Collecting Notes on Empson

Seven ways of Ambiguity/ Noumenon or phenomenon

PREFACE

Sept 28

Collecting Thoughts on my Notes

Terribly helpful book, if your a rhyme roller into verbal analysis and the process itself.

Most people are just searching down their own ways of expressing, posing, exposing, nature, beauty, horror, madness, love death, and the absurd.

Thats where I ended up… each their own angel + demon + the middle third…

BUT history of poetry is also about discovery, discovery of what language could do —

Story telling via plays occurs as poetry early on. Rhyme working across sound was creative and could be lead into narrative forms.

Modern Outgrowths Stanza Like

FOR INSTANCE, there’s a modern stanza-like type of story telling now, that seeks to assert Its Own, through poetic narrative -

Another uses stanza-like formations, that cut and clip through sentences, as separations. And goes after concision, and a kind of vigilantism, that vibrates with personal ruth.

Intentional unintended meanings

Is what? born out of extending metaphor and usage or/and vice versa.

Modern day meandering into nonsense rhyme which doesnt have to rhyme —

Some that pillage irony, rigged as an inflection in the ascent/exaltation of the absurd -

GUILTY, yeah…

Both humorous and/or sub-violent.

Theology Philosophy → Psychology and Your Sanity

Theological / philosophical discovery of reason — in history of western philosophy.

Created a coextension of language cogitative elaborating sometime collaborating in the betweens, imbued by constant need to encompass/know what we are, what we should be.

What being and consciousness is, notions of spirit —

And what of: modern poetry running into depth psychology and the saving of one’s sanity.

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Sept 29

(xiv) Noumenon or phenomenon

Short famous poem by Blake that after the making of which, he crosses out.

In one of his notebooks. The Fly and the Bye Bye…

(Dont know which poem Empson is referring to… doesnt say.)

Whether a poem is Noumenon or phenomenon —

Then Empson submits: London’s painter, landscape artist, John Constable.

Observing the Weather by John Constable

Some see his “unfinished” work as his truer paintings… an uprush of primitive, in strokes…

The Constable process:

1. Prelim Sketch Idea

2. Studio painted sketch very fast

3. (Sketches make use of primitive marks and gestures in drawing and painting —)

4. Settles down to create: Presentable Picture.

5. A HA!

I do that, in drawing, many of us do that. Exploratory drafts. Sargent they say didnt have to…

I do fast pencil sketches — for me not clients, clients I have different approach.

Where dig in after a cross between Fashion and the Grotesque... And yet not too far in either direction. Trying to find a middle mud bunny… I like.

I then clarify with marker. And erase 85 to 90 percent of pencil The drawings are more fashion than primitive?

Fashion that uses relatively free drawn markings that happens in its underlying sketch — Turns out : fashion primitive for sure. But if I start only drawing over some lines, and not fully outlining the figure…

Thinking outloud….