Fenollosa Shot a Horse

Fenollosa's approach to language (that of Chinese and English) and his ideas of transference of time and energy, "the reality of time" (363) really inspire me to look harder at my own poetry. It is simply captured in his example.

"Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weakness of our subjective operations but because the operations of nature are successive. The transparencies of force from agent to object which constitute natural phenomena, occupy time."

The way Fenollosa talks about how the reality of recognition, the transference of energy that takes place in the perceiving of something, and the way man communicates it are so different kind of bugs me. That maybe I take advantage of time and it's necessity in poetry, or it's existence in the life around us. The act of recognition can be as powerful as any action. At least Chinese seems to work a little bit better than ours, giving physical depth and and symbolic meaning. The idea that the symbols themselves are metaphors for the action, "For example, the ideograph for a 'messmate' is a man and a fire"the symbols are metaphors themselves of action, that then can be used in a metaphor, adding layers of poetic detail that English cannot seem to match. The Chinese language just seems fused with poetry from is roots. I mean, is doesn't just mean "to have" but it is derived from "to snatch the moon with the hand". Holy crap. But to be fair "is" in our language is derived from the Aryan root as, to breathe.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that when one goes to use a word (or words if you're being fancy) in poetry it's not just a place-holder or a conjunction, play-doh that you can just mash together and expect to come out beautiful. The best way to think of it for me is that they're like colors, where you can blend them, and there are complimentary colors, and colors, and when put opposite each other give contrast, or, and, placed together create beautiful (or ugly if that's what you're going for) pictures. I didn't really think the metaphor was going towards painting (kind of cheesy and over-done), but it makes sense.

Thus the power of the sentence becomes much stronger in chinese poetry.

I'm coming after you next Pound! Soon!