I read that article and also another one. I read that article and also another article. I read William Carlos Williams and I read the Google algorithm. I read the Google algorithm and I read the Tender Buttons. I read algorithmic buttons and I read tender white Wittgenstein. I read a cuban sandwich and I read a book on birding. And I read on birding and I read associations into it. I read on legs and Kafka, on Levinas and on Gertrude Stein. I read the words I write and wrote and reading them on screen. I read an image of a picture of a letter of a character. I read a character and I read a word or two, and then I sleep, or slept, or wrote, or read, and in the cloud I searched for tenderer buttons than these. So little now depends upon the color of a laptop, glazed with ejaculate, alongside the sleeping young woman…

At least, I think so.

Glad to find the post, be it through google’s algorithm of who to buzz. Much like the approximation of empty spaces and blow job guessings. Speaking of which, Joe you are the greatest teacher one can have and I have yet to have you. All kidding aside, here’s to the association by word or space between or name and such the likes of places.

As for the associative stuff from Wittgenstein, my major professor (R.M. Berry) explained it to me as Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblances,” again, something humans can process in a flash, but we have to teach computers how to do, since words aren’t literal referents in all cases (e.g. the “little rock” case you mention).

The W.C. Williams link is appropriate–all such linkage is appropriate! … but I wonder if Williams’ process works because of “idiom,” in terms of diction or that it is his use of white space and line breaks that really achieve the effect you describe?

Would an extreme example of this process be Stein’s Tender Buttons? Or is she pushing the unity envelop too far? Or is she saved by writing in prose? (Or how does prose change the game here?)

In the case of these students, precision was not the problem. They were poor at entering what I’ll call “aproximate feeling modes.” They had to guess, and it was extremely difficult for them when they guessed wrong and caused someone pain, or recieved looks of shock. The one student had straight A’s, wrote wonderfully precise lyrics, and was attractive, so no one knew right away she suffered any form of asbergers. In many ways proper, even demure, she often dressed in a provacative manner and was shocked and appalled when it drew notice She didn’t get mst jokes, though obvious forms of irony were understandable to her. An example of her disconnection would be the time she attempted to console her boyfriend in a room full of friends and strangers for having suffered a rejection: “Don’t feel bad Tommy,” She said, “Tonight, when we go home, I will give you a blow job.” She said this straight faced. She was shocked, and deeply disturbed when people laughed in shock, or incredulity. She tried to explain, highly offended by their laughter: “Tommy likes blow jobs. They always make him feel better.” She was not trying to shock anyone. She was not being bawdy. She was computing: “Tommy is sad. I don’t want him to be sad. Blow jobs please him. It will cheer him up.” In some respects, it resembled the “errors” google encountered, the problems with nuance and dstinguishing the difference between a hot dog, and boiling a dog, but nothing she said was incorrect. She just did not get certain forms of social context. She was not aware of the effect such words coming from the mouth of an attractive, otherwise brilliant girl would have. Those emotional tropes she did get, either through painful experience, or through an educated guess, she enforced more stringently than any normal person. IF someone said “shut up,” or anything smacking of rudeness, she was the first to upbraid them. Her problem was not error, not a lack of precision, but an inability to understand aproximations, the “sort of’s” of verbal and social context.

We know the brain is adaptive enough to have separate areas for precise calculation, and approximation. In cases where people have had the part of the brain damaged that allows for precise calculation, they do not say 2+ 2 equals 4, (unless they make a lucky guess), but they also do not say 2=2 equals 4540. If their ability to aproximate is still intact, they may say five or three or six, but they will not be absurdly far off the mark. It is this “approximate” sense by which we may be distinguished from the computer. A computer is capable of error, but not judicious error, and certainly not of spending the greater part of its life moving through a series of judicious and acceptable aproximations. Many people are willfully oblivious, and some, though they don’t have asbergers, have some form of emotional disconnect (In Meyers Briggs they would call such people radical T’s—thinkers with a buried “tertiary” feeling sense). In terms of poetry, this can often be an advantage because the same things that in a social context might prove bizzarre, come off as refreshing, incongruous, or vividly odd in a line or series of verse lines. The poem you quote by Williams has this element of freshness since, in its own way, it seems as odd, and strange as the girl with Aspergers saying: “Don’t worry Tommy. Tonight I will give you a blow job.” Much of modernism and post mdernism has been a dismantling of expected tropes of emotion, a greater emphasis on sensing and intuitive functions. The Red Wheel Barrow can reference no expected trope of emotion. People unfamiliar with the modernists, non-petry students (and many poets as well) will shake their heads and say: “Huh?” It is not so much shock as it is a suspension of the usual connections in meanings, both in the poem, and within the historical context of poetry. Suppose Williams had written:

The red wheel barrow glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens is vital to me.

The reader might understand this as a poem about the “beauty” of the pastoral life, a decidely bad poem. but it would not arrest or confound his intelligence. It would not make him go “huh?” Perhaps a better example would be Nabokov’s intentional mangling of a Robert Lowell line when he took Lowell to task for what he considered an awful translation of Mandelstam. He wondered how Lowell would like it if Nabkov translated his phrase “leathery love” into the “football of passion.”

It seems to me much of modernism and post mdernism is about exploiting these radical disconnects, creating what Burke called a perspective by incongruity. One final note:

Another student of mine with Asbergers recently lost her pet rabbit. She wanted to give him a proper burial. She was inconsolable, but the ground up here is still too frozen. Someone kindly suggested she have the rabbit cremated. This drove her to pained distraction and she said: “I won’t cook Billy! How awful!” She was right about the bare essentials of cooking and burning being identical, but she did not aprehend the person’s intentions, or the differences between cremating a beloved pet and cooking it. Aproximation,, the “sort of” might be how we move through both our visible world and our language systems. We construct a narrative, comprised partly out f past experience and partly out of a hard wired ablity to do instant guess work—a series of “sort ofs” by which we somehow arrive at the right place. Avoiding the follies of precision might be as important as avoiding approximations, but bth can lead to sme interesting places such as “the football of passion.”