All entries for Wednesday 05 August 2009

Diary of a Permaculturalist 13: Notes towards an essay onNecessary Rot

Follow-up to Diary of a Permaculturalist 12: Poet in an Allotment from George Ttoouli, Warwick Writing Programme

I've been thinking about the idea of necessary rot in language.

A recent article in New Scientist talks about the idea of brain patterns working along the lines of 'self-organised criticality' - as if the sporadic, restrained moments of random brain acitivty we experience are essential in some way to memory. Perhaps a step further - to creativity, to inspiration, to our ability to make associative leaps between themes, ideas, concepts.

It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems. "Lying at the critical point allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances," says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

Sure enough, the team found that each neuron triggered on average only one other. A value much greater than one would lead to a chaotic system, because any small perturbations in the electrical activity would soon be amplified, as in the butterfly effect. "It would be the equivalent of an epileptic seizure," says Beggs. If the value was much lower than one, on the other hand, the avalanche would soon die out.

At some level I can't deny this function works in the way I write poetry. I was having this conversation with a poet I exchanged a few pieces with. She pointed to the fact that my poetry seemed to work more at the level of sound than at the level of meaning. I had to confess, when she pointed to a few words in particular, that I often use words I don't know the meaning of, until I've used them. Words I've heard here or there, picked up on in passing, but sound right, first of all, before 'meaning right'.

I remember a conversation, long long ago, with Peter Carpenter (of Worple Press), who I bumped into at the Poetry Library. He was writing an article about Geoffrey Hill and specifically, at the point I met him, researching Hill's 'pitch' of certain words. He gave me an explanatory article to read which I have typically interpreted in my own special way.

'Pitching' words is about trying to syntactically position a word in a way that is completely fresh, unusual, e.g.:

A pet-name, a common name. Best-selling brand, curt graffito. A laugh; a cough.

That's from part II of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns. Delightful in itself. In this instance, one phrase that attracts me as 'pitched' is "curt graffito". It might well refer to the short, punchy phrasing of the graffito - which in itself is odd because who uses the singular of that word anyway? Graffiti is like sheep, isn't it? One word graffiti, many word graffiti? But no, he's etymologised it. So 'curt' not only evokes 'cort' - short - but alongside the singular 'graffito' there's a sense of cur-curse-cut. And the sight rhyme from laugh to cough; what's that? Has someone written 'fuck' on a wall somewhere? Probably.

But you're forced into the roots of the word, into the etymology. By pitching 'graffito' as singular, it evokes the Greek etymology (graphos - to write), and 'curt' evokes a Latinate etymology by association. Pitch. There you have it, explained as clearly as I can manage. (If Peter ever reads this, hopefully he'll provide a reference to the article that explained it far better than I have.)

Coming back to rot: perhaps what Hill is doing, metaphorically-speaking, is rotting away (or cutting away the rot of) language's contemporary, immediate meanings. It's an excellent way of learning how precious language really is and how precious (as in, rare) the attention of someone who can read language in this way can be. Hooray for Hill.

But something catches in the throat. Is it really so considered? Is it really so calculated? Where are the accidents of gene-combinations that allow a species to thrive? Where is the life emerging from the rot?

Spontaneity, decay, failure - these are all parts of natural selection. Meanings you didn't intend, which your reader has found for themself, these are all important parts of the ecosystem of meaning. Chekhov was often praised for allowing this 'self-organising criticality' into the short story for the first time. A main character could step out onto a street and suddenly be run down by a carriage and killed. Life's often cruel (but necessary, and sometimes kind) randomness had to happen in fiction also, or else fiction couldn't be realistic.

(Referring now to Biomimicry.) In a polyculture, in a given year, a harvest might see one in four, or two in four dominant species flourishing, while one in four, or two in four, might do particularly badly. This is not to say that the next year these species will be continually successful. Only that not all things are perfect all the time, that organising systems can try to understand the nature of nature might well be able to assess trends over twenty, or fifty years (and data of this nature (I know I'm using this word too much, but bear with me) barely stretches back to the 1970s) that might identify an ecosystem's balance or imbalance, but there's always the risk of making short term deductions.

As with Hill's 'pitching' of words, a long view is needed in nature that accommodates the self-organising criticality of these systems, the randomness that is gently reduced in impact over time, so that anomalies are identifiable and accountable. Living with a poem, a story, until it's meaning sinks in, changes enough time until it settles.

Right, enough sketchy synthesis for now. Regular broadcasts unlikely to resume until October, but that means more gestation.

George Ttoouli : 05 Aug 2009 10:00 |  Tags: Creative Writing Permaculture |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem