RE: [-empyre-] poetics...

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

After I posted, I thought of Aleksandra's posts that talk about the
process-oriented, braided 'poetics' of Balinese drama versus the less
process-oriented poetics of Aristotle and much of western literature.
Certainly writers involved in digital media have wrestled with the apparent
disjunction between the structure of western narratives and drama, on the
one hand, and the more process-oriented possibilities of new media. It may
be that the sort of thing you and Aleksandra note--that useful paradigms for
dramatic, process-oriented art exist (as in Balinese drama)--could be useful
to writers and others. Interesting that the 'braided process' approach is
not only of drama but song and dance...Greek theatre also had these
elements...it seems likely that the roots of Greek drama go back to
religious rites/rituals (so much work done on that matter by the 'Cambridge
anthropologists' Jane Harrison et all).

I wonder if you know when the Balinesians acquired writing? Much later than
their dramatic form? It would be natural for writing to be strongly
influential on form emerging from cultures that have writing.

I'm currently reading one of the better books I've encountered in a long
time, called Snow by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Though there are
conventional progressions between chapters in the narrative, you can pick it
up at any point and its interesting to read from there. That's a fairly
'simple' poetics, in a sense, but difficult to achieve: excellence at every
point. I suppose it doesn't hurt that the main character is a poet.

The approach is hinted at in the first paragraph of chapter one (titled The
Journey to Kars).

"The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If
this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt
inside him the silence of snow."

A wonderful introduction to the character's poetics--and the novelist's.
Poetics as what we mediate experience and language with.

ja
http://subtle.net/empyre
http://vispo.com