Never in this world will a man live well in his body save dying...

[kleenexwoman]

I've just come from Modern Poetry class, and boy are my frontal lobes chafed. Partially because of the objections of the Fugitive Stars and partially because I've seen a lot of cheap coffee mugs with the legend "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" written in whimsical fonts on them (you'd think that the creators of the mugs, knowing the quote, might know where it came from and what its implications are--then again, maybe it's deliberate, a sort of memento mori), I expected to dislike T.S. Eliot. But I was wrong, oh so wrong. I dug The Wasteland, and I dug it even more after Apter kindly explained all the references that T.S. had just sort of expected his readers to get. (Maybe through the collective unconscious he likes so much? Like by poem magic?)
William Carlos Williams, my god. I always thought of him as "that wacky guy who wrote about chickens and red wheelbarrows," but so many of his poems are naughty. Plants are women--a shameless fallen leaf crushed dry under the wheel of a slicksmooth car, a blossom of Queen Anne's lace invading a meadow in interconnected orgasm, a field of silvergreen asphodel waiting to be plucked.
Also, Wisława Szymborska. Experiment is excellent. The problem is that I can't find all her poems that I wanted to share on the 'Net, and I don't really want to take the time to type them *all* out. They're...long, some of them. The Wallace Stevens one I posted a while back tested my endurance as far as transcribing goes. Wish I had the patience to sit down and type 'em all, I really do--they're genuinely funny and subtle. (They had to be subtle if they were going to be funny--she was working under the Communist regime in Poland and couldn't actually come out and say things. Consider "Experiment"--this was when the Russian government was doing experiments much like the ones described in the poem. At least if your entire head is in a jar, you know you're in a jar.)

So I turned four poems in to the Central Review, and three of them got in. I'm pretty happy with that, but the three that got in were the three that I honestly thought kinda sucked. The ones that got in: A pair of overly ornate poems about dead girls (for those of you who aren't familiar with my poetry oeuvre, you can check it out at kindredhellion--the stuff I'm satisfied or frustrated enough with to have stopped editing it is put up there), an unedited "mini-sestina" I wrote for an exercise in Creative Poetry. The one that didn't get in was "Jubliate in Felibus," the one I sweated over and fiddled with and had to ask people about obscure parts of Latin grammar for, and the one that pretty much everybody seemed to like.
Eh. It's all a matter of taste. The poems were picked pretty quickly, though; submission date was Friday, and the winners were announced that Sunday. ('Stin, who's on the editorial board, says that not as many people submitted poems, and that she thought the senior editors did a crap job of picking a lot of them. Maybe I'll apply to edit the next one. They need a hell of a lot more fiction.)

*

Have been talking to Char and her boyfriend Robert (who's also in my Creative Poetry class, and always has highly unusual story recommendations) almost as much as I would like to. (Char is fun and full of thoughts.) We discussed the possibility of sex on Mars (and sex with Mars, for people who are just that turned on by extraterrestial geology, and came up with the idea of quantum reincarnation--
Reincarnation is, of course, the idea that one's soul goes through various incarnations in order to experience every basic experience and emotion that can be experienced. (For the purposes of this model, it has nothing to do with a system of reward or punishment. Example: I'd like to be a cat in my next life, and sort of hope to be one if I'm good, but that incarnation might not let me go through an experience that I still haven't, like the death of a spouse or, I don't know, the feeling of being cut down for paper.) Once you have experienced the entire range of emotion, you're complete and can be joined with the Cosmic Mind or go to Heaven or what have you.
Quantum immortality works off the idea that there are infinite (almost infinite) parallel universes that differ, each in turn, by infinitesimal amounts. The morbid or slightly paranoid will note that every second of your life, you have a chance to die, and there are enough universes to cover death every second of your life. Quantum immortality is the idea that upon each death, your consciousness is transferred to a universe in which you did not die. Thus, upon being poisoned by the toxic mix of powdered iced tea and milk that I'm now drinking, I will suddenly snap into another universe where the mix of powdered iced tea and milk is completely harmless. Upon being choked by the sardine I'm going to eat as soon as I get home, I will snap into a universe where I safely expelled the sardine from my throat and onto the floor where the cats can eat it, or possibly a universe where I never choked on the sardine at all.
Char brought up the possibility that because of this possibility, reincarnation in the classical sense is unnecessary. If you can transfer your consciousness to other, slightly different yous in other universes, why bother to live so many lives in sequence when you can live millions of the same one? Thus, quantum reincarnation is one single soul spread out among millions of universes, with each fragment of the soul going through a different life at the same time. Because every possibility is inherent in the universe and every possibility exists in a different universe, by the time you can't avoid dying, your soul will have gone through every single thing and experienced every single emotion it possibly can.
Question is, how much will you be able to differ before you become a completely different person with a different soul? Well, you can quantify differences as variables, and each person's life can be considered an equation. Soul A differs from Soul B because Soul A's birth-country variable is [Poland], whereas Soul B's birth-country variable is [Canada], and so on. Very broad, of course, and each variable has multiple variables attached to it (which part of Poland? Who was the midwife? Was the mother in pain? Was it raining outside?), but you get the idea. Comparing two equations would have to stop at points of difference rather than going on to compare increasingly varying variables that go along with each point of difference. From there, the question of how much difference makes two discrete souls rather than two fragments of the same soul is merely a technicality.
(Also, to take care of something that one of anivad's posts made me ponder, free will would be a matter of chance. In this universe, you just *happen* to choose to go to college instead of working at the dry-cleaning place down the street from your parents' house, to have tacos rather than burgers, to marry or not, to eat a peach. In another universe, you do not out of necessity, because you have made that choice here. Not that you are aware of this. The mind can fool itself pretty easily.)

You'll be tested on all this later.

Comments

[benprime.livejournal.com]

maybe the long-running free-will/determinism debate continues because its terms of reference are flawed. The assertion that we must have one or the other _exclusively_, when clearly determinism destroys the concept of responsibility, but on the other hand much of the physical universe does indeed seem to function deterministically and we seem to be part of that universe. Quantum determinism (that is, that everything is governed by quantum events which are individually random and only statistically determined) seems even less satisfactory than classical determinism, which was at least predictable. My current theory is that free will (soul, consciousness, whatever) interacts with the physical deterministic world at the level of these quantum events. The fact that the raw results of an experiment (see Bell's theorem) seem to depend at a fundamental physical level on the intention of the experimenter, is, I think, some evidence for that.

Which WCW work would you recommend for a novice?

[butterduck.livejournal.com]

Saying that events are random and using that as an explanation for them is completely unsatisfactory to me. Sure, there is chance involved that one thing might occur or not occur, but there is always a reason. I don't think that determinism gives enough credit to the reason things happen. We may not always understand why things happen, but that does not make them random. I can agree with the fact that our consciousness interacts with the physical world, whose events are separate but affected by our actions, but I can't see anything as arbitrary.

Sorry for the delay. As far as WCW goes, "To Elsie" is an excellent one; it really brings out the shift away from Romanticism and toward a 20th-century American identity.