Thursday, April 30, 2009

BANKELSANGER























Nature is being re-dreamed as a non-human space.


Wilderness is being re-dreamed as nature.


Nature is being dreamed of as landscape photography.


Human kind is being re-dreamed as machinery.


Cities are being re-dreamed as ruins.

Surfaces are being re-dreamed as depths.

Rural communities are being re-dreamed as urban ones, but rural communities are not allowed to dream of urban communities or to re-dream urban communities.

Reading is being re-dreamed as writing.

Writing is being re-dreamed as reading.

Well, that's just a tiny start. Is that what you had in mind?























bankelsanger is the pseudonym of a poet now
living on Vancouver Island.




4 comments:

  1. Who's doing all this dreaming, where is it happening? An urban dreamer, perhaps? There are several metaphysical layers here. Are rural communities stuck in the dreams of urban ones? Signs often seen in rural areas -- "No dump expansion" and "farmers feed cities" for example -- may come from rural consciousness of who and what comes and goes to and from the city. Are these dreams strong enough to resist the urban dream of the rural?

    Suppose rural communities do dream of urban ones, even if they're not allowed to. What does the city look like in a rural dream?

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  2. excerpt from paper on plurality by Alan Bale (MIT). Harold, please read the link between mass nouns, waves and their repetition, and the melding of rural to urban. Let's try to
    create blanks in the vision together.

    Bale:
    2 The Interpretation of Plural
    2.1 Background
     Traditional treatment of the plural morpheme hypothesizes that it creates pluralities from a
    set of singularities. The plural denotation only contains pluralities.
    1
     Example: Link (1983) proposed that the plural morpheme should be interpreted as a function that forms a set of pluralities from a set of singularities. A similar denotation is given by Chierchia (1998).1
    2.2 Challenges
     Sauerland, (2003), Sauerland, Anderssen & Yatsushiro (2005), and Spector (2003) present
    some well-known problems with the traditional treatment of plurality. In many downward
    entailing environments, plural denotations seem to include the singular groups/sets as well as the plural groups.
    eg. a. If you have children, please raise your hand.
    b. Everyone who has children, please raise your hand.
    c. Do you have children?
     In response to (3a) and (3b), one would raise their hand if they had only one child. Similarly
    one would respond \yes" to (3c) even if they only had one child. In these contexts, the plural children does not seem to mean \two or more children" as the traditional treatment would expect, rather it means one or more children.
     Sauerland and Spector suggest that these downward entailing contexts reveal the true meaning of plurality: plurals include singular atoms in their denotation. One might revise the
    traditional treatment in the following way to account for these facts. (cf. Spector, 2003)

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  3. working in "mike's" paradigm:

    city in rural dream has been depicted nightmarish in last few decades. I note now that public service announcements abbreviating city pictorially, put a single giant tree as backdrop to (smaller) skyscrapers.

    Is urban just a piling-up of people replacing biodiversity with more human clutural [sic] diversity? Is there a qualitative change that accompanies this on the spiritual plane?

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  4. excellent poem. I wonder what re-Reading is being dreamed as, as I read it in a book the other day. That was Jean Cocteau's diary:

    February 15, 1953 entry: "Frightening how many important things I said about the period which have left no trace in people's memories (I myself ...), Probably need more perspective. And of course people would have to read (reread)."

    ReplyDelete