#eliot — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #eliot, aggregated by home.social.
-
Does articulation blunt inner experience or elaborate it? Some thoughts on compulsive digital writing
A question I’ve been circling around for years has become increasingly clear to me as I’m reading Donnel Stern. When I have an intense inner experience and feel the urge to articulate it does that articulation blunt inner experience or elaborate it? I’ve built a whole belief system out of assuming the latter, condensed in Eliot’s phrase ‘raiding the inarticulate’:
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion
- T.S. Eliot's East CokerThe nearly 7000 blog posts over 16 years collected here are an expression of that belief. I’d estimate there are < 1000 posts which serve some functional purpose but the overwhelming majority of this stuff came because I had something which I felt some need to articulate. The blog has always been a framework to incite and contain this. It encourages me to elaborate in a way I wouldn’t if there was no audience and it makes what I’ve articulated easily searchable for me later. It’s effectively a sprawling public notebook in which I put everything I want to articulate which isn’t sufficiently personal to warrant going in my Day One journal instead. There’s a lot of extremely personal stuff on here still but it’s conceptually mediated in a way which makes it just about comfortable for me, though I rely on the vastness of the archive to reassure me that the stuff I’m less comfortable with isn’t particularly visible to a casual reader.
I started taking deliberate blog breaks last year. I realised when there was something major going on in my life which I needed to sit with, it was helpful for me to refrain from posting on the blog. This worked even if I wasn’t actually posting about the events in question. There was something about the frequency of articulation through blogging which I realised was impacting on my willingness to sit with difficult or complex events in my life. These breaks have been between two weeks and two months and I’m almost certainly going to continue taking them. This suggests to me that articulation can blunt inner experience or at least change our relationship to it in an undesirable way. I played around earlier this year with describing this as unrequited meaning, which I now realise was a fuzzy attempt to theorise exactly what Stern has spent his career exploring:
A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:
Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on– Charles Olson, La Torre
I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.
My instinct is that reaching too hastily for unrequited meanings can be counter-productive. There are some meanings, particularly when it comes to significant change, which need time to germinate. I suspect that articulation itself, even when it superficially relates to something else, can impede this germination. My gamble is that this is a time-limited process and there’s a rhythm to it which I’ve been trying to tune into.
Which suggests that it’s not a matter of articulation inherently blunting or elaborating experience but rather that the outgrowths of articulation depend on the wider psychic context. There are points where it’s deeply rewarding to seize on what C Wright Mills called ‘the feel of an idea’ and put it into words. But there are also points where it’s better to sit with what you’re feeling, indeed stepping back from the idea and be curious about the feel. What does the feel itself feel like?
It’s possible my own hypergraphia is the fundamental issue here. If I let my articulation loose I compulsively name, articulate and elaborate on contact. It’s how I metabolise things and it works very well for me in a whole range of ways, but it also squeezes out alternative modes of elaboration. Claude Opus 5 made a slightly unsettling observation when I presented it with this blog post in the context of the draft of my psychoanalysis and LLMs book with Milan Sturmer:
So the sharper version of your closing sentence: it isn’t the wider psychic context, it’s the rate. And rate is downstream of resistance, which brings it back to the criterion I offered. Seven thousand posts in sixteen years is roughly one every twenty hours sustained across a decade and a half — that is a medium with the friction engineered out, not by design but by sheer practice. You have spent sixteen years becoming so fluent that nothing gets to stay unformulated. Which is an uncomfortable observation given what you’re writing, because it makes the blog a personal precursor of the thing volume two warns about: a low-resistance articulation apparatus, always available, that takes whatever you bring it. You built one out of WordPress before anyone built one out of transformers.
The fact that user-model interaction is another form of articulation I now feel the need to take breaks from (e.g. I just went three weeks without using a chatbot) underscores the weight of this observation. I wrote earlier that the blog contains my articulation and it does so in a specific way. The same is true of my Day One journal. The problem I increasingly see with language models is that they don’t easily provide that containment, though the move towards token-based pricing might reinstate it. The boundaries are part of the process which make the difference between articulation which blunts versus that which elaborates.
Ultimately though this is an unfinished process because Eliot’s lines are ultimately about failure. It’s about iteration and elaboration, a way of orientating ourselves to the nature of our own experience, rather than something we can expect to conclude. This takes me back to the opening question though. When are raids on the inarticulate likely to lead to a deepening and opening of that experience? When are they instead a form of repetition, a compulsion, a release valve for our libidinal energies? How do we know the difference? Can we know the difference? Ironically Opus 5 pointed out that I did answer this question in the manuscript:
Which also answers the question you end on, and the answer is in your own manuscript. The Rogers passage you quote in chapter four is exactly this: frustration modified by the development of thought, or evaded by evacuation — and if it can’t be tolerated it becomes a bad object fit only for evacuation. That’s your criterion for when a raid deepens and when it’s a release valve. The raid elaborates when it’s conducted against resistance, when the thing won’t go into words and you stay with it regardless. It becomes compulsion when articulation is the means of not staying with it. Naming on contact is evacuation at high frequency.
And that gives you a test that isn’t retrospective, which the piece currently lacks. Evacuation feels like relief. Elaboration feels like effort and often leaves the thing more vivid and less settled than before you started. So: if writing the post made you feel better, be suspicious of it. If it made the thing harder to put down, it worked. That inverts the intuition, it’s checkable in the moment rather than in three months, and it’s consistent with the Eliot — a practice premised on failure shouldn’t feel like success.
Which incidentally is a great example of why I find these exchanges so intellectually rewarding. I was 90% of the way to articulating this but I hadn’t made the connection between two lines of thought. It’s capacity to hold a large amount of writing in context meant that it could point me towards the connection I hadn’t yet drawn. The problem is that the second paragraph isn’t my own material and it’s extremely good nonetheless. It might have been something I’d come to on my own but it’s not latent within my own text in the way the first paragraph is. In this sense there’s a substitution of articulation inherent in what is rewarding about user-model interaction, even when it’s conducted in a deeply reflective way structured around using your own archive. There is at least the risk of it which is one I think we all need to take very seriously, particularly if we’re going to regard these uses as legitimate which I still very much do in spite of the risks.
#articulation #diary #DonnelStern #eliot #hypergraphia #journaling #LLMs #writing -
Happy #Caturday!
T.S. Eliot's 1939 collection of whimsical light poems, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, is entirely dedicated to felines and served as the basis for the musical Cats.
#poetry #poem #kitty #cat #cats #poet #eliot #tseliot #catsOfMastodon #books #reading #literature #bookstodon @bookstodon #books #books #booksky #booktok #bookwyrm #bookstagram #feline #today #cartoon #catsOfFediverse
-
We make poetry out of a mouthful of air
In his wonderful How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry, Edward Hirsch reflects on the orality which marks the poetic form. For most of history it was been an oral art and it retains that orality even now. Inspired by the boast of W.B. Yeats that “I made it out of a mouthful of air” Hirsch reflects that:
As every poet does. So, too, does the reader make, or remake, the poem out of a mouthful of air, out of breath. When I recite a poem I inhabit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body. I become its speaker and lt its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer. I let its heartbeat pulse through me as embodied experience, as experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.
At the weekend I found myself thinking about the word ‘phoneme’ and its parallel to tokens upon which large language models rely. We too compose meaningful units out of components so atomic that their constituent character falls beneath the surface of our awareness. I was making the point to a friend using the word ‘phoneme’ and was suddenly struck that ‘phoneme’ itself is composed of phonemes: pho-ne-meme. It was startling to experience the concept itself involuntarily decomposed into atomic units.
Except these aren’t phonemes. These are syllables. Phonemes are even more basic units of sound out of which syllables are composed. The fact what presented itself to me as the most basic unit was not, when I thought about it, actually the most basic unit was itself striking. This led me to discover the International Phonetic Alphabet in which phonemes can be rendered using the phonemic alphabet. In which case ‘phoneme’ is composed as /f əʊ n iː m/. This is how GPT 5.2 breaks that down phonetically:
f as in fan
əʊ the diphthong like the vowel in go
n as in no
iː the long vowel like in see
m as in manIt’s a struggle to remain at this atomic level. It’s too basic and too strange. Though it does suddenly make me regret not doing the linguistics degree I fleetingly considered as a teenager. You can stay at this level but it takes a bit of training to do it. The syllabic register is more accessible but even then it takes work. You have to manually decompose as an analytical exercise rather than seeing or feeling the composition. This highlights to me how we’re embedded in the semantic register such that we have to abstract from what words convey in order to analyse them as sign systems.
There are mysteries in the phonetic register. This exercise is akin to repeating a word until the meaning is lost. It just becomes a sound. Then a series of sounds. Until its unsettling to realise that only a minute ago, before you repeated the word fifty times, it conveyed a meaning with an immediacy which now feels inaccessible. There are mysteries in the semantic register as well though. If we instrumentalise our use of words, or rush through speaking and writing, we lose the experience of the force which animates them. There are words which energise us and words which drain us. Words which move us and which leave us cold. There’s a meeting in our experience of words between something deeply human and something…. Other.
Poetry I think is the purest form of connection to that mystery. If we rush through reading a poem it remains flat and inert. The meaning only emerges through us if we take the time to linger with what we are reading. There’s an obvious role of the unconscious here, at least in my experience of as someone who gets gripped by certain lines which I then find myself circling round and preoccupied by. Why am I gripped by these lines? What is it they are evoking in me? Why are they evoking this? I find it hard to appreciate a poem as a whole because I need that foothold to gradually learn to inhabit the poem or rather to find a way to let it inhabit me. The analytical register is too ready-to-hand for me, a tool that presents itself when I have a question but if I do that with a poem (at least too soon) the fragile life of what I’m ready withers and dies in front of me.
There’s something there which we’re encountering with poetry. How it feels and looks changes as we change. But it is in a real sense, I increasingly think, an encounter:
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
As Yeats put it we make poems out of mouthfuls of air. What I’m circling round is I think how mysterious and remarkable this is. How we have the capacity not just to produce meaningful sounds with motor movements of our mouth, tongue and throat that coordinate human action but that carry transformative meaning that transcends the very system of signs we have constructed. That reaches beyond and past it. The theme of the Other I’m just as much circling round relates to what is beyond. What is that deeper reality beyond the sign system. This makes me think that I’m unsatisfied with the obvious Lacanian reading that I’m talking about the machinic quality of the linguistic system. The alien mechanisms through which it churns away in a quasi-autonomous way. I’m talking about what’s in us that exists beyond that system yet remains utterly dependent on it for intersubjective expression.
Perhaps this is just the unconscious: the mycelium which chains together more sensory intensities then we could possibly process and out of which a mushroom of conscious meaning occasionally pops up. I don’t know, I’ve confused myself and I’m going to stop rambling now. But this feels like fertile terrain.
(I’ve also got a book to finish imminently and I’m struck that this sudden mystical fixation on inarticulacy could be the world’s most abstract procrastination exercise 🤔)
#EdwardHirsch #eliot #inarticulacy #language #linguistics #poetry #sound #Yeats
-
Hype for the Future 64L: More on York County, Maine
Introduction Apart from the central and northern portions of York County, the community at the southern tip of the State of Maine is also important relative to the historical context of New Somersetshire as well as of historic Yorkshire County of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Today, however, the county hosts numerous historic sites as well as art galleries representative of the culture at the beginning of the modern Yankee settlement of the State of Maine. The Berwicks The communities of […]https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/01/03/hype-for-the-future-64l-more-on-york-county-maine/
-
Kuusi uutta eliölajia julistettiin sukupuuttoon kuolleiksi https://yle.fi/a/74-20187845?origin=rss/Mastodon
-
Per la Giornata Nazionale del #Mare proponiamo un articolo di #AOQU, che intende dimostrare come il tema acquatico della "Ballata di Rudi" di Elio #Pagliarani, sia stato influenzato da "Terra desolata" di T.S.#Eliot.
#Ecologismo ed #epica, sono possibili chiavi di lettura dell’opera di Pagliarani, in cui l’#acqua, e specialmente il #mare, sono motivi centrali.⬇️ https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/aoqu/article/view/14719?mtm_campaign=mastodon
-
Lyrik - Lyrik - Lyrik
Und ich werde dir etwas zeigen, das anders ist als
Der Schatten, der dir morgens nachläuft,
Und als der Schatten, der dich abends einholt;
Ich zeig dir die Angst in einer Handvoll Staub.
T.S. #Eliot - aus Das öde Land (S. 11)
👇
https://media.suhrkamp.de/mediadelivery/asset/cd6a642785df47f98b45a24d77599f3f/das-oede-land_9783518420225_leseprobe.pdf?contentdisposition=inline
#LyrikLyrikLyrik #Lyrik -
Heute geht's wieder mal ins Deutsche Theater
WASTELAND: PETER PANT. S. #Eliot.s Lang-Gedicht (mehr als 400 Verszeilen) DAS ÖDE LAND von 1922 spiegelt die Verwerfungen + Unsicherheiten seiner Zeit wider - „ein Hohelied der Bitternis, mit trockener Kehle verfasst“ (Hummelt). Für den heutigen Abend wurde das Gedicht mit #Barrie’s Theaterstück PETER PAN oder DER JUNGE, DER NICHT ERWACHSEN WERDEN WOLLTE (1902) verbunden.
Sehr gespannt!
#DeutschesTheater #DT #Schauspiel #Berlin #PeterPan -
💕
"It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are. We must always take risks. That is our destiny.” ~ T.S. Eliot
🎶
Here I am looking back, finding myself with my 32strings in a landscape. Contemplating The Wasteland next to my own beautiful world... luckily there are angels and harp music. 😇😉
🙏
www.annevanschothorst.com/animamundi
-
BOTD: Lucy Chao (Zhao Luorui #趙蘿蕤, 1912–1998), #Chinese #translator of T. S. #Eliot's The Waste Land 荒原 and Walt #Whitman's Leaves of Grass 草葉集. #TranslatorsMonday
-
I got absorbed by the poetry section. I got two Chaucers so I can read the old version and a modern one.
-
"But you are the music, while the music lasts"
I looked at this in the library, and thought, no, I'll never really want to watch it. And now I do. I'll walk to the library, it won't be there.
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets – Ralph Fiennes – Official Trailer https://youtube.com/watch?v=e7F7hmlelTk&si=EHhopqW6bY854OSs
But it might be.
-
Gewandhaus - Kammerkonzert mit einem anspruchsvollen Programm und einer versöhnlichen Zugabe
Im Rahmen der Konzert-Serie „Quartett-Gesellschaft“ gab das „Eliot-Quartett“ am Abend des 19. November seinen Einstand mit einem vielseitigen Programm im Mendelssohn-Saal des Leipziger Gewandhauses.
Dieses Ensemble, benannt nach dem amerikanischen Schriftsteller T.S.Eliot, wurde erst anno 2014 gegründet und hat...
https://oratorium-leipzig.de/gewandhaus-eliot-quartett/
#Gewandhaus #Eliot-Quartett
-
@itamarst Thank you! 😄 Right now I'm experimenting with it for some nanoservice I been setting up.
I do have one question. #Anyio is what I use for concurrency. I haven't yet tested if #eliot works with it, but maybe? It is asyncio compatible. So my question is, how does Eliot treat async calls? Or am I thinking this wrong I should only log sync to play safe?
-
-
Any modernists out there? In their commentary to Vol. 1 of The Poems of T. S. Eliot , Ricks and McCue note that Eliot disliked the US Complete Poems and Plays (1952), but cite no source. Does anyone know where this comes from?
-
@curiousdoc. Oops, you were responding to the #Eliot one and I was talking about my That Girl post! Haha. But I did know Casaubon hadn't read all those books. I wasn't a little kid, though, when I read Middlemarch!!!
-
“Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.”
George Eliot💙HAPPY MOTHERS DAY TO ALL MOTHERS💙
My painting “Mother and Child” in a private collection
#happymothersday #mothers #art #artist #painting #novascotia #eliot #artmatters #canadianartist #canadianart #mastoart #artistsofmastodon #artistsonmastodon #mother -
That feeling when you're... 15 hours into a book (Victorian epic) and then everything is put on hold for an hour (please less!) of discourse on the nature and fate of the Jews... #Eliot #DanielDeronda
-
Did Rishi Sunak help a Russian oligarch dodge sanctions to sue a UK journalist? Will it finish him? | Vox Political
https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2023/01/24/did-rishi-sunak-help-a-russian-oligarch-dodge-sanctions-to-sue-a-uk-journalist-will-it-finish-him/#Rishi #Sunak #Yevgeny #Prigozhin #Wagner #Ukraine #Russia #evade #sanction #sue #libel #Eliot #Higgins #Bellingcat
