A Poetics (61-64)
61. Mushroom
While cutting mushrooms, I considered the fact that mushrooms, which seem to us a distinct form of food (one separate from fruits and meats and maybe even from vegetables, one that is in itself a complete type of naturally occurring food), range in edibility from delicious and edible to tasteless and edible to slightly bad for human consumption in certain instances (such as hens of the woods growing on pines) or to certain people (slightly allergenic) to mildly poisonous and of bad taste to the final and unfortunate state of delicious and deadly poisonous in a quick-acting way. Humans learned these facts not by a process of deduction but of reduction, by testing these fruits of ethereal or determined darkness over the course of generations, some peoples never learning that one type of mushroom they avoided was perfectly edible because their culture had never tested (by means of tasting) that variety.
Mushrooms are not ever really simply mushrooms, however, which are, more precisely, simply those fungi with a stem topped by a cap, but which are sometimes narrowed to mean only those mushrooms that are edible (as distinct from "poisonous mushrooms"), and, in my case here, "mushrooms" is simply a word and concept I'm using, something metaphoric, rather than real, because I am reminded that we had to learn, as the people of the continuing earth, how to define mushrooms, how to segregate them into categories by edibility so as to stave off death from eating, and that tells me that definition in the case of mushrooms, even if the word "mushroom" isn't itself that stabilized in meaning, is essential, which reminds me that the definition of the term "poem" or "poet" is helpful, and maybe essential to some, though not all, discussions of poetry, but that precision of definition is not essential in the sense of ensuring or denying the continuation of human life.
62. Definition
So I would say that a poet is someone who creates poems and that what a poem can be is defined in item number 60n.
63. "Truth"
The lie we most fervently believe. This is particularly true of poets, and two contradictory beliefs, two contradictory lies, can both be examples of "truth.
64. Marked-to-Show-Quotation
Nabokov, who butterflied more ideas together than most of us ever will until we could see no distinction between the absurd and the rapturous, believed that "reality" was a word that must always appear within quotations marks (meaning the word is really "'reality'"). The other such word, the one he forgot to mention, was "'truth.'"
ecr. l'inf.
While cutting mushrooms, I considered the fact that mushrooms, which seem to us a distinct form of food (one separate from fruits and meats and maybe even from vegetables, one that is in itself a complete type of naturally occurring food), range in edibility from delicious and edible to tasteless and edible to slightly bad for human consumption in certain instances (such as hens of the woods growing on pines) or to certain people (slightly allergenic) to mildly poisonous and of bad taste to the final and unfortunate state of delicious and deadly poisonous in a quick-acting way. Humans learned these facts not by a process of deduction but of reduction, by testing these fruits of ethereal or determined darkness over the course of generations, some peoples never learning that one type of mushroom they avoided was perfectly edible because their culture had never tested (by means of tasting) that variety.
Mushrooms are not ever really simply mushrooms, however, which are, more precisely, simply those fungi with a stem topped by a cap, but which are sometimes narrowed to mean only those mushrooms that are edible (as distinct from "poisonous mushrooms"), and, in my case here, "mushrooms" is simply a word and concept I'm using, something metaphoric, rather than real, because I am reminded that we had to learn, as the people of the continuing earth, how to define mushrooms, how to segregate them into categories by edibility so as to stave off death from eating, and that tells me that definition in the case of mushrooms, even if the word "mushroom" isn't itself that stabilized in meaning, is essential, which reminds me that the definition of the term "poem" or "poet" is helpful, and maybe essential to some, though not all, discussions of poetry, but that precision of definition is not essential in the sense of ensuring or denying the continuation of human life.
62. Definition
So I would say that a poet is someone who creates poems and that what a poem can be is defined in item number 60n.
63. "Truth"
The lie we most fervently believe. This is particularly true of poets, and two contradictory beliefs, two contradictory lies, can both be examples of "truth.
64. Marked-to-Show-Quotation
Nabokov, who butterflied more ideas together than most of us ever will until we could see no distinction between the absurd and the rapturous, believed that "reality" was a word that must always appear within quotations marks (meaning the word is really "'reality'"). The other such word, the one he forgot to mention, was "'truth.'"
ecr. l'inf.
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