Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

We writers go about our observing, imagining lives, moving onward day by day but always alert to patterns—ways in which experience shapes itself, ways we can replicate its shape with words. We create passages for a reader to move through, seeing and sensing what we devise on the way. And when the reader’s done—levitation! She looks down and sees how she’s traveled, sees the pattern of the whole.

I love this imagery and looking at reading and writing as active things

“The first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot.” The term soul here is part of his conceptual framework of hylomorphism. Hylo or hule = matter, and morphe = form; hylomorphism refers to the compound of matter and form that exists in both artifacts and living beings. Matter has potential that is made actual by form. Imagine a lump of clay that someone wants to shape into a bird. That lump has the potential to look like a bird, but only if, along with clay, there exists the abstract idea, or form, of “bird” (and an artist to shape it). Once the clay has been modeled into a bird, it’s a compound of matter and form: a piece of art. The form that it could be has actualized the potential existing in that matter. In a living being, the corollary to matter is body, and the corollary to form is soul. Soul animates body to make a living being, just as form animates matter to make a piece of art.

It’s magic, but a magic that can be mapped, which I suppose makes it technology.

A Bar.