Zhanmusi Qiaoyisi BIG in CHINA

By what miracles of linguistic mastery and literary imagination could Chinese characters be made to capture Joyce’s mind-bending manipulations of the alphabet? By what subtleties of cross-cultural understanding could the specificities of Ireland and its mythologies be translated for a Chinese audience? -- http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/13/james-joyce-china-bloomsday-chinese-reputation

...the alphabet vs. the equation....?

Ernest Fenollosa 2014 and TTOTT

"Ezra Pound was no starnger to Oriental art when he met Mary McNeil Fenollosa, the widow of the American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), in London in late September 1913."--Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism (1994)  pg. 9. 

Fenollosa 2014 and TTOTT 

 by Steve Fly

"Fenollosa [1853-1908], wrote an essay on
"The Chinese WrittenCharacter as a Medium for Poetry" which vastly influenced
Ezra Pound and, through Pound, modern poetry generally;
said essay also anticipates some formulations of General Semantics
and NeuroLinguistic Programming [NLP], and foreshadows
modern critiques of "linear" and "alphabetical" thinking. --Robert Anton Wilson, Recorsi 2005.

Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) found a place in the chain of human innovation, and the lineage of modernism as defined by Dr Robert Anton Wilson in his unfinished project called 'the tale of the tribe'. Please read some of my others posts trying to get at TTOTT and what it all means to me.

When compared with other characters from TTOTT Ernest Fenollosa seems a rather strange addition at first glance, hardly any of the Wilson readers i know hold Fenollosa to be as influential in defining TTOTT as say, Pound, Joyce or McLuhan. At the same time Fenollosa is rarely noted as an influence on RAW, in any writings i have found, which says something about the focus on RAWs subject matter, opposed to his hologramic prose style, or his specially hand-crafted Robert Anton Wilson language that weaves together signs, symbols, equations and primary experiences into the magical texts he left behind for us to meditate upon.

RAWs lifelong reading and re-reading the works of Ezra Pound seem to me to be where he might have first come across Fenollosa, and probably through his work: The Chinese Written Character As A Medium for Poetry, which has a famous introduction by Ez. I would like to note here that RAW once led an online class (2004) at the virtual Maybe Logic Academy, called The Ideogrammic Method and set the above text by Fenollosa as course work, together with sections from Pound's ABC of Reading.

Here we are in 2014, how and why on earth would some obscure American scholar of Japanese Art and Poetry who has been dead 105 years be important to any of us today? To attempt a quick answer to that question would be foolish, and as only fools rush in I'll get my feet wet and suppose that Fenollosa is important because he was instrumental in the development of modernism, more precisely his works got to Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats and by osmosis the whole world or global village, introducing for the first time around 1913/14 highly developed poetry, history and culture from the Orient, in particular Japan and China.

This first contact with the best parts of Oriental poetry, plays, and paintings fused a new level of coherence within the small group of western poets gathered in London. A new aesthetic emerged, and can be traced through poetry, sculpture, painting, clothing design, throughout the 20's, into the 30's and then splintered and somewhat shit upon during WWII.

After these great global horrors, fewer people in the west wished to pay much fair and unbiased attention to some ancient Japanese poets and Chinese Buddhist philosophers. However the tale goes on, and of course we emerge out of the arts world and the literary impact of the oriental traditions to the economic and political-military-industrial impact on the global stage.

"It eplores the influences such as ethics of pictorial representation, the syle of ellipses, allusion, and juxtaposition, and the Taoist/Chan-Buddhist (Zen-Buddhist) notion of nonbeing/being (formlessness/form) in Pound's pre-Fenollosan Chinese adaptions (1914), Cathay (1915), Lustra (1916), and Early Cantos (1915-19), and in Williams' Sour Grapes (1921) and Spring and All (1923).--Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism (1994)  pg. 9.

China, in 2014, still remains occluded to most westerners. I mean to say, we, or most people i know and communicate with are as like the public of 1909, without any inkling as to what the Chinese language and culture is about. Myself included. Yet, what fascinates me about Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound and Robert Anton Wilson is the synchrony in the general message "Taoist/Chan-Buddhist (Zen-Buddhist) notion of nonbeing/being (formlessness/form)"

In 1913 we have a special intersection point, from the point of view of the development of peaceful communication between peoples and cultures (The Orient and the Western lands), in the passing over of Fenollosa's manuscript to Ezra Pound, who then published it and promoted it to the hilt. Perhaps this point in history exactly 100 years ago should be celebrated and so investigated due to the gravity of the situation from the perspective of modern poetry and its proponents and their impact and precursive-innovations on such fields as Neuro Linguistic Programming, computer programming, pluralistic non-linear conceptual, and, non-conceptual models of history.

There seems to me traces of Buddhist/Taoist wisdom contained within the Chinese characters themselves, on some level, when you think of caligraphy and the ancient ceremonial approaches to writing and painting. To generally empty the mind of clutter and get with the flow, and go.  

Here, i think that RAW may have been hinting at another way forward, or around the problems presented by alphabet cultures, and the general subject-predicate orientation that often skews the sensation of being/nonbeing, or tuning in/tuning out which has much more in common with ancient Chinese (Chan-Buddhist) wisdom, than our western Aristotelian history of alphabet.

Internet and HTML present an interesting case where alpha/numeric characters can be combined and reused to create fantastic parallel processing powers. Yet, most human western brains are still wired with an Aristotelian system, hundreds of years old, totally at odds with the nature of the things we pertain to know, speak of, write about etc.

Together with the principles of lets say, Count Alfred Korzybski,  a total revolution in the human mind is possible, and therefore a total assault on the culture. A transformation in the perception of language, can transform the entire cosmos, to paraphrase B.J Whorf. Consider the Hubble telescope, for example, and how it has changed our perceptions of the cosmos, but with images of a higher resolution.

The Fenollosa/Korzybski version of the Hubble telescope would be turned in on the viewer, looking deep into inner space--your mind--where the formation of language clusters and tiny universes dance and morph and often burst out into communications. These outbursts are limited by whatever singular forms are invoked from the vast limitless region of mind, by the word-things that are what we all know and what we love, the familiar day to day language of waking life that we share.

Yet too often, outbursts without doubt or the suspension of judgement, eruptions full of the continuous lyric of 'I', or of 'being'. The ego-beak or bigger rhino tusk, trampling through the human universe, blinkered to the infinite flux of being all around in 360 degrees, here, in the decentralized universe promoted by Girodano Bruno in 1584 where you sit.

Somewhere in the Korzybski matrix of general semantics can be found A WAY to better sanity. The way to better sanity involves attention to language, you are what you think. And by extension, in a McLuhaneque way, you are what you watch, what you listen to, what you type. In a hyper-connected world you are what you tune into, like the old Zen-Buddhist poets thought on occasion. Attention to mind, body, speech, or the cleansing of the doors of perception. Like RAW often hinted at: "repeat often, if you want to be a writer, do it every day, if you want to become miserable watch the news everyday, if you want to become a concert pianist, do it every day."

The global Internet opens the doors for the good and the bad to enter you and become one with you, like some kind of intergalactic body-snatcher. Therefore, to go back and trace the history of those wise people in the west who warned us, but and also provided useful tools, methods, principles, tricks, hacks, helpful feedback on the issues at hand, solutions, or general paths to where some solutions may lie, is an important journey in 2014, i think.

Buckminster Fuller also promoted the modification of the language used to describe new and future technology, based on the fact that any and all innovation starts in the human mind: the matrix of Korzybski, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Girodano Bruno, Claude Shannon, Bucky, and RAW...all characters in the tale of the tribe. All these characters from TTOTT can show us the way towards changing our own minds and transforming the world around us, as we work to practically transform that perceived world to the benefit of others.

Here lie dormant tools for the mind to navigate around many challenges faced by humanity in 2014, use them. Ernest Fenollosa helps to define the kind of Orientalism wisdom RAW (who had a pen name Mark Chan) liked to promote and found most interesting to his on going study of language, etymology, and how to get beyond language.

This synergy between Fenollosa and RAW also helps to pin point the area of most interest to RAW concerning Ezra Pound, which can be best be encapsulated by the Ideogrammic Method. At this point i might mention that another innovation, with a modernist heritage, and that seems in resonance with the Taoist/Buddhist concept of being/nonbeing can be found in Joyce's masterwork Finnegans Wake, which stretches and contorts alphabetical languages to near breaking point, forcing the familiar signs and symbols to behave upon a completely different axis of meaning, turned upside down and inside out 'all laotsey taotsey' as Joyce might say.

FW includes a rather large portion of foreign languages including Chinese, Japanese and Gaelic/Irish, translated and reconnected through his super condensed hologrammic prose. Much like ideogrammic method of Pound, the hologrammic prose of Joyce condenses meaning and fires off branches of context in all directions through spacetime. A relativistic prose. A kind of design science innovation, a new poetic shorthand, a blast of synaesthesia. A stylized alphabetical sculpture, at least, to stand proud next to a picture, a painting, a photograph, a movie projection, overshadowing the world of written words?

How can the word, as we now know it--stand up--to the new media of a visually dominated world? Well, Joyce had his own weird ways, possibly having something to do with his interest in synchronicity and transference of the sensation of epiphany, more on that another time. I think that living your life with integrity and honesty, and living in resonance, sympathetically with the symbol systems and languages around you can help a lot. You can also simply feel yourself as the center of all things, the master who makes the grass green, and if you like ask yourself what role these TTOTT characters have had in the rapid trajectory of culture we all now find ourselves inter-twinned with through our digital being/nonbeing

--Steve fly
Amsterdam
1/1/14

My ETTT post linking to an essay on Ernest Fenollosa that includes many TTOTT luminaries. A must read for a deep academic tour of WHY Fenollosa matters in 2014.

"The pictographic and ideographic nature of Chinese characters conduces to thinking in images, which, in turn, renders Chinese thinking, among other things: 1. analogical 2. nonlinear 3. concrete 4. holistic 5. intuitive 6. in harmony with nature.--http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss3/1_3art7.htm

Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958)

Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958)
Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos: Brazil

From Concrete Poetry: A World View, 1968, ed Mary Ellen Solt

RELATED RESOURCES:
Haroldo de Campos in UbuWeb Historical
Augusto de Campos in UbuWeb Historical
Decio Pignatari in UbuWeb Historical
"Concrete Poetry: A World View : Brazil" in UbuWeb Papers
"The Imperative of Invention..." Charles A. Perrone
"Interview with Augusto de Campos" Roland Greene
"The Concrete Historical" Roland Greene
Sérgio Bessa "Architecture Versus Sound in Concrete Poetry"
"Speaking About Genre: the Case of Concrete Poetry" Victoria Pineda
"From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation", Kenneth Goldsmith

Concrete Poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms. Assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent. Qualified space: space-time structure instead of mere linear-temporistical development. Hence the importance of ideogram concept, either in its general sense of spatial or visual syntax, or in its special sense (Fenollosa/ Pound) of method of composition based on direct-analogical, not logical-discursive juxtaposition of elements. "ll faut que notre intelligence s’habitue à comprendre synthético-idéographiquement au lieu de analytico -discursivement" (Apollinaire). Elsenstein: ideogram and montage.

Forerunners: Mallarmé (Un coup de dés, 1897): the first qualitative jump: "subdivisions prismatiques de l’idée"; space ("blancs") and typographical devices as substantive elements of composition. Pound (The Cantos); ideogramic method.
Joyce (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake): word-ideogram; organic interpenetration of time and space. Cummings: atomization of words, physiognomical typography; expressionistic emphasis on space. Apollinaire (Calligrammes): the vision, rather than the praxis. Futurism, Dadaism: contributions to the life of the problem. In Brazil: Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954): "in pills, minutes of poetry. João Cabral de Melo Neto (born 1920—The Engineer and The Psychology of Composition plus Anti-Ode): direct speech, economy and functional architecture of verse.

Concrete Poetry: tension of things-words in space-time. Dynamic structure: multiplicity of concomitant movements. So in music-by, definition, a time art-space intervenes (Webern and his followers: Boulez and Stockhausen; concrete and electronic music); in visual arts-spatial, by definition-time intervenes (Mondrian and his Boogie-Woogie series; Max Bill; Albers and perceptive ambivalence; concrete art in general).

Ideogram: appeal to nonverbal communication. Concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content. Concrete poem is an object in and by itself, not an interpreter of exterior objects and/ or more or less subjective feelings. Its material word (sound, visual form, semantical charge). Its problem: a problem of functions-relations of this material.

Factors of proximity and similitude, gestalt psychology. Rhythm: relational force. Concrete poem, by using the phonetical system (digits) and analogical syntax, creates a specific linguistical area-"verbivocovisual" -which shares the advantages of nonverbal communication, without giving up word's virtualities. With the concrete poem occurs the phenomenon of metacommunication: coincidence and simultaneity of verbal and nonverbal communication; only-it must be noted-it deals with a communication of forms, of a structure-content, not with the usual message communication.

Concrete Poetry aims at the least common multiple of language. Hence its tendency to nounising and verbification. "The concrete wherewithal of speech" (Sapir). Hence its affinities with the so-called isolating languages (Chinese): "The less outward grammar the Chinese language possesses, the more inner grammar inherent in it" (Humboldt via Cassirer). Chinese offers an example of pure relational syntax, based exclusively on word order (see Fenollosa, Sapir and Cassirer).

The conflict form-subject looking for identification, we call isomorphism. Parallel to form-subject isomorphism, there is a space-time isomorphisin, which creates movement. In a first moment of concrete poetry pragmatics, isomorphism tends to physiognomy, that is a movement imitating natural appearance (motion); organic form and phenomenology of composition prevail. In a more advanced stage, isomorphism tends to resolve itself into pure structural movement (movement properly said); at this phase, geometric form and mathematics of composition (sensible rationalism) prevail.

Renouncing the struggle for "absolute," Concrete Poetry remains in the magnetic field of perennial relativeness. Chronomicro-metering of hazard. Control. Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back. Faster communication (problems of functionality and structure implied) endows the poem with a positive value and guides its own making.

Concrete Poetry: total responsibility before language. Thorough realism. Against a poetry of expression, subjective and hedonistic. To create precise problems and to solve them in terms of sensible language. A general art of the word. The poem-product: useful object.


Note: Original printed without capitals. The "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry" presents a synthesis of the theoretical writings of the Noigandres group from 1950-58. The critical writings and manifestos of Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos have been collected in a volume: Teoria da Poesia Concreta, Textos Críticos e Manifestos 1950-1960, Sao Paulo, Ediçãoes Invenção, 1965.
Translated by the authors.

1958
(From Noigandres 4)

http://www.ubu.com/papers/noigandres01.html

RAW360.net (21st December Launch)

www.raw360.net will go live December 21st, 2012.

I made a short introduction to RAW360 by way of describing 'the tale of the tribe' and how, in my humble opinion, raw360.net presents a new medium by which to process the encyclopedic and the epic, in literature, poetry, and historicism.

360 PANORAWMA AND THE TALE OF THE TRIBE.

(An overview of TTOTT synthesis in the age of web 2.0)

Over the last ten years, in the company of a sleepless band of independent researchers, I have been tuned onto special information processing of The Tale Of The Tribe (TTOTT) developed exclusively by Dr. Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007).

Today in July 2011 we embark on a whole new way of communicating some parts of RAWs 'Tale of the tribe' by introducing new ways of seeing and new ways of navigating 'information processing spaces' spaces that reflect the architects that RAW highlights in his TTOTT foundation.

 The multi-sensory experience of interacting with the new 'info-process tools' feature flash based 360 panoramas and embedded media in a way that ploughs the language for the appropriate inspiring flow.

I walk in the footsteps of those writers whom wish to show delight in the limitations and boundaries of the art form. Visit any major writers website and be confronted with audio, video, texts and hyperlinks, the sum total of which, I feel, often overshadows the individual media by which they maybe regarded. (a moving picture with surround sound audio of Dali' painting, for example, may exceed the attension span of most domesticated primates who 'see' his static paintings, although they move the mind more than most!

A new synthesis has emerged amidst the convergence of information technology, social networking and the will to share, and what we are doing with the PANORAWMA is making a new synthesis explicit and demonstrable by example. Look and see, click and watch, read, listen process. I feel that in 2011/12 we can build special 'information processing tools' that are designed to interact with a special individuals 'programming' and 'programmers' and what better place to build a foundation other than that started by Dr. Robert Anton Wilson?

Together the 'programming' (that maybe defined as the principles and methodologies distilled from the works of RAW) and the 'programmers' (in this special case scenario the dozen or so characters from RAWs TTOTT) produce a remarkable comprehensive super-computer: an operating system that includes the unique mixture of innovations that we get from study of the tale of the tribe, a new global epic including history and magic.

Here I shd. offer a word on why you must read on and how RAWs TTOTT  harnesses a lifetimes study in what I, and many scholar activists alike; consider the most important and critical 'information skills' to help planetary humanity, make it together and explore mind, earth, space (inner/outer) and each other in harmony.
Dr. Wilson read and processed each of the characters in his tale of the tribe over a period of approx' sixty years. SIXTY YEARS, with a taoist modernist method of processing these characters, balanced progressive and featuring suspended judgement, multi-valued logic, poetic surprise principles and cybernetic mathematical balance.

RAW exhibited a beautifully appropriate 21st century 'programme' of humanitarian information processing with a witty creative edge long long ago, and, I may add defined lawyer run capitalism, banking syndicates and secret societies, simultaneously with 'quantum psychology' and 'the eight circuit model of consciousness' with the likes of Dr. Timothy Leary. He helps place you, the reader, interactor in the driving seat enabled, better informed.

RAW refused to step down or stop striking his hilariously precise blows at the greedy and corrupt  mummerjumpers who block and sabatage innovation, free-trade (in its proper sense), and art-run humanism from breaking out across planet earth tomorrow, and out into the greater solar system maybe in a matter of months.

I think that the least we can do might consist of correlating some of his favorite innovators and humanitarian artists into a RAW universe, (PANORAWMA: a place that reflects RAW through the people he expressly named running together in a rogue gang, a sleepless krewe consisting of magicians, historians, writers, poets, film makers, linguists, media theorists, design scientists, comedians, heretics, all raving together in a big soup, engineered into cyberspace by the greatest living web 2.0 geniuses and visionary artists actively building the PANORAMA right here, everywhere and nowhere at once.

The new 360 degree panorawma spaces are an opportunity for synthesis between the characters from RAWs TToTT, a synthesis between the innovations and principles they contributed to the collective human knowledge base (2011).

The precise and equalibrius writing of RAW naturally provides such a synthesis, and his books and articles remain testament to this comprehensive wholism as deployed through the medium of literature. The PANORAWMA project reflects the process of making a movie in comparrison with writing a book. We are building an interactive Universe where activities and events take place through multi-media synthesis: video, image, text, audio, game play.

In my opinion the key to building a harmonious Universe lies in the inter-connectivity between all of its parts, and the tale of the tribe by RAW seems to have been developed to exploit this inter-connectivity, where any of the charcters can be processed and permutated with any other to produce meaningful and complimentary mixtures. The art of mixing and of juxtaposition, however, often requires a very special touch, a rhythm and timing and sense for improvisation, to then travel the posible pathways, the choices, and analyse the path of least resistance, or that which resolves the immediate sense of opposing forces. Enter the poet, enter the painter, enter the photographer, enter the programmer, creating together to balance the equation: language vs. The equation.

--Steven 'fly agaric 23' Pratt.
www.raw360.net

"Keep the lasagna flying"--Robert Anton Wilson.