Warp

Deriving from the Ancient Greek etymons eîdos (‘form’) and eídō (‘to see’), the modern term ‘eidólon’ transmutes into English in two interconnected ways: an eidólon can either be an idealised person or thing, or a spectre or phantom. In poetry, the term is often associated with Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name, included in his ‘Inscriptions’ section of the 1881–82 edition of Leaves of Grass. In this apocryphal text, stanzas repeatedly conclude on the word ‘eidólon’ as if the repetitions are one means (semantic satiation) by which to challenge connections between signi ed and signi er. The American transcendentalist’s poem offers ‘a theory about how a poet should handle, or mediate, form and materiality’ (Cohen 1), and the eidólon remains paradoxical for Whitman, a ‘spiritual image of the immaterial’ which ‘seeks to demonstrate the incompleteness of our understanding of reality’ (Richardson 201). Deploying the term experimentally here, we intend eidólonging (vb.) to identify that yearning for idealised space perhaps common to poets used to asking (in their own ways) ‘have you reckon’d the earth much?’ (Whitman in Bradley et al. 2).

The contemporary self is caught in spatial systems beyond its control. Yet it has to interrogate these systems in order to make existential as well as architectural – designer sense of its predicament. This interrogation is acted out in the language of anxiety, hybridity and fragmentation that reflects the material condition of humanity of today; it appears inseparable from techno-scientific practices. The result is a weakening of the Cartesian notion of 'extension' (ontology, objectness) and 'self' (subject, narratability) as a measure of the bodily existence and identity. Instead, it is argued here, the self depends for its ability to recognise itself primarily on collisions that suspend the flow of spatialised complexity. The sites of such collisions are folds of networks of virtual and material interactions – spatio-temporal instabilities or warps. They expand the Schmarsow-Benjamin 'elbow room' (Spielraum) that gives a perceptual-empirical meaning to the self's ontology. The 'elbow room' may be viewed as a dynamic impact parameter – an effective existence radius of the self – as an assemblage of the self, place and interactions (narratives) binding them dynamically together. It constitutes an object-event, with its 'extension' and a 'lifestory'. This dynamic model of the wayfaring self seeking self-recognition and creative fulfilment is analogous to the field theoretical treatment of collisions. It offers an opportunity to develop models that may be instrumental in unfolding the origin of space warps, in finding their link to specific techno-scientific models of the world and dynamic ontology, and in pointing to their usefulness in identifying strategies and novel technical features in meta-design.

2011

1990

Based on an analysis of ten recent Bengali poems and their English translation, this study examines the 'leeching' quality of the language of poetry and the deleeching nature of criticism. Metaphors of space land language itself constitute the thread that binds these poems together. The word-epidemic has struck all our senses. 26 UDAYA NARAYANA SINGH try and judge a work of art that he cannot create, and is thus necessarily severe on the text. But it is these nominals that we seek to expound. Such qualitative critics may only have unimaginative adjectives to spare for a given text, but not enough sensitized attention to appreciate works of art. Like 'language', which derives strength from the duality of pattering, 'image' is also subjected to another kind of duality which has been called the dynamics of 'reverberation' as against the energetics of 'causality' (cf. Eugene Minkowski, Vers une Cosmologie, Ch IX, as in Bachelard 1958:xii). The poetic image has the quality of 'transsubjectivity', even when it shows variationality as against the other concepts that are constitutive and are, therefore, open to causal relationship. Such an image does not need scholarship because in creating his world, the poet may well transcend the limits of rationality. Like the painter who creates his colours and the performer (on the stage) who transmutes herself into another being thereby anthropomorphizing a lifeless set of defining characteristics of a dramatic personnae, the poet creates his own language. Many of us will agree that "the poet does not confer the past of his in upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me" (Bachelard 1958:xii). The sentimental resonances with which we may receive any piece of art only lets us hear the celebral oral construct that is poetry. In the reverberations we speak it because at this level the poem possesses us entirely. Knowing that the image in the text has been given by another man, the image that we as readers derive makes us feel so much involved with the text that we begin to feel that we could have created it. The twists and the turns that we, enliving such texts, give in speaking, repeating, singing or enacting the oral poetry derive precisely from this confidence that the poem has become 'really our own'. The question is what does the poet, as a master or subject of the text he creates, do with language in order to actuate. One idea seems to be that he distorts the world of words, corrupts vocabularies, cripples the syntactic norms of the canonical language, and mends language to accommodate his images. "The poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language of signification. By living the poems we read, we have then the salutary experience of emerging" (Bachelard 1958: xxiii). To the extent that this is true, the poet as the subject becomes a kind of phenomenologist with a massive space and scope for numerous experiments on his dual objects the direct (text)

Journal of Maharishi Vedic Research Institute, 2022

This paper is an excerpt from the forthcoming volume Manifold Poetry: The Origami of Consciousness in Word, Line, and Form, a book inspired and informed on many levels by the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Vedic Science, absorbed over the course of several decades. The selection printed here appears at a point midway through the book where my ideas around the concept of “origami” in poetry are just beginning to form and take wing. In this context, due to the pithiness of its statement, my choice of an expression from the Bhagavad-Gīta, Chapter 9, Verse 8, was in many ways key to my being able to introduce in a simple, general manner my idea of “the Fold” and various ensuing folding processes in the early stages of a poem’s development to the book’s readers. The fact that these were words spoken from within a poem had additional appeal, since I had already made note of how closely the operations of a poem, the poem that discloses itself, reflect and parallel those of consciousness. With respect to my notion of the primal Fold in a more particular sense, I have in mind that process described in Maharishi Vedic Science whereby the unmanifest singularity of self-referral pure consciousness seemingly “divides” within itself to give rise to the many from the One via the first faint impulses of manifesting creation. [Something similar seems to happen in the phenomenon of knower/ process of knowing/known as it is appreciated in poetic dedoublement, for example.] It would not surprise readers of the Journal of Maharishi Vedic Research Institute to learn that these early ruminations eventually lead to more profound discussion in a later section of the book, which highlights Maharishi’s detailed elaborations on the mechanics of language, phonology, and creation in his Apaurusheya Bhashya, the uncreated commentary based on the initial words and syllables of Ṛk Veda. The commentary on the collapse of [A] onto [K], the first syllable of Ṛk Veda, in terms of infinity onto its point value, and the intricate combinations of tumbling letters, syllables, and sounds that ensue from this action is gripping not only from the standpoint of science; it is also great poetry! Materials related to these mechanics articulated in Bonshek’s The Big Fish: Consciousness as Structure, Body and Space and Freund’s notes on Sanskrit phonology as expounded in Varna Shiksha helped me gain a deeper appreciation of the significance of this major contribution by Maharishi. Finally, I can’t fail to acknowledge the importance to me personally, in terms of my forthcoming book, of the simple fact that the hymns of Ṛk Veda, together with the shlokas of the Bhagavad-Gīta, are poetic compositions comprising significant sounds and meters because in the final analysis it seems that poetry, as a preferred vehicle of consciousness, is itself infinitely self-referral and awake to itself and its own processes.

It seemed like six legs defined a word expressed to bloom spatters of colorful light from tubes of paint. This influenced the collection of intelligent figuration, and the artificial figures made of plaster, to like, better, the bent remnants propping progress along its rails, similar to the walk which never failed, that operated the three letters, fate, fortune, flowers.

corpus movetur in superficie quacung; curvy, cujus axis per centrum um transit, & a corpore axem demittatur perpendicularis, eig ..." --D. Isaaci Newtoni.

What is the space of words and language? The following work of seven poems reveals how language—jumping between Spanish and English—can both take up space on a page and create spaces in the imagination. Sounds, rhythms, shapes, and poetic device shape the following pages in a way that causes the reader to look to the spaces beyond the words themselves.

Literature Compass, 2006

By comparing avant-garde visual poetry to the avant-garde architecture of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, this essay describes how one virtually “moves through” poetic space. Appealing to examples from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery and Susan Howe and contemporary Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña, I steer the reader through complex visual poems based on the grounds that a disruption of the reader’s sense of space has aesthetic and political implications.

Data quibuscuniv nlocis velocitatem, qua corpus figuram datam viribus ad commune aliquod centrum tendentibus describit, centrum illud invenire --D. Isaaci Nevaoni.