Why poetry is good for the rational mind

Here's one of my poems:

    What's my great fear?
    I'll tell you; come near.
    To lay down in death
    with so much left.

    Passion not spent -
    Oh cowardly regret!
    For fear of others?
    The thousand deaths.

    I'm afraid to die
    With no twinkle in my eye
    To pass meagerly by
    Yet hidden inside.

    To walk through life
    Not truly alive
    And to pass in the night
    With an unfelt "goodbye".

Two weekends ago I did a wine and painting class. They basically blow up a picture of your pet, greyscale it, and put it on a canvas. Using some guidance and some help from the instructor you paint your pet (while enjoying delicious wine of your choosing).

I've been heads-down in a full-stack project for months and haven't had a creative outlet and it was very difficult for me to get started with this. I approached it like I did with my programs looking for exact inputs and parameters as to how to go about painting. It was very frustrating because I was falling behind the rest of the class and it looked terrible.

At some point I figured out I just needed to "let go" and start painting and trying out different things. I experimented and ended up with something that wasn't perfect but I was very happy with. It's on my wall in my office in fact.

I realize that I need these types of exercises to make my mind more plastic. Being so rigid for so long I feel really stresses me out and that releases like this are needed to let the pressure blow out. It takes things like this to get remind me that life really is ambiguous and not nearly perfect like my programs and dev ops processes.

Writing metered poetry that does not sound "stiff" is particularly challenging. I like how this one came out:

---

    I would not mind floating downstream; 
    End up among the fish and whales.

    Of the ocean waters, dark and deep, 
    I’m not afraid, for I do know 
    That, once you’ve lived among the corals, 
    The muddy currents, pebbles and rocks, 
    And parlous contours of the stream 
    Against whose tide you’d rather swim 
    Are banes you’ll gladly leave behind;

    For deep at sea you’re not confined 
    By rocks and edges that grind and rasp– 
    The river’s water may be sweet, 
    But just as sweet, the river’s shallow; 
    I’d rather down its torrent follow, 
    Follow to the salted sea.”

    (At this you quickly sipped your tea)

    “Yes, in the sea I’ll freely trace 
    The peaceful ebbs of open space, 
    More free than any shallow stream; 
    As free as logic in a dream.”

    Again you sipped, and leaned, and laughed, 
    Then played a moment with your scarf; 
    And I suspect you did agree.

I have a few more writings of different types at https://noamswebsite.wordpress.com/category/poems-and-fictio... :)

I miss writing! I think after this startup thing, if it's successful, I'll take some time to write again. I'm probably very rusty!

And it's incredibly challenging. Writing something meaningful and lyrical can be as much of a brain workout as designing a complex recursive algorithm. I've no qualms about placing Shakespeare under the same category of genius as Newton or Gauss.

It's kind of a shame that today the two worlds seem so separate... both sides are poorer for it.

A lot has been written about the rhyme of “What immortal hand or eye / could frame thy fearful symmetry?”.

Long story short, these words were probably pronounced with the same final diphthong [əi] in Blake’s time, or they had been pronounced that way recently enough (the past century or so) that it was still accepted as a rhyme. Poetry often relies on somewhat old-fashioned language to fit the meter and sense of a piece.

>“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” the American poet Emily Dickinson instructed herself

Do you look at the universe in Engineering / CompSci terms and frameworks? That's not a normal method of interpreting reality, but due to our context we extend it via our jargon and experience. Can you consider future life choices framed by a meat-algo tempered by back-propagation? What does that mean (to you?).

Half of the issue with the sciences/engineering is that a sense of absolute correctness and process is drilled into the student over a few years. The code you write may be pretty, understandable and modular but look at this benchmark. Scrap it, you're wrong according to this measure (excluding any others such as future maintenance, interop requirements, etc). There is freedom to solve a problem in a unique way, but the path there is fairly railroaded, although this is where programming gets creative. Save for end results, creative/flexible/nonlogical/associative thought has little place here.

I worked on a project a few weeks ago called BlackBox that explores this Engineering/Art space (an arbitrary divide or synthesis, lines are handy alright?). I'm a fine arts painter and while the meat has been loosening up slowly, the conceptual "baggage" of my Engineering context follows me. Analysis, Analysis, Preplan, Observe, Direct relation, Justification, Analysis, Blank Canvas, Paralysis. When I'm with fellow Artists what amazes them is my ability to systematically break a problem into smaller manageable bits, yet still keeping them non-modular. This baggage cannot simply be shed, it's part of the identity and story of SuperPaintMan/BlackBox so I use it as an arbitrary line in the sand. Fine Art / Engineering (What that means is a exploratory process).

Associative thinking is a strange creature, trusting the non-justifiable conclusions and straws we grasp allows our works to breathe in new and innovative ways. My line for having gone to far is opening a bakery whose principal ingredient is engine oil. [ https://xkcd.com/452/ ]

I met a guy who had a stroke and as a result of it he loosed a lot of his brain capacity.

He was learning spanish, learning about computers, learning french, writing a book, doing kayak, running, hiking... everyday.

He told me... every second of kayak I do; I'm kayaking running away from death.

He was conscious on how this helped his brain, to gain plasticity and allow other parts of his brain to supply for the loosed capabilities.

I think for people with good rational abilities it's tempting to think that we can logic our way through all of our internal (meaning, emotion, relationships) problems the way we can with external (business, financial, engineering) problems. It doesn't work, and the tools provided by both the humanities and spiritual traditions[1] do work, marvelously.

[1] When approached pragmatically, rather than dogmatically. Dogmatically religious people seem to suffer from as much or more angst than anyone.

I've taken to writing a lot of poetry lately as a way to process my feelings and it has been very helpful.

I actually recently read the book How Music Works by David Byrne and I enjoyed reading his account of one of his creative processes. He said that he often begins by coming up with a vocalization, grunts or hums or breaths, that fits into a certain rhythmic pattern, even though it has no linguistic meaning at that point.

He'll work to sharpen it, refine it, all without even trying to add words. Then, after getting that basic guttural rhythm down, he will begin to search for words that fit into it.

This kind of syllabic constraint also reminded me of Oulipo, of which I've been a long-time admirer.

Anyway, I started doing the same thing, and what I've been amazed with is the way the syllabic constraints cause you to sculpt and shape words and sentences that you sort of didn't even consciously realize were inside yourself.

Just a quick example, I came up with the idea to have stanzas with a syllable structure (for each line) of 3, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 8. I was actually sitting in my computer chair moving my shoulders to the 3-3-4-4 part and even drew a sort of bastardized Morse code thing on a post-it note to make sure I didn't forget it. I also felt like I wanted a longer line at the end of the stanza, because I couldn't see how continuing the 3-3-4-4 pattern could reach anything that verbally felt "conclusive" -- if that makes any sense (it probably doesn't).

At any rate, here [0] is the poem I came up with out of that experiment (warning: I'm not a poet, and this is totally amateur, but it was still enjoyable to write):

-----

In my hand

made of sand

electric pulse,

wavefront growing.

Integrate

mass and weight

and the broken fragments of slate.

Now tell me why do I ache for

that which I don't know?

Now tell me why do I ache for

that which I don't know?

In my mind

fruit and rind

fall away from

trees on fire.

Multiply

time by land

by the darkened lines of my hand.

Now tell me why do I ache for

one who I don't know?

Now tell me why do I ache for

one who I don't know?

But do I really ache for

one who I don't know?

But do I really ache for

one who I don't know?

What do I really ache for

can my kind ever know?

Is it the chance to know her

or the chance to know me?

----- [0] < http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2016/07/ache4.html >

Many of the phrases from the poem were not ideas that I rationally or consciously accessed. The two stanzas are about the way that I feel this sort of electric reverberation of loss over some relationship experiences, and that it sometimes feels like a devastated landscape inside of myself. But I think if I had sat down to write that directly, instead of letting it just kind of fall into the framework of the syllable constraints, I would have sounded more like the emo kids from South Park (err, maybe I do anyway).

Tempt me no more for

I Have known the lightning's hour,

The poet's inward pride,

The certainty of power.

    Blight
    
    by Ralph Waldo Emerson
    
    Give me truths;
    For I am weary of the surfaces,
    And die of inanition. If I knew
    Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
    Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony,
    Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
    Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sun-dew,
    And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
    Draw untold juices from the common earth,
    Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
    Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
    By sweet affinities to human flesh,
    Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,--
    O, that were much, and I could be a part
    Of the round day, related to the sun
    And planted world, and full executor
    Of their imperfect functions.
    But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
    Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
    And traveling often in the cut he makes,
    Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
    And all their botany is Latin names.
    The old men studied magic in the flowers,
    And human fortunes in astronomy,
    And an omnipotence in chemistry,
    Preferring things to names, for these were men,
    Were unitarians of the united world,
    And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,
    They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
    And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
    And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
    The injured elements say, 'Not in us;'
    And haughtily return us stare for stare.
    For we invade them impiously for gain;
    We devastate them unreligiously,
    And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.
    Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
    Only what to our griping toil is due;
    But the sweet affluence of love and song,
    The rich results of the divine consents
    Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
    The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;
    And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
    And pirates of the universe, shut out
    Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
    Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes,
    The stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
    Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay,
    And nothing thrives to reach its natural term;
    And life, shorn of its venerable length,
    Even at its greatest space is a defeat,
    And dies in anger that it was a dupe;
    And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
    Is early frugal, like a beggar's child;
    Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
    And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,
    Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped,
    Chilled with a miserly comparison
    Of the toy's purchase with the length of life.