Language is a way of understanding and in turn being understood. Take language away and you have a sort of simplistic hand-gesture language that remains, in other words, symbols as a language if you will. String symbols together and you have meaning. And what are words but a grouping of symbols? The letter “e” is a symbol, but link this same “e” with a few more symbols – say “r” “t” and another “e” – and, presto chango, you get “tree.” Utilizing writing as a method of expression is just that – fashioning symbols to represent what you mean.

                The symbols that language provoke in our mind are different, which raises fascinating questions. How is it that when the word “tree” is mentioned, humans automatically associate the word with an image? How is it that the language we use changes the mental images in our mind and what is it that fills the void between hearing something and seeing it in our mind’s eye? In answer, I would suggest that the ability to organize and associate is something that humans instruct themselves to do automatically – to store images and sound bites and smiles in your mind along with text…to intertwine mental understandings, reactions, and the things that made you react the way you did in a virtual filing cabinet that is cross referenced by an index. It is the retrieval process that makes us unique.

                Language can be twisted in this retrieval process. Say the word flower and you get one image, but if you read a poem that contains the descriptive phrase “noses of flowers,” that produces a confliction of images…we try to pull forth an image of the word “nose” as well as that of a “flower” and this creates tension in our minds as we struggle to grasp what a the nose of a flower might look like. The work of a true poet or writer is therefore to wrap and coil the shape of words in order to make you think about them in a separate context, to give them new shape, new life, to breathe forth contentiously insipid pairings of words that almost don’t work…but somehow…they do. Take the poem below for example:

darkness

and out of the solitary abyss come thoughts more lucid

than broad daylight could hasten to point a finger at

snippets of conversation, noses of flowers, purple moons rising

(instead of once-in-a-blue ones)

bees humming and delighting

in the rich nectar of a sudden of Spring in my mind

golden whirling dervishes spin-dancing in a tittering way

oops

they detonate at the brush of a touch,

accidentally showering pathways of thought with their harvest –

clogging me up with the fruits of my own intuitions, thoughts, dreams

filaments of innocence,

forgotten smiles.

but mostly dripping

dripping remembrances of smiles.

like a delicate monsoon rain – just washing

my thought-trailways free like they

have an innate tendency to do every

once-in-a-monsoon.

When asked to summarize what has taken place in the poem, many people would be at a loss, and with good reason. In writing this poem, I attempted to play with language, to be transparent, and to hold in my hands the interpretation of the loveliness of imagination; to watercolor the watered-down essence of the vibrancy of language. This poem was an experiment with language, grasping tight to the idea that out of darkness a brilliant string of thoughts can make one blind to the dimness and want to break free from the confines that humans have imposed upon our language. Writing is meant to be an expression. Beautiful words that have a plethora of meanings in which to discover other meanings – for it is more than a discovery, it is a taste, an image, a color. It is the author showing the reader a vision so indescribable that one must insist on attempting to explain it in a remote manner, inconsistent with the consistency expected by society in hopes that the far-fetched will make the impossible appear more sane.

                It is around this time (after I read Prufrock) that I began writing the poems first and then the title, the one word that tied all the random, rambling thoughts together. The title was important. Symbolic. It had to be smooth-edged and at the same time jagged; it must never flop. That, therefore is what writing entails for me. It has to be brutally alive on the page. The individual letters have to tango to the music of my mind in the minds of others, to twist and squeeze the same juicy, intenseness from their minds. Writing is the way my mind imagines and language is the way that I in turn communicate my imaginations.

This sense of language as a tool of measuring the growth of society is something that I definitely want to persue in my revision of my very first essay. I want to especially elaborate on this paragraph because the idea of language and how we then understand it interests me:

                Language is a way of understanding and in turn being understood. Take language away and you have a sort of simplistic hand-gesture language that remains, in other words, symbols as a language if you will. String symbols together and you have meaning. And what are words but a grouping of symbols? The letter “e” is a symbol, but link this same “e” with a few more symbols – say “r” “t” and another “e” – and, presto chango, you get “tree.” Utilizing writing as a method of expression is just that – fashioning symbols to represent what you mean.

I think that another point of elaboration will be on my poetry that I incorporated into my work…I think that the use of my poetry as a method of examining how the language that we use changes our understanding of a work and how the mental images change as a result of the word choice – but most of all, I want to focus on how the spoken and written art of language especially change our comprehension of a piece of work. Reading a poem and listening to the author of a poem read his or her work out loud creates separate appreciation of the product. I am fascinated by language, and this course as only served to create a larger sense of the way language can be interpreted in different formats.

            Patchwork Girl is at first perplexing, and the author’s vision may seem distracted and even intrusive, but the texts are meant to stand on their own. To be understood as insolated individuals that cohesively are linked in ways that force us to make the connections for ourselves as opposed to a conventional novel or printed text in which the conclusions are drawn for us. In Patchwork Girl, we have to fight to withdraw the associations, to extricate meaning and finally to assimilate and organize them in a structured manner that is different from the organizational system that we normally employ which is able to organized by sequencing chronologically. We as humanity understand chronological order, understand the logical following of events, and comprehend even the blisteringly thoughtful discussions as long as there is a beginning and an end. This is precisely what Shelley Jackson seeks to shatter, or perhaps also to broaden – our understanding of organization. She “hop[s] from stone to stone and an electronic river washes out [her] scent in the intervals…a discontinuous trace, a dotted line.”

            To be able to organize and associate is something that humans instruct themselves to do – to store images and sound bites and smiles in your mind along with text…to intertwine mental understandings, reactions, and the things that made you react the way you did in a virtual filing cabinet that is cross-referenced by an index. The conventional novel gives us the material we normally fill our folders with…Shelley on the other hand gives us the index and forces us to draw on our filing cabinets to understand her writing; this sort of reading is mental physical exercise as opposed to a sinking onto our virtual couches and letting the reactions wash over us. This is, I would argue, why it is so difficult to delve directly into her writing – we as readers are used to a light walk at most, whereas Shelley’s work is the equivalent of a full out sprint for miles – we must first condition ourselves before we can physically attain what she expects of us. Shelley intimately describes the “assembling [of] these patched words in an electronic space” in a text box entitled “this writing” as such:

            “I feel half-blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest…How I got from one to the other is unclear.”

            The understanding of Patchwork Girl and the meaning behind it became clear to me not after I had spent time pantingly trying to keep up with the texts I was leap-frogging between but rather as I read Shelley’s critique of her own work – perhaps in a sense also her defense. In it, she justifies her work as one that: 

“never seems quite finished, it isn’t clear just where it ends, it’s fuzzy at the edges, you can’t figure out what matters and what doesn’t, what’s matter and what’s void, what’s the bone and what’s the flesh, it’s all decoration or its all substance…in hypertext, you can’t find out what’s important so you have to pay attention to everything, which is exhausting like being in a foreign country, you are not native.”

It was then that I realized the point that Shelley was trying to make when she devised the idea to compile all the smaller subsections of text in a seemingly random conglomeration – she is not trying to make sense. She is giving us pieces of ideas as jumping off points onto which we can attach our own. In other words, we are not jumping on the train, we are physically attaching ourselves to the engine she lent us and allowing ourselves to be pulled along for a brief time until she unexpectedly disengages us and leaves us floundering in space only to be reattached to another idea train when we click on the next link. (Clink. The noise I think of when I consider the conjoining of two steel couples that bind two segments of train together…not unlike the word link. Links are the physical bonds between our mental filing cabinets and our mind train.)

            Shelley Jackson does an exquisite job integrating the idea of the hypertext and the more traditional inspiration that the novel invokes. I personally find her separated blurbs more invigorating and beautiful because they are pared down, smaller samples of her writing. They (I’m going to refer to them from here on out as thought blurbs because even though they are text boxes, I am quite certain Shelley sees them as thought blurbs) allow you to take as much time as you need on a section of writing or even on a specific sentence and simply to revel in the language – some of the blurbs that pop up contain a sentence that when buried among pages would not normally excite the reader, but when isolated, one finds that it contains new meaning which suddenly jumps forth to surprise.

            In a sense, I find reading through her work Patchwork Girl not unlike reading an anthology of poems. Poetry is the opposite of extrapolation; it is consolidation and oversimplification to exonerate the beauty of the English vocabulary. This is what I believe Shelley seeks – to reinvent how we understand the English language when we read and to peruse the idea that disjointedness can in fact lead not just to confusion but rather to new understandings other than that which the customary linear plot line delivers…

“There is a kind of thinking without thinkers. Matter thinks. Language thinks. When we have business with language, we are possessed by its dreams and demons, we grow intimate with monsters. We become hybrids, chimeras, centaurs ourselves: steaming flanks and solid redoubtable hoofs galloping under a vaporous machinery.”

- Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (it thinks)

http://www.ineradicablestain.com/skin.html

In Birkerts’ conclusion I want to highlight that Birkerts is on a track with which I agree and which creates the seed for an interesting thought process; without realizing it, Birkerts is in fact rationalizing the very idea that he is so set against. He discusses on page 221 that technology and “improvements” create a sort of separate self, or “extensions of man.”

We are drawn to technology because it inspires us to think about the potential of what we could accomplish with greater speed and efficiency. The more prolific the amount that we as humans can process and produce, the more society as a whole benefits. But it is a strained benefaction as opposed to a simple benefaction that is the result of one action leading to a positive reaction. Strained benefits is how I am going to refer to the idea that with the advancement of technology to procure better results in a more rapid fashion, so too does the amount expected of the average human increase. This swelling of requirements to accommodate the added pressures of broader expectations is only underscored by the advent of technological devices that allow us to speed the pace. The questions I think that Birkerts is, in this sense inherently posing are as follows: If I, and society in general, accepts technology that makes us more productive, when will the limit of production begin affecting our progress? How do we know when progress is no longer progressive and when does the hastening of life, time, and production time reach a point where it simply cannot expand any further? What is the limit of human capabilities? Is there a point where we rescind our humanity for something less fleshy? In answer to this last question, I would agree with Birkerts in that in essence, the advancement of technology has allowed us to become more mechanical. In a very large respect, the perpetuation of technology into our lifestyle has created a virtual sense of the world around us, of virtual participation in events, of virtual friends, of virtual universes…and we are delving into it because we recognize a part of ourselves, just as we recognize a part of ourselves in apes. But that doesn’t make it humanizing – I would argue instead that it creates the possibility of uber-evolution: evolution to the point where evolution is no longer necessary because we have reached the stage of a plateau where there is no up or down.

These “enhancements…don’t seem to challenge our power so much as add it.” Birkerts seems frightened by the computerization of his sense of self, time and space regardless of the idea of a bionic human. Super human. It is a rather frightening thought and I am of the opinion that Birkerts feels that once technology begins to sprint forth, there will be no restraining it, creating a sort of hopeless haze of continuum. Birkerts has found himself in a place where he knows that the future may obscure all the things that he so convincedly holds fast to. He feels that technology will reinforce our willingness to “trade for ease…at every step.”

Birkerts justifies his lack of adherence to technology in an interesting fashion. He discusses that when a man goes to view the majestic beauty of the Grand Canyon that “he sees the canyon by avoiding all the facilities for viewing the canyon.” This was an observation that I found extremely fascinating. It suggest that the only way to view a phenomena such as technology or change is to remove oneself completely from it and rely on one’s powers of observation as a simple spectator rather than an participant. He wants to understand, not to be swept up by the superficial aspects of potential.

Birkerts quotes Benjamin as relating the “desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly.” We see the future and want to acquire any instrument that will promote the pulling of that future closer/nearer to ourselves. We are bent to improvement of our race and more specifically ourselves. We inherently want to be the best that we can be and the media plays to this need/drive. They emphasize uber-skinny women, overtly good-looking men, smiles all around and in their hands or on their figures…the newest, most amazing items. We see the happiness on their faces and crave to be like them. Birkerts is the critic behind the scenes going wait…the smiles are fake and here’s how the world really works – we are materialistic like no other and that same materialism is what creates the “depletion” of humanity as a whole.” Birkerts blames much of our materialism on technology. “We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence, both of the authority of the individual and, in ways impossible to prove, of the species itself.”

I think the moral of this is really that when I read Birkerts’ arguements, in my head I am using his arguments to compliment my own conclusions and that what Birkerts and people in general write can and will be used against them…so many things can be read more than one way.

I would like to put forth an argument to Birkerts’ case when he says that “the order of print is linear, and is bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. Syntax is the substructure of discourse, a mapping of the ways that the mind makes sense through language.” Print is a linear thing, but it can be organized in a non-linear fashion, as in the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Syntax on the other hand, I would argue actually does NOT have to be written in a linear fashion. I read once about how there was once a college study done wherein a group of people had their reading comprehension tested and it turned out that as long as the first and the last letter were in the right place – no matter how the letters in between were reorganized – the human mind could still make sense of them:

 Udnerastnd. Uerndawetr. Lugah.

The brain goes through a rapid succession of word-referencing until it finds the correct one and then virtually rearranges the letters to make a word that we can comprehend. Understand. Underwater. Laugh. Because of this I argue that while the order of the printed words must be in a linear sentence-oriented fashion in order for us to understand the entirety of the meaning, neither the syntax nor the print itself must be structured in this way for us to comprehend it. Our brain automatically tries to connect things to others in order to create the fullest sense of understanding that we can achieve. Words, images, thoughts. All are interconnected.

In Birkerts’ world, he attempts to separate things that are most successful when interrelated. He argues that “reading is fundamentally an act of translation. Symbols are turned into their verbal referents and these are in turn interpreted,” while I would alternately argue that when we read, it is not just an act of translation but rather one of association. It is not how we translate, but rather one of what we can associate the text with that allows us to understand it.

This is where I think that Birkerts and Shelley most diverge.

“The faraway rest of the world, has been transformed by the pure possibility of access.” Birkerts is very close minded in his viewing of how the world should revolve around and in turn be recorded by what Birkerts terms “static” print…print that cannot be deleted (although it could be ripped, shredded and reorganized with glue, theoretically) and cannot be hyperlinked into each other (although indexes could be termed hyperlinks in a sense, even though most people don’t really read indexes in their spare time).

“exploring, transgressing, and exploding the conventions of the book while still retaining enough ‘bookishness’ to make clear they remain within its traditions, even as they redefine and expand what “book” means.”

This is an interesting concept. It basically entertains the idea that although books may seek to be traditional, they evolve regardless, out of the hands of authors. As authors write novels, they seek to capture their audiences by making books less about the black and white lettering that appears on the page and more about the places that those black and white letters lead you to. In other words, as authors write new novels, they seek to elaborate upon the simple idea of print on paper, and in seeking new ideas they unknowingly/ unwittingly advance the idea of the novel, perhaps (I am suggesting) they even allude to the advent of the hypertext and text that is not as physically able to be grasped as that of a written novel.

The idea of Patchwork girl is a rather intricate one, and I admit, I have been having many issues reading through the text because I cannot disassociate Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and all the other understandings that I have of reading. Since I was small I have been reading and comprehending novels in a linear fashion, with the exception of a series that I read when I was small entitled “Chose Your Own Adventure.” (Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure; official Chose Your Own Adventure Website: http://www.cyoa.com/main.htm ) This series was, looking back on it my first experience with a non-linear text. The premise behind the series was that of a “choosing” of your own path through a novel. The novels were written in first person format, so it seemed that the situation that you decided on had a direct affect on your character. These were books that were never meant to be read in a linear fashion and could not be; each successive situation directed you to a different one and to read them in succession one after the other would have resulted in meaningless jabber. I remember as a young child being fascinated by the many facets and possibilities offered by a simple change of a decision and reading the novels over and over again until I had exhausted the possibilities. But therein lies why I have so much difficulty understanding allowing myself to integrate into Patchwork Girl. When I read through the Chose Your Own Adventure Series, I always read the book in a linear fashion regardless of the fact that it theoretically COULD be read like Patchwork Girl: I walked the expected paths through the novels and when I had finished with a certain path, I walked down another one. Not so with Patchwork Girl. There is no linear sense of direction to guide me and no set outline that the author gives me to follow. Instead, I am given snippets, snatches really, that come across in an extremely disorientated fashion to my very linear-minded brain. I think that if I had been brought up to read and understand texts like Patchwork girl I would struggle less with the seeming lack of structure, but I was not. I am used to following the rules and the lack thereof is not exactly a freeing experience – it is quite the opposite in fact, I feel directionless and confused.

I did, however want to quickly note the point that I found extremely interesting which Hayles made: that “media constantly engage in a recursive dynamic of imitating each other.” We print written reviews about movies, we glog about websites, we give speeches on novels. The idea that we are at times taking the same material and attempting to present it in a different manner speaks to the fact that perhaps we are attempting to attract different sorts of people (whether generationally, economically, or otherwise). I found that the idea of “paper clipping” a computerized text especially interesting because of the way in which it connected to Patchwork Girl ( how we can attach notes to certain pages in PG and also how we can ‘bookmark’ certain items as well = virtual ‘earmarking’ ).

Frankenstein

 Mary Shelley versus Kenneth Branagh

            The transition from a liquid form of film to one that is more remote and distant than the original chemicals – the viewing of the solidified form of liquid film – is not always a smooth one. In the version of Frankenstein that was watched in the lecture hall, the ending was particularly obvious for its diversion from that of the original Shelley novel, however I would argue that some sections in the story could, through the use of visual stimulus and noise in fact create more poignant imagery and therefore reaction than could the novel itself.

            Benjamin’s article discusses the advancements of technology and how the developments in science and nanotechnology are altering the environment that we understand today. Specifically, Benjamin focuses in on the evolution of photography and film. The process of developing film is an intricate one. The steps of development provide a delicate balance between under- and overdevelopment, where a few minutes can mean the difference between complete whiteouts – where nothing is visible – and complete blackouts – when the film is too dark to view the images hidden there. Watching film develop is an awe-inspiring almost something out of a dream; images gradually appear, almost amoeba like as they spread across that what had been bare blankness seconds before.

            While watching a film, one has no idea of the physical wetness and smell of the chemicals that revolve around the developing process. In this sense, the viewing of film is not unlike the reading of a novel in this fashion – you see nothing of the moisture involved in the printing process and instead understand it in a “dry” way.

            While watching Frankenstein I got an inherent sense of this aridness – you see images that flash distractedly through your field of vision fast enough that your brain can only understand them as motion, can only catch the vague blur of each individual frame that passes by. Watching a movie is sensually overwhelming as your eyes, and ears are overpowered, resulting in a draining away of the rest of your senses to the point that you are enthralled by the screen, the images, the sounds. The waterlessness of viewing a movie results in a dehydration of your senses other than that of vision and hearing, while emotion is always the same – feelings. The way in which we experience and the extent to which we are impacted by what we are feeling can be more exactly prescribed on film, mostly because we feel as though we are ‘falling’ through the screen into the world of vibrant colors and intense sound – a more sparkling reality than our true reality. Film “creates a false sense of companionship, making people feel intimate, informed, clever, busy and important…we as viewers feel engaged…without the effort of actually being engaged.”[1] In other words, film at the same time isolates one from and integrates one into society.

            When formulating a script from the original text, some words are given more meaning because of the way in which they are delivered by the actors and others less so. The thing that most caught my eye as a viewer of the Frankenstein film actually occurred at several points throughout the movie – a strong sense of pity and sympathy for the monster was strongly invoked, much more dramatically than came across in Shelley’s novel, even despite the fact that Victor Frankenstein’s monster is never referred to as a monster during the course of the movie. Sympathy for the monster was shown specifically in his own expression of human emotions, to which I reacted more strongly on film than in a black-and-white lettered format; emotions on film play into my own emotions.

            The section of the film which stood out most poignantly to me was that in which the monster expressed his extreme frustrations with Victor’s resistance to stitching another monster together of the female sex.  The monster’s failed attempts at assimilating into quote on quote ‘normal’ society brought forth an intense desire to have someone upon whom to shed affection and in turn have affection showered upon him; simply to be physically near to someone without them judging him solely based on his appearance.  The words with which the monster conveyed his message had an undertone in them that were particularly terrifying: if he is denied another fellow creature upon whom to bestow affection, he leaves no doubt in the mind of viewer when he states that he will become extraordinarily unstable and rage at Victor’s lack of compassion and understanding if Victor fails to comply. In the battle between love and hate, “if [he] cannot satisfy one, then [he] will indulge the other.” The lack of understanding that Victor exhibits in the movie at that moment is much more vividly portrayed when you can physically see the emotions being played out across the monster’s face as he hears the news that his hopes may not come to pass than when Mary Shelley describes it. There is something indescribably terrifying when the monster looks you directly in the eyes yells at Victor because he cannot understand why Victor would give him emotions without “tell[ing him] how to use them.”      

            Being confronted with something that seems to literally jump out you is a disconcerting experience. It puts you in the shoes of those on the screen. You associate the feeling that you are undergoing with your own litany of feelings and cross-reference the feeling with the events that made you understand the things you were feeling when you experienced them for the first time. This association with outside factors allows movies to be more relatable and for you to feel as though you are intimately involved with the characters on the screen because you not only feel the emotions their bodies and faces are expressing, but you also are bonding with the images onscreen because you feel that yourself and the characters have shared an intimate bond – that of a shared experience. The rage on the monster’s face in this particular scene is transmitted to the viewer as a pity because the audience associates the monster’s rejection with their own personal rejections from something that they wanted very much to be a part of – be it their high school soccer team or the grade school games in physical education. Isolation is a widely understood human emotion and one that is difficult to recreate in words because much of the feeling and the taste of isolation is a visible phenomenon – tears, distress in the lines of one’s face, the look in your eyes when you are mourning, the desperation of your movements.

            This image of Frankenstein for example is a stilled image from the film, a brief millisecond in the length of the film and yet in captures much of the disbelief and displays much human emotion just in this one image. The confusion in his eyes is something that cannot be replicated in text format. For this reason, the evolution of one form of media to another is for this reason not always a smooth one.