Skip to main content

"Thud" as phenomenological description

Description:
1 a : an act of describing; specifically : discourse intended to give a mental image of something experienced (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/description)
Based on this authority, "Thud" seems to be what is in the consciousness of the percipient, that being--in part--the same as the poem itself. After all, the bulk of  "Thud" is the poem rendered in prose form, something like a series of paraphrases.

But "Thud" denies its essence as phenomenological in several self conscious bits. "Thud" labels itself as a "deconstruction," a "lengthy explanation and context for its [the poem's] composition." Thud also explains: "s/he is in the business of being, not for-giving, or for giving, or forgiving. Big play here on forgive."

What to do? Back to the thing itself of this course, what is it we call phenomenological description? It is an uncovering of a phenomenon, of thud, a dull sound (that a reading that "The last poem" makes).  "Thud" re-creates the dull in part by showing what the poem says in prose, a form of expression implicitly here more dull. It also asks the reader which thud is better, the thud that is the "deconstruction" or the thud heard/felt by experiencing the poem? This gets at the noesis, how one experiences the what.*

It is as if the writer has admitted feeling and has asked the reader of this piece: Don't you feel that same thud as you did when reading the poem (thud being just one of the many possible variations of experiencing these things)? Thus have we discovered a description of a phenomenon in two parts, not just mental image/experience but also how that is experienced.

Hold the excitement.

Before pursuing this line, that asking a rhetorical question is more of theory construction than description, we need to set a boundary. The parts do make up the whole, but the whole is not the parts; the grains of sand is not the beach. And (I argue) that it is the beach or larger segments of the beach that we refer to when saying anything like phenomenology is (as) writing, writing is (as) phenomenology.

Read  "Thud" as a gloss of "The last poem." If your response is the same as this percipient's, that of the voice's or writer's,  "Thud" uncovers what belongs to a felt thud, what constitutes it. "Thud" attends to how the sound/feeling is given in experience. It clarifies, in the main, and does not explain.

I will not push the thesis too far. It is perhaps too radical a notion to equate phenomenology and writing and vice versa. Or this is what I am feeling--that is, experiencing in this moment. We need more exemplars, or something. And writing as phenomenology may be a nuanced notion.

To be continued.

_____
*There used to be several good glossaries of phenomenological terms on the Web. I can't find one today. I will post a link when I find a suitable one. Apologies.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Exercise one: The data do show

A. For each writing, what is the phenomenon described? Can it be rendered in a word or phrase? This is to say that each is about something--a noema, an X, an it . B. Is each writing "a direct description of our experience [of that something] as it is"? This is to say, or claim, that each is a phenomenological description comprised of both the it and how one experiences that it . C. Each writing as an  it in itself is an object of intentional gaze, or could be; each is a phenomenon which can itself be described, both noema and noesis. Which, 1 or 2 below, is more clearly a writing/text/work as phenomenological description? . . . Just to get things started. SAMPLE #1 {BEGIN WRITING} The last poem Years and years and years past I would write a gift, and thought it shared the love at Christmas. Now and now and now at last through the years I sift, and think to share our love at Christ's mass. Then and then and then repast I would mine eyes uplif...

Aside

"Lauren Silbert uses brain scans to try to zero in on what happens when two people click." (http://www.radiolab.org/2011/apr/18/soul-mates-and-brain-doubles/) Ms. Silbert read a story and had her brain activity mapped (scanned). Then she told the story to others and their brain activities were mapped. One listener's brain activity matched that of the storyteller, exactly. Thesis? The matching points represent the same experiences of the words-images that comprise the story. And if they match entirely, both storyteller and listener have had the same experience that the words create (evoke?). Is this the fundamental phenomenology of writing--the intentionality--to create in your experience that which I intend and had when I wrote what I did?

All is interpretation

What appears to you is what is. There is nothing outside of you which tells you, or me, that IT, what ever "it" is, IS. The only way I can know is through me and my senses. My stream of experiences are mine, no one else's. These experiences do not prove the existence of the exterior world or anything in it. I construct that sense-world by attributing my sensations to an unknown universe. The world then is my projected picture of it, symbolic and approximate. We justify, on the whole, the external world by accepting our private evidence that something exists beyond ourselves. So, I contend, we go about our business thinking that I see, feel, hear--sense--what you think you see, etc., or can. Thus the bases for science and other things. I  becomes w e. And we proceed beyond me and under the illusion that my concrete reality is the same as yours, a "consensual realty." We carry on our oh-so-practical lives on what are defenseless and uncertain foundations. Thus all...