Matt said to dmb:
...In your description of DQ as not blank at all, but "rich and thick and
overflowing," does this come from the idea that there are little particulates
of sand that one sorts?
dmb says:
No, as I read it DQ is the ENDLESS landscape and the sand sorting is static.
It's like James's analogy wherein conceptual buckets are drawn from the stream
of experience. In both cases, you get this image wherein our static concepts
are taken from something much larger. I'm just saying that the white paper
depicting DQ is like that endless landscape and like that stream of experience.
I'm pretty sure that these are just three different analogies for the same
idea. To your question, "is there a conflict between his SODV description of a
permeating DQ and where DQ would fit in the earlier sand-sorting analogy?", I'd
say no. I don't see any conflict there. That's what I like about reading them
that way; it gives us coherence and consistency and we don't have to stretch or
bend anything to make it fit.
DMB said:
...She was stuck because she always relied on repeating things she's heard
before. Starting with the upper left hand brick precluded that parroting option
and forced her to see with her own eyes, apparently for the first time in her
life. ... This specificity doesn't just mean smaller or more limited so much
as it means more concretely felt and lived and immediate.
Matt replied:
..., I'm not sure how that changes the conceptual story I told--you start with
[an immediate] chunk: a static pattern. For the brick is a static pattern,
still, isn't it? Does it make sense to say that the girl is beginning with
DQ/immediacy when she begins, as a practical heuristic, with the
brick/inorganic-static-pattern?
dmb says:
I can see how one might take it that way, but I don't. I mean, it wasn't really
the brick that got her going. It was the fresh seeing of the brick. It happened
to be the thing that tricked her out of her unoriginal parroting ways, that
tricked her out of starting with some standard or model to imitate. And isn't
she a lot like the amateur philosopher in the sense that they both want to
write something excellent and original? They both want to say something that
hasn't already been said by somebody else?
Matt said:
...The interpenetration of DQ/SQ makes it apparent that it doesn't make a
whole lot of theoretical sense to say one begins with either. And reverting to
the discussion of amateur philosophy, I didn't want to say that one _begins_
with standards, but that one _is_ standards, facing down that DQ/blank page
(which is this analogy's version of the whole of the aphorism: static patterns
plus contact with DQ).
dmb says:
The point that "one IS standards" is not at all clear to me. But I'm pretty
sure that it does make sense to say we should begin with one instead of the
other. I'm pretty sure that his central point in those classroom scenes.
"As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil
that had to be broken before real rhetoric-teaching could begin. ..the more he
thought about it the more right it sounded. (ZAMM 192) " 'It doesn't make a bit
of difference HOW you do it! Just so long as it's good'. ..The student was
finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And
it was just exactly that and nothing else that taught him to write. ..the
academic system ..forced students to conform to artificial forms that destroyed
their own creativity. Students who went along with his rules were then
condemned for the inability to be create or produces a piece of work that
reflected their own personal standards of what is good. (ZAMM 208-9)
But it seems pretty clear that we have very different ideas about DQ. If I
imagined it in terms of a blank page, I would NOT be making a case for it like
I am. I mean, it would be very unhelpful to suggest that creative excellence
begins with a blank page. In fact, that image only conjures the terror of
writer's block. To put it roughly, I'm saying it begins with an honest attempt
to render your own specific experience as opposed to starting with standards.
The idea is that excellent is a real goal even if you can't say what that
excellence will entail in advance.
This particular moment would be an excellent time to start cooking my dinner.
Later.
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