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PARTISAN REVIEW
may be that the mind at its most illumined confronting the world at its
most obscure is able to generate extensions of experience that alter and
unify the field of experience itself.
*
*
*
" 'Nature does not use
pi'
means that nature does not measure bubbles
but generates them ." Hugh Kenner's interpretation of Buckminster Fuller's
remark (in
The Pound Era)
is wholly in the line of the open field idea of
composition articulated by Williams and Olson, and within the realm of
what I have called a generative theory of compositi9n.
"Pi
will only describe
a sphere once formed, and a sphere moreover idealized because static. But
the generation of forms is described by vectors." To take off from there,
let's say that
pi
is the point of view of art as static and measurable, as in
Aristotle : form is a description of forms that already exist, and that may
be
transferred to works that do not yet exist. Thus, metrical scansion, tradi–
tional forms , the well-made novel. In an open field, or generative, theory of
composition , the page would be a field of forces whose vectors generate the
poem. There is no a priori form-form is generated by the currents of energy
that interact on the page . Robbe-Grillet has spoken about the question of
generation in composition, but I prefer a modification of his ideas suggested
by Ricardou:
It
is the activity of writing which provokes the activity of "invention in
presenting it with problems, in imposing directions on it, in endlessly
pushing it ahead .
It
is in and through the text that the text is produced .
This resembles that art of the sixties in which the mechanics of the medium
produced the work, without, however, its naive ambition
to
substitute process
for artist . In this view, the page would become a model, or better , record–
not of "reality"-but of the way the mind works, the way we experience
things, including the way we experience creative thought. "Mind is the re–
generative part of nature," Kenner remarks further on . And, one might
add, art is the regenerative part of experience as it generates new anti–
entropic extensions of it that reestablish a vital connection with the data of
reality in the energy field of the art work . That's why we can say that art
makes life more real.
*
*
*
If art is not reflection of reality then the last reflection to get rid of is
self-reflection. The fate of Narcissus is
to
drown in contemplation of him-
