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Comment on On to the syntactical future

meika Tue, Jan 15, 2008
The metaphor of the 'ordering' (syntaxis) of an Ancient Greek military unit (phalanx, finger) has been used (millennia later) by Terence McKenna in a moment of insight into the freedom of a virtual world compared to meatspace engineering, proclaiming, "The engineers of the future will be poets. "

After some linguistic/grammar puns I say they must be but war poets and sappers, embedded in carnage and undermining connections. No doubt this is a moment of etymological fundamentalism on my part.

I then suggest that, as a failed poet myself, with reference to Shelley's Defence of Poetry, that chiliastically leaping about saying that the paradise-to-be is poetry, is really but a future ruin, (like Shelley's Ozymandias). If not an instant ruin.

This leads to the poetical suggestion, from a failed poet, that maybe a non-military non-finger-pointing ordering(not) of speech might be more useful metaphors. Though I don't think I give any suggestions. Might save them for a post.

At this point Folkert adds, "That's still a little rudimentary though, the ultimate goal would of course be to do away with syntax altogether."

Which I read —as I would, as a failed poet— "as without syntax and use some other ordering(not) (non-imperative) system". Not that there would be no order but that it would be more emergent than pointed.

So we're all right, if not alright already.



ps
the (not) following 'ordering' is a substitute for strikethrough text which is not allowed here, thus ordering(not)



I feel like a tutor ruining the poem for everyone. I am Ozymandias.