The following passage was part of an essay titled "Currents
of Attention in the Poetic Process" which I originally
published in "Temblor" (#5, 1987). The passage was not included in any
published version.This essay was also included in my
collection pubished by Roof Books in 1993 titled
"The Boundary of Blur"
*

121/14/84

The rejection of the correspondance of surrealism
by Einstein and Freud marks the beginning of a
rift between theory and practice which may be
partly responsible for some of the more aggressive
results of both theories, particularly Einstein's.
I am thinking of Hitler's crime against
the Jews and the explosion of the Atomic bomb.

The failure of Einstein and Freud to acknowledge
the developments in culture which were
*analogous* to their contributions, which
have their source in methodologies
in science and art which preceded both of them
led to an over-investment in *action* as a
result of the overly quick application of
political viewpoints. While Einstein briefly
acknowledged the "free play" of ideas and
concepts, Freud extended this concept as far
as he could. Both were too bound up in their
own religious viewpoints to acknowledge
the cultural implication in the very aura
that they both made best use of, in
language. Of the two, Einstein was by far
the more cautious, and, as a result of
this failure, their followers fell into
a mass of contradictions whcih have yet to
be worked out theoretically- their
cultural anticedents and implications.
*

While in many ways I still feel this is a vague, rash and
essentially unsupportable statement, at this time I
am now more sympathetic with the spirit of what I was trying
to get at here. I still can't articulate it precisely, but I feel some
urgency in the necessity to try. At the time I had taken
the history of atomic physics during the era of Heisenberg and
Bohr as a series of connected discoveriies in recent science that I knew
I could probably only grasp
in an elementary way. It was my own sincere desire to try
to do so that interested me and still does. I wanted to be able to intuit
the dissonances between hard science and what I was
trying to do in my work in poetry, poetics and psychoanalysis. I was looking
for dialogue with these foundational thinkers and their universally
successful approaches, but I also wanted
to understand the rift between contemporary poetry and such
areas and in some surely very improvised manner, build bridges and
find connections between areas that refuse to communicate and share their
knowledge.. Probably
a cardboard bridge in a world of imaginary maps- maybe with
a rope bridge a few risk takers or very foolish people might also
try to attempt the journey and try to map it.
I was looking at the way the ideas that these
men inspired in others were applied led to ever
greater rifts between forms of creativity. I grasped that
the creative visions which inspired the ideas of these ingenious inventors
were shrewdly diverted towards ever more rigid,
insular, profession-building coneptual strategies.
Profession building has at its heart a desire to promote competition
and envy. The essential destruction of creativity by
creativity is at the heart of profession building.
Profession bulding destroys idea buiilding and
creativity. It relies on exclusion, hierarchy and
elitism to do this. Such elitism is promoted in
professional publications or publications professional
use to grasp the contemporary zeitgest and its passwords.
Without usable bridges to bring them together to work
on behalf of their own ideas and ideals
creative workers lay themselves
open more and more to political explotation.The over-zealous
use of "criticism," attack and turf building builds fences
and divides neighbors-who may have substantial things in common that
might threaten the control of the "authorities."
Hopefully blogging can be one source of mapping conceivable paths out
of this imbroglio, this labyrinthine and not so accidental trap of communication gaps
and confused and divisive passageways that threaten
everyone's creativity; some way out of the one way street of authoritarianism,
the universal creative
trap that ulitmately leads to facililtating leaders in their
manipulative empoyment and uses of
war, death and destruction..

(It does not go without saying, of course.
that without some acceptance of
profession building one has little hope
of obtaiing a continuous income.
Ah, here we come upon that infamous
relationship between economics and
politics one is never in a hurry to
think about too much or discuss. Aye, and there
the rub, one might say.