LOGOS | Ee Cummings & Semantics

Murielle Mobengo • 12 octobre 2020

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POETRY HACKS / shorts

Ars Poetica
E.E. Cummings: Semantics is bondage

Plato, a great storyteller who tried to repress his poetical tendencies, tells us about a legend he received from his Guru, Socrates. 

One day, Egyptian God Thoth swaggered he'd gifted humanity with writing, and King Thamus asserted there was nothing to brag about:

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
— Phaedrus (275-275)


Thoth is the divine Scribe walking below (or measuring space, like Urizen). He is also the God of computation, imagination, logic, the conscious heart and...writing's confusion.


anyone lived in a pretty how town, a poem by e.e. cummings from the collection 50 Poems, coud be a parable. It sees beyond seeing, and tells beyond telling through a deliberate tweak of grammar and semantics. While your head is confused, your heart receives a story. Illuminating.



Listen

"Striding Thoth," - 332–30 B.C. - Ptolemaic Period - The Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York, NY


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