What Would Stevens Do?

The first thing that came to mind, catherine, was steven's "anything is beautiful if you say it is," a first class invitation to aesthetic sophistry that i'm inclined to want to follow. when thinking about an 'error in beauty,' the idea brings so many things immediately to mind (the inherence of one in the other being the first thing). when you speak of an error in beauty, is this a betrayal of a beautiful subject, acting in bad faith as a subject, do you mean?

ok, i'll just make some quick statements and then think about it more and then come back with more.

i guess mishearing and miswriting are not quite errors, but they seem to me to have the quality of errors, of overheard voices, whose truth or falsity dissolves in the act of applying your imagination to murkiness. this is, what duncan calls (when speaking of pindar) a "wrongness that has style." this wrongness (which is also the wrongness of "large bad picture") is integral to my conception of the role of the artist. the idea of error that this stance imagines is a skeptical attitude toward the world. that the world's imposition of "rightness" and "right thinking" or any kind of orthodoxy (which pains real beauty with its appearance) is that which the writer must deny.

This denial, however, is not so much a romantic, subjective denial as it is a denial of bad information, of humans misleading one another for whatever reason (avarices, powers, pettiness born of squashed conceptions of the individual). Error becomes verity, because smugly reported truths (as opposed to er, beautiful errors) are errors of process. Now, i guess this is where my imposition of my own idea of your "error" comes from. My error is a static state. One errs, veers from a dogma in order to find larger errors which are not faulty because of their place on a scale of imposed rightness.

Yeah Yeah.

Also does this world of error include the accidents of the bricoleur, of the wayward (wyrd, weird) mis directions of the weather's butterfly effect? the complexity of the poet's reading and writing in time, the progression of which is tiny dreads when the poem is being built or polished?

there is of course, the internal feeling of error, in which the writer makes a statement that is not true. this has two categories:

a) it is not true
b) it must be admitted, truth (or fixity on a scale of rightness) be damned.

so, if the error is generated by the person and poses a threat to the person's morality, then the error must be toyed with. if it outrages the poet, that is, it must stand.

but, if it is just not true, with no interesting fireworks or sparks, it cannot stand.

ok, am at work, must go.

jared