this scrap bag is more about eliot, tradition, etc. from wompo

I posted an excerpt about the classic from stein's composition as uh, whatever --

annie finch: If we include radical, progressive
> systems--including,long-lost ones-- among the possibilities, maybe the
> idea of a poet using a tradition isn't so unquestionably a conservative
> idea? Couldn't there be such a thing as using a radical tradition in a
> radical way, but still gaining the benefits of using a tradition in
> terms of poetic power?

the missing "accepted and traditional" framework

ELIOT

> > "We may speculate, for amusement, whether it would not have been
> > beneficial to
> > the north of Europe generally, and to Britain in particular, to have
> > had a
> > more continuous religious history. The local divinities of Italy were
> > not
> > wholly exterminated by Christianity, and they were not reduced to the
> > dwarfish
> > fate which fell upon our trolls and pixies. The latter, with the major
> > Saxon
> > deities, were perhaps no great loss in themselves, but they left an
> > empty
> > place; and perhaps our mythology was further impoverished by the
> > divorce from
> > Rome. Milton's celestial and infernal regions are large but
> > insufficiently
> > furnished apartments filled by heavy conversation; and one remarks
> > about the
> > Puritan mythology an historical thinness."

ya gotta love a slam on milt; but perhaps this "he was a blind windbag" view is precisely what leads Eliot to also misunderstand blake.

also, I suppose I have always occupied a catholicism which I was born into, not adopting like noyes or eliot, where the reading of milton and blake was -- not mentioned. but also where the conversion and adoption of pagan believes and rituals was part of a quasi-nationalist catholicism esp. in western europe and also in the different eastern orthodoxies, and the influence of greek and roman mythology, with the large exception of the elusian (sp?) mysteries, being mostly that of philosophy, of Plato and Aristotle on Aquinas and Augustine.

I wonder really about his conversion to catholicism -- or a conversion to any religion -- being wholly different from being raised in a particular faith in a particular place, and also the idea of a return to the root of a religion as a modern person, and the problem of cutlrual accretions like so many burrs and wads of lint.

Buddhism and Catholicism change(d) so much in response to the religions, folk beliefs, and philosophies in the nations where they spread. It is a commonplace to hear that irish and italian and polish catholicism are all different from each other in important ways, ideas, folkways, traditions, rituals; zen never replaced shinto in japan, buddhism never replaced confucianism and china, but the religion was marked -- mostly in those countries -- by the encounter with the philosophies. two porcupines rubbing together.

what unites the diverse things that interest me and that I do is making systems, "programs" is an architect catchword now, or designing, or developing.

one of the most effective ways to do that is to design modularly, where the modules can be shared (more like sharing than borrowing or stealing or taking); another is to repurpose modules to serve diffferent ends

the entirely made thing has an appeal

but so does the brilliant application of poetry, say, to an idea, or of an idea into poetry

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