| Poetry is not a sort of distrorted and decorated
prose, but rather prose is poetry, which has been stripped down and pinned
to a Procrustean bed of logic. The computer men who would program the translation
of languages sometimes forget this fact about the primary nature of language.
To try to construct a machine to translate the art of one culture into the
art of another would be equally silly. [...] In the cliché system of Anglo-Saxons, it is commonly assumed
that it would be somehow better if what is unconsciuos were made conscious.
Freud, even, is said to have said, "Where id was, there ego shall
be," as though such an increase in conscious knowledge and control
would be both possible and, of course, an imporovement. This view is the
product of an almost totally distorted epistemology and a totally distorted
view of what sort of thing a man, or any other organism, is. |