Time and Poetry. [How Art disproves Causality.]

Time and Poetry. [How Art disproves Causality.]

Sheldrake was right, yet again. The present does not come out of the past into the future; it comes From the Future as one of a series of Possibilities.

There is no Causality in Art. When I move one word from one stanza to another, I wonder (causally): What WOULD that first stanza looked like HAD I put the word in the earlier stanza earlier?

I begin to imagine: The stanza would have had a greater Order. BECAUSE the word would have been in a different place, its presence would have displaced the entire following stanza. This is Causal Reasoning. It is all so a fallacy because I do not know for certain that I would not have written the stanza in the same irregular pattern.

From a Nietzschean perspective, the stanza originally came into being as a synthesis of that irregular pattern and, in its midst, the incidental presence of the Word. By [re]moving the Word, one does not disturb the pattern; the water remains the same even in the absence of a prior stone.

The poet attests: I wrote this to be intentionally irregular! The causal theorist, thinking to one-up affect with logic, insists: But in fact that was only your out-come, not your intent. Had it been your intent, you would have written it that way from the beginning. It was only by chance that you made an error, only corrected it partly, and called the settled-for mess of an outcome ‘your intent’.

Clever but false. For in fact the poem was All Ready Complete in the Future, and one had to make attempts, experiments, and revisions to find it. Had one failed, probably by sloth, the Future would have not become a Present.

Most artists will attest to this.

Dm.A.A.