Eneh Akpan Writes: Aristotle

Saturday, October 27, 2012

If Elephants Were Writers

Elephant footprints. Source: Wikipedia

Our minds are chronic recorders. Voracious feeders. But if our output doesn’t measure up with the intake of electrons, we limit our potentials as the creative individuals we were created to be.

If these land behemoths could convert their physical and metabolic process into literary accomplishments, there would scarce be room for all the books produced.

Elephants are herbivores and spend up to 16 hours a day eating plants. An adult elephant consumes 140–270 kg (300–600 lb) of food a day. – Wikipedia

Apparently, if most writers could eat (feast their minds on life’s voluptuous magnificence) in a fashion similar to the elephant’s rate of consumption and actually work (bend their backs over their desks to create) like healthy, adult eleph-ANTS, the world of fiction and creativity would be a pretty combed-out spot.

Elephants are a symbol of wisdom in Asian cultures and are famed for their memory and intelligence; their intelligence level is thought to be comparable to that of dolphins and primates. Aristotle once said the elephant was “the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind.” – Wikipedia

There has to be some sort of balance, though. I wouldn’t have you work like an elephant and eat like an ant. If you tow this lackluster line eventually, you’ll start imitating yourself. Your work becomes repetitive (like you’re going around in circles), you dry up from inside out and the magic fizzles away, as a direct result. And there’s nothing more gruesome than the death of the intellect. No other misery is quite as appalling as a man who stops thinking, quits being imaginative.

Danger awaits the writer who writes more than he reads; who goes through life without really living it up. Playing his own role as an actor and flaunting his stuff.

The internet reeks of information. You can find stuff on the news, talk-shows, films, soaps, the radio, the dailies and, the world around you. There’s always a phrase, a word, some picture to spark up your muse.

But what do you do when you are all alone by yourself?

Elephants can’t go through a forest or path without leaving their mark. It’s unthinkable. Their footprints are like giant ‘Periods’ in the sand punctuating their passage with emphatic, decisive dots.

What can you take away from all this talk? If elephants were writers, would you be in business?

Let your pen bleed.

Akpan

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Wordsworth's Criterion

Poetry Workshop (Photo credit: Steel Wool)

Okay, let’s talk poetry. I’m not interested in the fundamentals – form, structure, or metric fluidity, right now. I’m more at home with unwinding the spool of mystic which wounds around the craft like a shawl; the touch of poetry on the soul and the spontaneous ignition that accompanies the reaction.

I’ve heard people argue that the human emotion has no business meddling with the heartstrings of poetry. This school of thought points out that far too much research and constructing goes into the making of a poem. And so, they stress, to fling the craft at the mercy of a thousand nameless emotions is, stating it mildly . . . flimsy. I disagree, though. Well, I’ll give them due fairness and add that these school does not deny entirely the relevance of our feelings to the flow of cadence. Actually, they view them as mere poetical attachés and nothing more. They assert that sensations are fickle and lacking in depth to be a route to the core of poetry.

Well, I don’t know about that one. What I do know is I’m out to understand the essence of poems and I’m taking into consideration the pick-and-choose nature of the craft. The selectiveness of verse, its choice of delicate words differentiates it from prose. I like explaining it to myself like this, if narrating in non-fiction is telling, if in story writing it’s showing, then in poetry above all, it is feeling.

Of course, I speak in defense of poetry; the emotion is an indispensable ingredient in every form of writing created to have a personal edge. Maybe, just maybe news reporting might be excused from what Stephen King calls Wordsworth’s Criterion.

The poet feels his way through each word applied to each line of verse, skillfully selecting, streamlining, and fine-tuning them to sync with the emotive flow of the entire tapestry. Poetic language is attentive to meaning, nuances, and sound patterns of words a poet repairs to in creating his art. This is something readily overlooked in any other form of literature, (Like I stated above, only writing that does not call attention to feelings maybe exempted.) except of course, music which at its finest is characterized by elements of poetics. By the way, writing which appeals to human emotion always always is the offshoot of poetics.

Aristotle said, ‘The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor’. You would easily agree that without metaphors poetry would be one first class piece of dead meat. The metaphor is the evocative force of poetry which paints mental pictures of sweet delights within a reader.

Robert Frost was thinking the same thing when he remarked, ‘There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor . . .’ Poetry is the vehicle of emotion just the same way the emotion is the writer, the driver of poetics.

Robert Wallace puts a ring of finality to it when he says, ‘The metaphors virtually stand for or present the emotion.’ Remember, William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry; Emotion recollected in tranquility?

The metaphors are visible passions which lend their charm to the poem. In other words, they ain’t just the thrust of feelings in the verse but the seen aspect of emotions recollected.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan