The Theorist Limns Esoteric, a portrait
a sailboat yaws in the nerve of twilight, a passel of
infrangible fire,
a cablestitch of
dream, the dense dusk, the choir on rostrum filigrees desire,
the memory a farrago, adventitious mayhem and basilisk dismay,
imbroglio of ersatz hints, deaths among propinquity, the
trite essay,
the theorist limns esoteric, his carapace the night’s
autonomy,
summer’s wisdom encased, ascending alchemic theonomy,
the desk lamp coruscates carnations, his cognizance respires
in furlough’s gnomons,
risqués in fructuous nocturnal landscapes, ratiocinations of
creation,
the theorist has a laugh at ‘pigs dream of acorns and geese
dream of maize’,
records Todorov’s marvelous nature and immixes some cabernet,
newsprint and black doves drift and gyrate, alight upon the
floor,
all the villa is wind and rainstorm, lubricious billet-doux from
Y. Roquemore.
Tzvetan Todorov 
Tzvetan Todorov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, but moved to France to pursue his education; he studied under Roland Barthes at LÉcole des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and quickly became director of research at Europe’s largest fundamental science agency the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research). Almost immediately he established himself as a prominentproponent of structuralism, a method of interpretation. Heavily influenced by cultural anthropology, that focuses on recurring patterns of thought and behavior. In 1970 he published his most influential book, “Introduction à la littérature fantastique,” in which he noted that the genre “requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work -- in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as ‘poetic’ interpretations.” He was especially interested in questions of moral turbulence; in “The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other” (1985), he concluded that aboriginal peoples lacked a concept of “otherness” and were thus unable to defend themselves against European enemies who could manipulate their perception of reality and confuse their planning and reasoning. Altogether he wrote 39 books, which exerted significant influence in the fields of anthropology, sociology, semiotics, literary theory, thought history and culture theory.
ReplyDeleteIn 1910 the early psychoanalyst Ferenczi Sandor referred to a Hungarian proverb, "the pig dreams of acorns, the goose of maize." As his mentor Sigmund Freud remarked in "The Interpretation of Dreams,", "The whole theory that the dream is the fulfilment of a wish is contained in these sentences." In 1914 Freud added a footnote with a similar Jewish proverb, "What do hens dream of? Of millet." But in the 1950s Michael Jouvet hypothesized that if cats dreamed, then the action of motor signals from their brains would cause them to act their dreams out. He cut up the heads of cats and then hooked up his animals to devices that monitored their brain activity. After entering into the REM state, the cats engaged in predatory of defensive behaviors. Rather than dreams as wish fulfillment, Jouvet theorized that they are for practice, a rehearsal of survival responses. If geese dream, it is probably of foxes rather than maize.
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