Happy Semiquincentennial! Not odd at all that JP makes no honorary post or rustle on this date given the significance of American history to his life and this hunt, not to mention the role of the Declaration of Independence (250th birthday) in his favourite cinematic reference National Treasure?
Maybe we have to wait until August 2nd?
“If you’ve been wise and found the blaze/ Look quickly down, your quest to cease.”
”Wisdom waits in shadowed sight—/
For those who read these words just right.”
Wisdom was the answer in the Fenn hunt: the blaze.
Is wisdom the answer in Posey’s hunt: shadowed sight?
For Posey (and this is the only historical interpretation that matters to this hunt really), Fenn’s “blaze” was a giant tree that had fallen down with time… probably THE greatest regret and frustration JP developed with Fenn and his hunt… the ephemeral nature of nature… flux is the code of the natural world (“chaos”), but it is the bane of an investigator’s life… an engineer’s devotion to solve. He *almost* had it… 200 feet or less, right? If only the blaze had remained standing…
This emotional riddle requires more thought from us all. What is JP’s solution to Fenn’s “blaze”? The checkpoint?
What about the “blaze orange” hunting attire he wears near the end of the documentary as he fiddles with something *just* offscreen? Hunting season… A trail cam? Or are we going to punt on that… https://www.reddit.com/r/JustinPoseysTreasure/s/SKHCvPD7kT
See previous posts on “infrared” for “shadowed sight” theory in relation to PIR sensor tech in trail cams: https://www.reddit.com/r/JustinPoseysTreasure/s/2AHeuejVKR
I found a trailcam at an exact final botg location which I calculated based on all the “knowns” provided by the poem (and a “key” collected botg in stanza 4 with a “topographical implication”). Inside, I found a quality code dated August 2022, proving that the device could not have been placed there before this date. The device did not contain batteries or an SD card when I found it, but when I inserted batteries and turned it on, the digital date on the computer screen read September 16^(th), 2022. *We know these dates fall within the exact timeframe JP has stated that he began “serious planning for this hunt” and also aligns with the final (which is to say successful) period of his negotiations with JS for the Fenn treasure which he took legal possession of only a few days later on September 19^(th) of that year* Given that the internal computer clock will keep measuring time while the device is in sleep mode awaiting animal movement, we can be quite confident that this September 16^(th) date measures the total amount of time this device was used (containing charged batteries)— one month or less usage since the first possible date of purchase. I first found the trail cam in February of 2026 and then returned in April of 2026 to insert batteries and try it out. The camera appeared to be unchanged in the interim. The options for this one-month total usage are as follows:
1. The person immediately installed the device after purchasing it in August of 2022.
1.1. But then, they must have either a) used it for only one month and then immediately abandoned it or b) used it for very short bursts of time over a longer period.
1.1.1. The former scenario would be strange because the empty batteries and lack of SD card suggest the abandonment was intentional. It couldn’t have been an accident as if a hunter died after installing it, leaving it unused for several years while the battery died after a month. And why would they then feel the need to install the soon-to-be abandoned camera with such an elaborate security system: homemade reinforced steel (rebar) bearbox drilled into a giant tree with heavy duty screws and bolts with a bright green (which would attract any thief and also scare off many deer) hardened steel circular combination lock?
1.1.2. But the latter scenario is also strange because, from all that I’ve read about trail cams, they will last for AT LEAST a month of constant usage with four AA batteries (usually longer). So why would a hunter remove the batteries so frequently as only to allow for just over a week of usage each year? At that rate of usage, I am not sure why anyone would use a trail camera which has the function of constant surveillance… the idea is to capture the wildlife activity at a particular site in a passive monitoring style… when the hunter is not present or active on scene. Even if the person who placed the trailcam there had abnormal purposes for it, why would they take the effort to remove the batteries each time they stopped using it if the batteries were not dead and would not be quickly drained by inactivity (ie sleep mode)?
2. Or, the person waited a long period of time to install the device after purchasing it in August of 2022.
2.1. But, if it was placed there years later by someone else, why did they decide to install such an old camera that they had hardly ever used to-date? And why would they then feel the need to install the old (now out-of-date and close to “worthless”) camera with such an elaborate security system: homemade reinforced steel (rebar) bearbox drilled into a giant tree with heavy duty screws and bolts with a bright green (which would attract any thief and also scare off many deer) hardened steel circular combination lock? If there had been an SD card, it might have been possible that a hunter or researcher sought to protect their data more than the old camera, but there was nothing inside. Why would the camera be left empty and locked while unattended on public land? That is, the placement of an empty camera can sometimes be used to scare off intruders… but there are no “intruders” here on this public unleased open hunting land.
2.2. Moreover, they either did not insert batteries at the time of installing (I found the trailcam without batteries inside) or, if they did insert batteries, then they removed them again after only a month of use. None of these options seem like typical behavior for anyone actually trying to use the trail camera as a trail camera which is what you’d expect an average person installing a trail cam to do…
Conclusion: So, either someone installed the thing in that elaborate way and then either never used the thing (maybe tested it at home for a month but then didn’t install batteries on site) or else used it for a month on site and then returned back to remove the batteries along with the SD card, put it back in the box and locked it for whatever reason, and then left it there for years… No matter how you slice it, this is all very weird. And, like I pointed out in a previous post on here about the thematics of “infrared,” there are reasons to think this trailcam (in a “bear” box…) might contain the checkpoint… but I still do not know what the “unintended consequences of [this] checked box” might be…. I haven’t found anything inside. So, am I left with a very startling coincidence (after a series of many others leading me there) that I found a bizarrely unused but elaborately protected “hidden in plain sight” box that just so happens to be created, used, and abandoned all within the same timeframe that JP “got serious” about hiding his treasure and actually bought the Fenn chest of treasures? (By the way, the term “wisdom” from “wisdom waits in shadowed sight” comes from the Proto-Germanic wissaz, which ultimately derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *weid-, meaning "to see"…) I guess “stranger things have happened” in the words of JP himself…
When JP posts about the treasure being “too small to see” for the searcher who climbs a ladder of false humility, does this refer to the invisible infrared wavelength which has a “lower” frequency than visible light? A Passive Infrared (PIR) sensor in a trail camera is very “small”… and it works as a kind of “shadowed sight.” Could the wisdom of the poem be held in some capacity within some element of a trail camera like a Passive Infrared (PIR) sensor? Could this be the "checkpoint"?
Watched a documentary recently about criminal psychological profilers who are usually called into an investigation as a sort of last-ditch restart effort, but who can prove quite useful in those circumstances for drawing out new leads... thought that making attempts in this regard might actually be useful for the hunt so long as we can bracket our speculations as purely provisional and somewhat ungrounded. Not sure I've managed to bridge this hypothetical "profile" to any real leads with the hunt itself but maybe it's a start to thinking in that direction... do others have thoughts about how to bridge that gap or else any caveats/counterarguments to the profile I offer here?
Continuing the discussion started by Civil_Improvement134 in the J Money Profile post, here's my attempt:
He’s an incredibly imaginative guy, but not so much that he can be satisfied by living only in his thoughts… the gap between fantasy and reality kills him.
So he dreams big and also acts big… But, traversing that gap, he sometimes drops the details.
He can beat himself up over these loose ends… sometimes finding ways to forgive himself through self-deprecating humour or preempting any potential mistakes with modest self-aspersions… but, despite this “false-real humility,” he is always striving for ever greater perfection. So, he develops checklists, routines, categories, devices, programs, benchmarks, rubrics, etc.— always conscious of the “unintended consequences of (un)checked boxes”… always trying to predict Nth order outcomes— almost always preferring externalized solutions rather than deep internal self-reflection.
He is uncomfortable with the options self-reflection poses: either endlessly perseverating via self-flagellation or cathartically (but disempoweringly) acknowledging his own human limitations within a universe that teeters delicately between meaningful complexity and chaotic absurdity.
He is self-critical beyond measure… not just by sweating the small stuff (loose ends, dropped details) but, like his overstuffed backpack in “Trailside Troubles,” usually taking outsized responsibility for the big stuff as well (his grandmother’s fading memory, his brother’s faltering mental health, our digital infrastructure’s failing cybersecurity).
He assumes this disproportional responsibility and prefers to take “action” through externalized solutions because those two options posed by self-reflection are too excruciating. He is either continually crushed by the weight of the world or is dissolved along with it (one small part in a grand airy nothing). Atlas, Sisyphus— take your pick.
He craves mercy, he pleads for salvation… someone to engineer another way out of this philosophical double-bind.
He turns to language as a possible solution, inviting the world to “[pick] up a signal… never heard before.” If the circuit of communication can be engineered with certainty, accuracy, and real-world fidelity, then we might have found an actual door leading beyond this house of smoke and mirrors. We might share some ground of meaning and sense-making with one another… and this has two merciful consequences: 1) we might be able to carry some of that weight with him and 2) the weight will be worth us carrying.
He is capable of deep and passionate emotion, but he cannot always cut through the thicket of his own analytical intelligence to get at the heart of what exactly he feels and why. So, he continues the cycle of externalized solutions even though he is intuitive enough on some very powerful but not-fully-conscious level to realize his own patterns (see “Trailside Troubles” and “The Probability Paradox” etc.). As he ages, internalizes loss, and faces possible personal death as well as global devastation, he increasingly takes the immaterial realms of emotion, intuition, and meaning seriously (considering himself “spiritual” beyond orthodoxy or dogmatism).
He seeks to reconcile these immaterial elements with his respect for and understanding of material reality’s ultimate ubiquity and power. But he often hits into the wall of another philosophical dualism… seeing objects as “containers” of history or as “conveyors” of collective meaning/memory… even if (and perhaps *because*) he values the immaterial above the material, he cannot help himself but to subordinate the former to the latter in his mental map and guiding metaphors (see One Clue Short interview: “part of the impetus for collecting is to try and freeze time and to be a part of history at a whole different level than just reading about it… that tangible aspect really strikes a chord...”).
Every aspect of his philosophy is shaped by this dualism— his ontology, epistemology, morality, spirituality. He takes a Newtonian view on time… from the false non-position of the impossible third-person omniscient narrative “perspective”… because of this non-view view, he sees time as singular, directed, and “flowing” (there’s that container again) through a series of now-points. This faith in the fantasy of an “objective” stance dilates his nostalgia (the return to an Edenic childhood), triggers his guilt (if only he had realized something sooner or acted faster or focused on the right things), and secures his hope (the past serves as data for solving current problems and optimizing future outcomes).
A born engineer, he succeeds at and thrives with “optimization”… the goal setting-solving-assessing loop… but his strengths are also his weaknesses… he fears “mess” and suppresses “noise” (unless it can be instrumentalized to achieve some goal as in cryptographic "salt"). He struggles with immanence, non-dual awareness, or perhaps what he frequently calls “presence.” He is very adept at other kinds of presence— hyper-focus/fixation on a task, patient commitment to a pursuit, faithful understanding of loved ones, and detailed attention in analysis (when he is not getting ahead of himself with excitement or sidetracked with juggling his multiple projects… always so curious, always testing, always striving, always achieving, pushing the boundaries of thought and action in too many directions to keep track… what is that he often says about the risks of “idle hands”?)
Like a cat, this tendency towards curious “testing” and detached observation can get him into trouble. He “tests” the emotions and reactions of others with pranks and he might not always intervene to help others struggling with minor debacles if he is curious about studying their behaviors. Throughout the trial-and-error of his life, while guided by a strong sense of justice and a deeply protective instinct, he has increasingly learned the safe and moral limits to this curious “testing” and detached observation. In all cases, he is rooting for the underdog and sharing joy in their successes. And, in this regard, he can sometimes intervene too much when he can't help himself but apply (what he rationalizes to himself is only) a "light" touch to solving someone else's problems.
While he struggles with forgiving himself, he has ample room to forgive others… especially when they take requisite accountability for their actions (and thus graft coherent explanation back onto an unjust and untenable state of confusion). But, despite his best intentions, he sometimes struggles to make amends with others when they increase his emotional and moral burden with accusations of their own… to a hammer, everything looks like a nail… to a devout engineer, every problem requires an optimal solution. So, he embraces his skillset to mollify others... to solve the problems they pose to him— numbers, programs, payments, logic…
Even though he struggles to contend properly with what might appear to be the unreasonable and unpredictable emotions of others, he ironically only exhibits this weakness because he cares so much, takes such responsibility, and fears his own limitations when engaging with the immaterial. His greatest fear is letting down those he respects and loves and feels duty-bound to protect.
He is most moved and grateful when others comprehend how his deeper intentions guide these actions… through this understanding, he finds the “mercy” and “salvation” previously noted (the communication circuit is effectively closed). Although he is aware of these weaknesses expressing his own and engaging with others’ emotions— and increasingly seeks to open himself up to the world as a result— he will only ever fully do so with these intuitive people (inclusive of canine species 😉) and he will prove himself loyal to them even at the point of self-sacrifice. Just consider the fortified walls of a man who will not name the subject of such a heart-felt “dedication” (I mean, it’s in the section title!)… who will not really portray the full lifelike personality of his brother in the anxious, claustrophobic, protective detail of his prose.
So he builds labyrinths to trap the white bulls we all, as humans, must face… those intuitive souls who can navigate their way through the labyrinth of understanding may also be the ones to tame the bull by way of the mercy and salvation he seeks to learn for himself.
He might lose faith in or patience with those who fail to find their way through these labyrinths. To those who are confused by or unaware of their failure, his reaction might look like disloyalty, emotional coldness, sudden distancing, distractedness, stubbornness, black-and-white reaction/judgement. But he is actually giving the only possible answer to the unformulated question… “if you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand anyway.”
He gives a wealth of effort, patience, guidance to those who take the leap of faith on his waxen wings… simply *trying* to intuit in the right ways and for the right reasons already supplies the blueprint (map?) to find the labyrinth’s center.
JP's last three X posts are rather cryptic, but my gut tells me they aren't related to the hunt... I think it's a complex tech environment for his business right now... with all these Claude developments at Anthropic, he's probably seeing maximum optionality and potentiality at the same time that he's seeing maximum unpredictability and instability... that makes intentional growth hard even when there's a need/demand for the service/product.... Does anyone have another take? Do others feel these posts are hunt related? As follows:
"The trouble with exponential change is that "too early" and "too late" are the same afternoon." (June 3rd)
"More intelligence can't turn a stranger into an old friend over a weekend -- which is the one mercy left in a world being rebuilt at the speed of compute. [Along with Anthropic repost]"(June 4th)
"An idea asks nothing of you. Seeing it through asks everything. I've learned to honor the latter." (June 7th)
I am trying to understand how JP would have likely interpreted the following question he was asked at Seeker's Summit: "Is shadowed sight, from the perspective of the searcher, a location or a concept?" His answer was as follows: "I'm going to have to look at that one. 'Is shadowed sight, from the perspective of the searcher, a location or concept?' Both." (Direct quotations taken from JIBLE 6.0 with thanks.)
"Location" versus "concept"-- both of these terms, but especially the latter, are quite abstract and nebulous... in some ways "concept" can refer to some dimension of almost anything, right? I mean, "shadowed sight" is comprised of words... and words by definition certainly refer to some "concept"...
I will try to think of some examples to help narrow down what distinction could be at play here...
"Britain" is a location and a concept because I can physically be there, but for that island land mass to be "Britain" requires a whole symbolic infrastructure of flags and language and stories and stereotypes and laws etc. But the "both" nature of Britain as location and concept is sort of overlapping... do you know what I mean? We almost don't realize there is a distinction between "location" and "concept" here with regards to "Britain." Likewise, a national park is both a location and a concept...
As a different example, think of the term "work" which can be a noun place (ie the location of "work") or can be a noun object-task (ie the "work" to be done) or can be the verb of conducting labour (ie the concept of doing "work"), etc. etc. Even though there is a strong relationship between these various uses of the term "work," they do not overlap so fully and unnoticeably as the former example. The concept of "work" can always be done away from the location of "work" and things other than "work" can always be done at "work." Despite the best (and most oppressive) efforts of the British, the concept of "Britain" doesn't quite pull away as easily from the location of "Britain."
Then we might have a situation where a location itself refers to a concept but has nothing really to do with that concept. Imagine, for example, a bar named "Valhalla." A clue in the poem that references "hall of the slain" might direct us to this bar (where hopefully no-one is actually "slain") only by way of the concept derived from our knowledge of Norse mythology that we are then able to connect name-to-name to get to the location.
Then there's the possibility of full-out word play where "concept" and "location" do not share any true correspondence but can be equally invoked by a shared sign. For example, "park" refers to a location (green public space) or a concept (a car at rest). So, a clue to "park" may serve BOTH to direct us to the location of the "park" and then also direct us to the concept of the activity "to park" which might instruct us what to do once we get to the location of the park.
Then I am not even sure if "a car at rest" really is a "concept" which seems to imply a greater degree of abstraction (such as the category "car" or the general state of being "at rest").
How do we think JP interpreted this question? I'm trying to think of the question in relation to the line "Wisdom waits in shadowed sight"... I'm not asking what "shadowed sight" actually means... but I am trying to figure out how this question and his answer of "both" can help us begin to approach the phrase "shadowed sight"... in other words, was anything really clarified/ distinguished/ communicated/ delimited by asking this question and receiving JP's response?
If you're seeking the answers without pursuing the questions, then you can "make like a tree and leave"... With that little hokey warning label, follow me for a briefer-than-usual stroll through some yet unresolved thoughts...
In a comment he made responding to a post by blackprogrammer on reddit four months ago, JP wrote the following:
"Treasure hunting is uncomfortable by design. The ambiguity that frustrates you is the same thing that kept you engaged for a year. That's not a trick -- it's the craft. Every hunt worth solving will make you question whether you're on the right path. That tension is the experience. I understand that's not satisfying to hear when you're deep in it and exhausted. But I didn't build something unclear. I built something hard."
I have always found this framing of himself as "builder" so interesting... He didn't state that he "wrote" something or even "crafted" something or "constructed" something or "designed" something clear... all of these are common terms for writers, poets, and authors to use in reference to their work... but I don't know of anyone who works with text (literary or otherwise) who speaks of "building." The closest thing I can think about here would be when Virginia Woolf described the structure of her novel To the Lighthouse. She claimed to have had a vision of “two blocks joined by a corridor” which she ended up developing into the three parts of her book: the main parts are featured at the beginning and the end, called “The Window” and “The Lighthouse” respectively (a delightfully coincidental alignment with JP's love of Myst). These were connected by the middle part called “Time Passes” which is distinctive in tone, style, structure, etc. in the ways you might anticipate for a "time passes" corridor. But even with this architectural blueprint for her novel, I am not aware of Woolf ever describing herself in "builder" terms. Then there is the exceptional Robinson Jeffers who literally built Tor House out of stone with his bare hands... but, while this project and devotion makes its way into the contents of his poetry, I don't know that he ever described his writing in terms of "building" (please correct me if I'm wrong).
I wonder if this anomalous phrasing gives us any insight into JP's authorial identity and perhaps his poetic sensibility and structural vision. Yes, we know he is an engineer... that's the "builder" aspect. But what does it mean to think about an engineer-poet (not just a poet with a more lucrative day job as an engineer, or an engineer who dabbles in poetry)? Here's an interesting book about "ergodic literature" which might help us think about "Beyond the Map's Edge" as a language-landscape machine that works as a "hypertext" (built with the aporia-epiphany structure of a labyrinth)-- EJ Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
[Interestingly, engineers who work on machine learning are turning away from the "builder" identity/mindset and towards "cultivation" or "growth" language (even the "learning" of machine learning suggests this move).]
Does this "builder" metaphor tell us anything about our role as "readers" (e.g. see above about how "ergodic literature" requires different approaches for engagement)? Or does it give us any hints about the degree of linguistic and structural complexity (I'm not sure anyone could say Fenn's connect-the-dots poem design is "built")? Or does it reassure us about the level of his control/oversight/etc. on the "built" system as a whole? Does it tell us something about the interrelation or correlation between the poem itself and the hunt design as a whole (as in, technical clue + cypher + checkpoint + memoir + website and all the other features are more structurally and/or thematically enmeshed then would otherwise be obvious)? If so, what would that actually entail and how would it guide our processes and expectations? I'm thinking here especially about the way that JP frames his "builder" identity in terms of the questions of poetic "ambiguity" and linguistic "clarity" here... In one sense, we know he uses these paratextual and extratextual elements to provide context (memoir) and confirmation (checkpoint), so what about the role of some of these other features... the nature of the "technical clue" and "cipher" are underexplored in my view.... and how do they integrate with the so-called "trinkets" which are found botg? ...The botg absolute requirement which emerges in stanza 4 suggests there is a more closely knitted relationship between world and text than we've managed to understand conclusively. Other than these "trinkets" (for lack of a better term) and these other paratexts, does he use natural/environmental, or built structural, etc. features to settle any of the ambiguities and imprecisions expected of language in general? If so, what is the actual relationship between such features of world and text... how are these "built" into one another?
I feel I am being unclear-- I am not asking whether the poem refers to any natural landscapes (of course it does, we are looking for clues after all!)! I am asking whether the structural and textual (or textural) dimensions of those landscape features are in-built with specific communicative capacities... The communicative potential of "London Hyde Park" (which is a huge area but in a pretty specific location of the world) is very different than "Speakers' Corner" (which is either a much more specific spot within Hyde Park or is an ambiguous reference to a type of location distributed in many parts of the world). The latter would only serve to specify location (i.e. reduce ambiguity or vagueness) if the former had already been determined/communicated. There are many other ways I won't get into that a landscape feature can be ambiguous, vague, or otherwise uncertain/imprecise until it is "built" into the other features (linguistic, cartographic, geologic, etc.) of the poem. But the important things are 1) that we are sensitive to how different communicative capacities might be built-in to environmental (as well as poetic) features and 2) that we realize how building these features into one another can further clarify communications. Ultimately, we must be open to the various possibilities in play but also attentive to how any one of those possibilities will necessitate (circumscribe, direct, etc.) others... the purview of the "builder" to design with functionality and clarity.
These are some of the questions that his anomalous phrasing has brought to my mind ever since I read his comment response to blackprogrammer... I have come up with some potential answers of my own (I gesture to some of them in my previous post on "structural complexity" as a way of both employing and eventually solving linguistic ambiguity), but I thought I would share the questions and the references with others here in case it proves useful to your work. One other tidbit I will offer here which I have learned by way of asking and then reflecting on such questions: what KINDS of natural or environmental or built-structural features can be employed by the poem to resolve this problem of linguistic "ambiguity"... and how can a poem do this? The suggestion I will offer is this: references to large locations or widely distributed geographic features will not by themselves yield a "kitchen sized" or "targeted" area. On the other hand, only referencing very specific pinpointed spots will be difficult for the searcher to find/verify. We need to be sensitive to how different kinds of cartographic/geographic/structural features (or, we might add a bit more abstractly, **instructional** or **directional** ones) offer different kinds of resources to the poet-builder/searcher... And we might suspect that those different capacities/affordances will be more or less valuable at different moments in the interpretive process and at different stages of the poem itself. These are the kinds of problems a "builder" would seek to resolve and so should also be the kinds of questions we should all be asking.
[Some ways of describing the "structure" of different landscape features: distributed, recurring, narrow, deep, isolated, dense, stretched, broad, targeted, prominent, meandering, shifting, recent, exposed, microscopic, remaining only as a trace, rare, known only by historical records, covered or buried, embedded, lost, eroding, developing, protruding, etc. etc. etc. Endlessly. As an exercise, just think what the strengths and weaknesses of any specific "structure" might be for directing someone to a "kitchen sized" area. Keep in mind your dual goals: ambiguous obfuscation which can nevertheless yield eventual clarity.]
INTP here to reflect as best I can on the role of "feelings" (embodied, emotional, etc.) in reading poetry and how to use our own responses to rhetorical signposts like punctuation, alliteration, line breaks, etc. to guide the interpretive process. This approach involves what has been called "affect-as-information." Fears about “confirmation bias” or impulsive decisions often motivate people to disavow the role of affect in logical reasoning. It is certainly true that feelings can be powerful enough to lead us down some pretty “tangled, twisted” paths. But they maintain an important role in many cognitive processes and are particularly relevant to literary interpretation (or human communication more generally). Storbeck and Clore explain succinctly:
“The affect-as-information framework posits that affect is embodied information about value and importance. The valence dimension of affect provides evaluative information about stimulus objects, which plays a role in judgment and decision-making. Affect can also provide evaluative information about one's own cognitions and response inclinations, information that guides thinking and reasoning. In particular, positive affect often promotes, and negative affect inhibits, accessible responses or dominant modes of thinking.” [See original source]
When it comes to our treasure hunting goals with literary interpretation, we may consider that relying on “affect” to help us decode clues may risk confirmation bias. But, using it to help us identify clues may be useful. While the former relates to meaning, the latter relates to significance. That is, our own affective responses to the text may not tell us much about the nature of Posey’s intentions but it will tell us a lot about the nature of our own attention. If we keep these things distinct in our minds and efforts, we may see how the affect-as-information approach can be very beneficial… not only to find the clues we need to unlock, but also— in a self-conscious, metacognitive way— to catch ourselves in the act of confirmation bias and impulsive decisions. By realizing the signs of our own desperation, tiredness, confusion, fear, aggression, humiliation, etc., we can extrapolate or anticipate how such feelings might direct our behavior. We can then overlay these signs and those causal relations onto our interpretive process and conclusions to ask things like: would someone else with different feelings and in another context be able to take the same interpretive steps that I have? Did my emotions prompt me to put the cart before the horse with this inference? Am I really considering alternative answers or is fear/fatigue/etc. preventing me from seeing the bigger picture?
Beyond this self-monitoring application of the affect-as-information approach (and the communicative/interpretive one I will outline shortly), we can also use this framework to help us select tasks more efficiently. Much of the literature I have encountered in this field observes how our moods and emotions shape and direct our cognitive processes and response inclinations— negative affects (fatigue, shame, apathy, fear, etc.) tend to promote more detail-oriented, critical, or black-and-white thinking while positive affects (joy, curiosity, calm, pleasure, etc.) tend to promote more holistic, creative, or flexible thinking. We need not be dismissive or judgmental here— both modes offer important capacities and trajectories. There are good evolutionary reasons for both mind-frames (you don’t necessarily want to expend the time or energy getting artistic or philosophical when you simply need to run away from a predator). But, knowing all this about our operating system, we might check in with our bodies before selecting our tasks. For example, feeling grouchy? This might be a good time for running over deductive validity, reviewing calculations, double-checking map measurements, grilling ourselves on the quality of our solves… things that require attention to fine details, unforgiving judgement, restraining alternatives. But, maybe feeling buoyant? Could be time for creative tasks like lateral research, interpreting clues, rethinking dead-ends, diving into rabbit holes, imagining connections between parts and wholes (see my previous post on “poetic structure”).
Now to the literary interpretation stuff— I will begin with a body-informed close reading of Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” and then I will sketch some relevant observations of “Beyond the Map’s Edge” for others to carry this methodology onward more fully. But, before I get into a demonstration, I should emphasize that I am not an authority on psychology. I welcome (demand!) correction from anyone who can help me and others learn more. The main idea here will not be to rely on any clinical explanation or formal diagnosis, but rather to reconnect with our own “feelings” enough to identify them in the first place… From there, we will attempt to track SIMPLE causal patterns between what is happening in the text and what is happening in our bodies (without an in-depth explanation at the psychological/biological/anatomical levels). We will use these patterns between text and body to note matters of importance and to direct our attention… these “feelings” will not necessarily be the keys that open the lock of each “clue” but they may be useful for finding those locks in the first place. The question we seek to answer here, then, is: what are the clues? I won’t even go so far as to end with a conclusive or exhaustive list of those clues. Rather, I offer a method for others to use themselves and I model a demonstration of how to go about achieving these ends.
Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”
This is one of the first poems I assign my first-year students because many of them express confusion, anxiety, intimidation, and lots of other negative feelings about poetry. I know it is generally a matter of unfamiliarity, so I want a poem that will be gentle and demystifying… one that will prove how surprisingly easy poetry can be.
I ask: how does this poem make you feel? They will usually jump right into analysis, noting the natural imagery, the lack of rhyme scheme. Some will even notice repetition or other poetic devices. I will say: wow, you know more than you seem to think! But these are all things you’ve noticed with your minds… you haven’t actually told me how you feel. The response is interesting— surprise, a little confused and anxious about the slight misstep… a few moments pass and then someone will usually raise their hand a bit shyly. Something like: “I feel calm?” (or relaxed or relieved or whatnot). “Okay,” I’ll say, “that’s great. Let’s read it out loud together to feel more.” So I begin reading the poem out loud, emphasizing through my voice how the poem achieves this sensation… I haven’t recorded myself here so instead I’ll just jump straight into the elements I highlight:
Repetition (“over and over,” “meanwhile” x3, “you do not” etc.) has a meditative effect which mimics many sounds in the natural environment… waves, wind, bird-song, etc.
Monosyllabic words (“you do not have to be good”) make the poem more accessible, simplified, humble. Our minds and egos can relax… we are reconnecting with feeling, and everyone is welcome.
Then even breaking down the more denotative meaning of her words: “you do not have to,” “you only”— these phrases trigger the mind to let go and expect less precisely because we are “not” being called on to think or do anything in particular (a nice break for my students who have some anxiety about interpreting poetry, not knowing what they are meant to “do”).
Imagery is concrete (“prairies and the deep trees,/ the mountains and the rivers”) so easily graspable… we do not have to do mental labour to disentangle contradictions, settle indeterminacies, or vitalize vagueness. Like the diction, the imagery is also accessible—common features of nature that would be familiar to most people around the world or at least within North America. Moreover, it is well-known that natural imagery has a calming and grounding effect in and of itself (maybe even at a hardwired biological level given the significance of nature scenes to our evolutionary history).
Assonance (clustering words like “while,” “wild,” “high”) which might create an effect similar to the repetition of “ohm” in meditation (vowel sounds tend to open and relax the body).
Conversely, there’s no rhyme or alliteration which would have created more of a musical quality. Given the repetition and assonance, this exclusion might be surprising if calmness is the desired effect. But these additional sound techniques might lull the reader in a way that distracts them from the actual words themselves. Think, for example, how many audiences will love a song without really understanding the lyrics. By avoiding these conventional sound techniques of alliteration and rhyme (seemingly intentionally, given their ubiquity in poetry) she might draw her reader’s attention in with more focus to create a sense of full presence rather than hypnotized lulling.
Neither symbolism nor metaphor (or very little) which are devices for abstraction or the separation of mind/body and spirit/matter… precisely the kind of instrument for intellectual divisions and moral judgements that Oliver frees us from here.
Punctuation and pronoun usage also work to collapse the kind of abstractions which frequently appear in poetry. Notice how she punctuates the center of this line with “yours”: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” Oliver converts the generalized role of “reader” with “your” specificity and presence…. You are really in this poem… she is really taking to you (“Whoever you are”)… she literally moves aside the material of the poem to find you a “place/ in the family of things.” (Like Moses, parting the poetic line with the commas to inset “your”.) But isn’t this the only way to talk about despair… it is always particular, embodied, felt, “mine,” isn’t it? At least, this is the only way to realize, confront, communicate, and process “despair”… Likewise, the dialogic first and second person voice in the poem sets up an intimate scene between reader and speaker… we are not alone.
Pauses in the form of syntactically unnecessary comma breaks (“high in the clean blue air” and “no matter how lonely” interrupt the rest of the sentence rather than being tacked on the end which breaks up thought processes and controls breathing). These pauses are also augmented by the caesuras and enjambment which impose extra rests or waypoints in the syntactic line of the sentence through poetic line breaks.
The last sentence might be a periodic sentence which delays the main clause “announcing your place in the family of things” until the end so that full closure punctuates the end of the poem and so that reader attention is held for a longer duration. The syntax thus forces the reader to wait patiently and also embodies the very relational dependencies (one clause gains its meaning from another) of the natural order that Oliver centers for us… this relational dependency makes us feel less spiritually isolated, less personally responsible, and less centrally targeted. The sentence literally performs the theme of the poem: we are just one important part of a much larger web of meaning.
In these ways and more, Oliver moves the reader into a meditative state of presence and non-dual awareness by triggering associations in the mind (nature, family, etc.) and controlling the body’s tempo (breathing, eye movements, etc.). Rather than prompting an anxious reading strategy by priming audiences to decode a “message,” Oliver relaxes us into a non-judgmental relation with ourselves and others… It does not make much sense to ask what is the “point” or “meaning” of a meditation. Instead, the poem literally moves us… our bodies, our hearts, and our minds. Beyond these effects, we are relieved of “decoding” anything. But the bigger takeaway I try to give my students through this demonstration is about the capacities of poetic language. Some truths (even if they are brought about by “language”) are not reducible to language (I don’t just mean denotative but also speaking beyond symbolic abstractions like metaphor). Some “truths” can only be experienced, embodied, felt. And, together, we seek to answer the question: How does this poem achieve that? These are some of the ways Oliver can produce an effect on readers, an effect which happens to align with the literal meaning of some of her words… the poem has a sort of “message” in that sense but to paraphrase it would be precisely to miss or destroy that message which is not to capture but to let go. The only way to “get” this poem is to feel it, to open yourself to being “moved” by it.
Now, obviously Posey’s poem is very different in its “messages” and “effects” (and “affects”) haha! But we can still get in touch with our feelings upon reading the poem to direct our attention to different elements in play. We can stop to consider when the poem might feel jarring (how about that spondee at the beginning of “double arcs” line? which btw is the mandatory botg stanza… a coincidence?) or when the poem feels more pensive versus more driving (perhaps revealing a shift in iambic to trochaic metrical patterns), etc. The way the poem activates our bodies and emotions in these ways may tell us something about where Posey has placed emphasis (does this signal a clue?) or may even tell us something about how Posey wants us to begin to consider taking action on a clue (eg, activating versus reflecting). I won’t go into detail now about how the poem triggers my feelings, but I do include an inexhaustive list of different literary devices and poetic techniques in the poem below for those of you less familiar with these things. You can search the terms online to learn more about what they mean, what they look like, how they are normally used by poets, what effects they often achieve, and thus how they might be shaping your own experience of the poem and/or how they might be signaling Posey’s intent. Btw, have you noticed how Posey reads in a strangely monotone and staccato voice whenever asked to recite the poem? He always seems to be a bit nervous about doing so in public… could this be because of what I am describing here where he fears that a performance will reveal these kinds of embodied and emotional cues/emphases with greater certainty or singularity? Perhaps we might all try reading the poem aloud ourselves in different ways to feel/hear how the lines/words might resonate with different significance and/or meaning.
Beyond the Map's Edge
Can you find what lives in time,
Flowing through each measured rhyme?
Wisdom waits in shadowed sight—
For those who read these words just right.
As hope surges, clear and bright,
Walk near waters’ silent flight.
Round the bend, past the Hole,
I wait for you to cast your pole.
In ursa east his realm awaits;
His bride stands guard at ancient gates.
Her foot of three at twenty degree,
Return her face to find the place.
Double arcs on granite bold,
Where secrets of the past still hold.
Beyond the reach of time’s swift race,
Wonder guards this sacred space.
Truth rests not in clever minds,
Not in tangled, twisted finds.
Like a river’s steady flow—
What you seek, you already know.
Key
Prepositions— Examples: bolded above.
Sentence types— Examples: first line is only interrogative and imperative is italicized above (also including partial sentences such as single clauses) while all others in the poem are declarative.
Pronouns— Examples: personal (“you,” “I,” “your,” “his,” “her”); relative (“who”); demonstrative (“those,” “these,” “this”).
Voice— Examples: first, second, and third person.
Simile— Examples: “Like a river’s steady flow”
Metaphor— Examples: UNKNOWN UNTIL UNLOCKED.
Allusion— Examples: UNKNOWN UNTIL UNLOCKED.
Alliteration— Examples: “Wisdom waits” and “shadowed sight” in line 3 of stanza 1; “read” and “right” in line 4 of stanza 1
Assonance— Examples: “find” and “time” in line 1 of stanza 1; “walk” and “waters’” in line 2 of stanza 2; “silent” and “flight” in line 2 of stanza 2; “sacred space” in line 4 of stanza 4; etc.
Metrical pattern— mostly iambic tetrameter (da-DUM) but mixing in trochaic tetrameter (DA-dum) with “FLOWing THROUGH,” “WISdom WAITS,” and “TRUTH rests NOT,” etc. “Double arcs” feels like either a spondee (“double” as two equally stressed feet) or even a molossus (“double arcs” as three equally stressed feet).
Regular rhyme scheme— AABB (broken in lines 3 and 4 of stanza 3).
Internal rhyme— Also sometimes called “jangling rhyme” or Leonine verse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonine_verse. Examples: “three” and “degree” in line 3 of stanza 3; “face” and “place” in line 4 of stanza 3.
Scattered rhyme— Examples: “you” and “through” and “who” in lines 1 and 2 and 4 of stanza 1; “clear” and “near” in lines 1 and 2 of stanza 2; “past” and “cast” in lines 3 and 4 of stanza 2; “face” and “place” of line 4 in stanza 3 with “race” and “space” of lines 3 and 4 in stanza 4.
Caesura— Examples: only with commas in lines 1 and 3 of stanza 2 as well as lines 2 and 4 of stanza 5.
Enjambment— Examples: each line consistently ends with a punctuation break so there is no true enjambment. However, it is worth noting that sentences regularly span two lines so that sentence completion (marked by either a question mark or a full-stop) occurs on every other line of the poem which, in combination with the dominant rhyme scheme, creates paired couplets.
Chiasmus— Examples: lines 1 and 2 in stanza 1 versus lines 3 and 4 in stanza 5… “Can you find what lives in time,/ Flowing through each measured rhyme?” versus “Like a river’s steady flow—/ What you seek, you already know.” By the way, did you know the term "Chiasmus" relates to the Greek symbol chi which looks like an X (talk about cool recurring themes or what?!)?
Imagery— Examples: fishing (river, casting pole, bend and hole, water, flowing, etc.); geology/topology/ecology (granite, face, shadows, bend, Hole, ancient, foot, place, space, steady, measured).
Repetition— Examples: “waits” (s1.l3), “wait” (s2.l4), “awaits” (s3.l1); “find” (s1.l1), “find” (s3.l4), “finds” (s5.l2); “past” (s2.l3), “past” (s4.l2); “you” (s1.l1), “you” (s2.l4), “you” (s5.l4), “you” (s5.l4)’;“guard” (s3.l2), “guards” (s4.l4); “not” (s5.l1), “not” (s5.l2).
Motif— Examples: theme of epistemology emerges from pervasive words such as “seek,” “find,” “truth,” “wisdom,” “know,” “clever,” “minds,” “right,” “read,” “measured,” “secrets,” “wonder,” “clear,” “bright,” “sight”; theme of movement emerges from pervasive words such as “flow,” “tangled, twisted,” “find,” “rests,” “seek,” “already,” “return,” “time,” “waits,” “surges,” “cast,” “walk,” “still,” “swift race,” “stands.”
Has anyone ever considered that "what lives in time" might be the single electron bouncing around through space-time to map out the material existence of the treasure as well as ourselves and everything else in the universe ("what you seek you already know")? The one-electron universe thought experiment...
Sorry for wasting (or constructing) your time with this nonsense but it was fun for Wheeler-Feynman to joke, and I thought I'd go for the second round of laughs.
The truth is that I want to write another "literary studies" post soon (following on the structuralist approach I outlined recently), this time about the role of "feelings" (bodily, emotional, etc.) in reading poetry and how to use our own responses to rhetorical signposts like punctuation, alliteration, etc. to guide the interpretive process. The approach involves what has been called "affect-as-information" instead of treating feelings as antithetical to or separate from "logical reasoning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_as_information_hypothesis
Would this topic be interesting/useful for anyone else to explore in relation to BtME? Or maybe we can just have a general chat here about it-- does anyone else track their own bodily or emotional responses while reading and take care to consider what these reactions might be conveying about the meaning/function of the text?
I want to map a constellation of concepts here— “complexity,” “ambiguity,” “vagueness,” “regularity,” “redundancy,” “depth,” “complicatedness,” and “convolutedness”— as they relate to poetics (form/structure) and hermeneutics (interpretation).
I hope that exploring this semiotic cosmos might shed some light on a recurring debate I’ve seen: how “simple” is the poem? My aim is not to settle this debate, but to sharpen some of its central features so that we can better understand what is actually at stake and at odds in the first place. In particular, I want to consider these matters in terms of the goals and constraints of the creator himself: the necessity of constructing 1) a set of somewhat (or temporarily) difficult but ultimately resolvable obfuscations; 2) a specific, accurate, and precise final meaning which can be deduced or extracted by a non-expert audience; and 3) an outcome that inspires reader confidence in the certainty and non-ambiguity of that final meaning. We know that some of these factors contributed to design features in the hunt as a whole (e.g. the “checkpoint” and potentially other “trinkets” for lack of a better term). But we might also assume and hope these factors have shaped the construction of the poem itself.
Justin has made a few comments on this subject…
1) When asked, “Is an advanced degree or deep technical knowledge needed to solve this poem?” he answered, “I've done my best to design this in a way that is accessible by anybody. You don't need any advanced degrees. Any reasonable person that spends a bit of time researching online and getting a baseline understanding of me is on equal footing” (JIBLE 5.0).
2) When asked “Which part of your personality influenced the poem the most? The part of you who is an engineer or the part of you who is an enthusiastic explorer?” he answered, “I'd say the part of me that embraces childlike wonder the most” (X Marks the Pod YouTube transcript).
3) When asked, “Do you think [people] are looking too deep? Is it simpler than people might think?” he answered, “That's the tricky part with any obfuscated text - how far is too far? It's sort of like hiking - what's around the next bend? How far is too far to go? I think the line is different for everybody. I'm hesitant to say people are taking it to too much of an extreme. I don't think that's the case, but it's probably safe to say that people in certain areas are diving in much deeper than they need to. But it's all a matter of perspective” (JIBLE 5.0).
Some folks have interpreted statements like those above to mean that the poem is “simple.” But I think we need to spend a bit more time figuring out what “simple” means before we decide whether to expect this of “Beyond the Map’s Edge.” Many things in our world are simple to operate but very complex in design— I can drive a car quite easily, but I have no idea how to engineer a car. Conversely, some things can be very simple in theory but extremely challenging to exercise or perform— meditation is simplicity by definition (to empty or focus one’s mind) but requires committed practice (sometimes a lifelong dedication). I could give you the instructions “turn right at the next stoplight” or I could tell you to “turn left at the next stoplight and then again at each of the following three intersections and then turn right at that stoplight when you meet it again.” The latter is a FAR more complicated structure (unnecessarily so!) and only slightly more difficult to compute and execute. The final outcome is the same even if the experience/process is quite different. But the redundancy of the steps itself appears to increase structural/procedural complexity while failing to reduce ambiguity and, in fact, actually increasing the likelihood of confusion or incomprehension. These various examples reveal how “simplicity” and “complexity” can come in different forms as well as how “ambiguity” and “difficulty” are not synonymous terms. Additionally, there is no necessary universal relationship between, say, “complexity” and “ambiguity” or “simplicity” and “difficulty” etc. but rather the link depends on what we actually mean by these terms in any particular given case (though, if possible, I would like to see whether any definite connections can be made between certain types of complexity— e.g. internal, structural, etc.— and particular forms of ambiguity— e.g. productive, resolvable, etc.).
So, is the poem “simple”? I have always found it interesting that realist painting requires so much technical knowledge and expert skill, but the interpretive range of such artwork is usually much more limited than cubist abstractions which can often yield infinite meanings from extremely simple and constrained sets of elements. Or think about how simple logographic languages are at the word unit (a single symbol) but how complex they are at a system level (tens of thousands of symbols to remember and use). Conversely, each word in an alphabetic language requires multiple symbols (letters) which are each fairly arbitrary (abstracted beyond pictorial imitation) and are often weirdly ordered (especially chimeras like English with hybrid etymologies) and require additional ordering rules (syntax) and symbols (punctuation) for sense-making at the sentence level. This is complicated! But also, this combinatorial system makes for relative simplicity and regularity in other ways. The game of chess offers another example where strategy and gameplay are famously complex and infinite, but the rules, board, and pieces are fairly stripped down.
Let’s imagine the poem is “simple,” then. What could this mean? 1) Perhaps no technical skill is required (advanced cryptography, complex geometry, etc.). 2) Maybe no expert knowledge is needed (niche history, insider/local-only geography, etc.). 3) It could be the poetic structure isn’t elaborate or manifold (a point-by-point or “connect the dots” clue order, a one-to-one signifier-to-signified of clue interpretation/exchange). 4) Or it might mean that poetic techniques are limited and/or obvious (e.g. only allusion, no metaphor or relevant alliteration, etc.). How does Justin’s emphasis on “childlike wonder” inflect this question about the nature of the poem’s “simplicity”? Children are not yet technical experts or warehouses of “facts.” They are not laden with hard skills, rigorous methods, or formal theories. Though they often do take extreme pleasure in rattling off lists of facts they have acquired, endlessly ask “why?” or “what if?”, betray no bias or limits to the subjects of their curiosity, reveal very little embarrassment about socially “inappropriate” questions, and compete passionately with other knowledge keepers (“did you know?” “I told you so!”). In this way, they enliven a sense of wonder and playfulness in the process of research itself. An attitude/orientation of “childlike wonder” thus likely relieves us of numbers 1 and 2 above, but it also leaves 3 and 4 open… we might even begin to see how the imaginative breadth and flexibility that children often possess should prepare us for a certain degree of depth and complexity when it comes to these matters of poetic structure and technique. We are talking about world-building… but this process which transforms a kitchen floor into a lava field also requires the construction of rules, regularities, certain rigidities through the process of play itself. In poetry, the self-structuring play of repetitions and differences becomes the emergent property of “structure.” This internal complexity (where we need not outsource complexity via “rabbit holes”) can also be called aesthetic “depth” where the poem takes on a certain multi-dimensionality. We are talking about a shared enterprise between writer and reader or text and interpretation where we all contribute to the shading and relief by way of a counterfactual logic…. As they say in Sesame Street, “I wonder… What if? Let’s try!”
ee cummings is the master of conditional statements. In “If” he writes, “If freckles were lovely, and day was night,/ And measles were nice and a lie warn’t a lie,/ Life would be delight,—/ But things couldn’t go right/ For in such a sad plight/ I wouldn’t be I.” As it turns out, I adore freckles more than any other human bodily feature… For the sake of our exercise, I will put it this way: freckles mark particularity and thus reduce ambiguity by increasing complexity (I know without a doubt whose freckles to kiss, those kissable freckles I know so well)… this is one of the ways I believe JP yields final interpretive certainty and specificity through his poem.
[If you’re bored already and don’t want a lengthy example of how ambiguity can be both constructed by and resolvable through the internal complexity of poetic structure, then jump to the TLDR summary at the end of this post…] Let’s consider another ee cummings poem as an example (see image of “I’d think ‘wonder” above). What is this poem about? I ask my students to enter the poem (and any poem) like a surprise, without a preformulated expectation, so that we can learn what and how it means on its own terms. I ask them to list things they notice and then to organize those things under categories that emerge from the data itself:
[Confusing punctuation (no full stops until the very end, inconsistent comma placement, open brackets and quotation marks), irregular capitalization (lower case “i” but capitalized “And” mid-sentence), repetition (“if”), no rhyme scheme, varying stanza lengths and line spacing, concrete imagery (“bats and mice,” “houses,” “little wings,” “jam,” “dark stairs,” “hands”), vague or contradictory imagery (“thing,” “therehere”), first and second person voice, mostly simple monosyllabic terms, etc.]
On the face of it, the poem might seem utter nonsense! Certainly quite ambiguous… What could it mean? But once we start bringing these elements above together with attention to how they are structured within the poem, we begin to understand some things. Firstly, the speaker seems likely to be a child. Note the mixture of concrete and vague or contradictory imagery— simple domestic or everyday objects which would be familiar to children are vivid and repeated whereas highly abstract or relational concepts are conveyed gesturally. The fragmented appearance of stanzas and lines replicates the frenzied thought process of a confused or frightened child while the inconsistent punctuation and capitalization reveal a mind not yet regulated by the formalities of writing.
Likewise, from the first- and second-person voice, we can understand the poem to be dramatizing a scene between two people from the perspective of this child. Who is the “you” of this poem then? We don’t meet them until the final three stanzas— "i say 'wont you' (remembering)/ knowing that you/ are afraid 'go first' of dreams and little// bats & mice(and// you,/you say 'let's' going in/ 'take/ hands' smiling 'coming up/ these dark stairs." The “i” asks “you” questions like “wont you” whereas the “you” utters imperatives such as “let’s” which suggests they are relatively commanding. Likewise, we can remember how the function of quotation marks are to distinguish sources of speech (e.g. diegetic versus extradiegetic, narrator versus character, etc.). Since most of the complex and multi-syllabic terms are contained within quotation marks (e.g. “twilight”), we can deduce that the “you” interlocutor in this poem is an adult.
Now that we know the lay of the land, we can begin to make some sense of the fragmentation and impose some regularity on the seemingly chaotic punctuation. Note how reading the poem cyclically returns much of the poem’s grammatical sense… the open bracket following “twilight’)” in the second stanza actually completes (and thus “closes”) the bracket left open at the end of the poem with “bats & mice(and”. On the other hand, we might also consider the singular full-stop that punctuates the end of the poem conclusively with “these dark stairs.” This full stop resists the circular reading and cuts the poem off with a more traditional linear reading from top to bottom. Finally, though, the open quotation mark at the end of the poem (“'coming up/ these dark stairs.”) creates tension with both of these alternate poetic structures… no closure is achieved by circling back to the beginning or by completing at the linear end… the structure here is a radical openness or infinitude where ontological distinctions (such as the diegetic versus extradiegetic levels) and the boundaries constructive of identity (e.g. narrator versus character, self versus other) collapse. We begin to discern a superposition of structural states— circular, linear, or open-ended— where each coexist with but also contradict the others. By the way, isn’t it interesting that these three options for reading the poem’s structure reflect the total possible range of frameworks for securing “knowledge” that encapsulate all of western epistemology (coherentism, foundationalism, and infinitism respectively)?
We are now gaining a sense of both the depicted scene and the structural logic of the poem from which we can extrapolate these larger meanings of theme or effect (e.g. a meditation or thought experiment on “epistemology”). Let’s turn to the seams between these three structures to see more. First, the opening line "i'd think 'wonder// if' if/ i were a/ child" raises a productive ambiguity about the identity of the speaker as well as the very nature of conditionals or counterfactuals. The phrase “if/ i were a/ child” suggests the speaker may not be a child (why would a child have to imagine themselves as if they were one?) and yet the fact that the child figure is one who would “think 'wonder// if'” plays off the following “if” statement (“if/ i were a/ child") to reassert the speaker as a child (consider the biconditional: 1. A<-->B, 2. B, 3. Therefore A; where A is being a child and B is wondering “if”). We come to wonder… What is a child? What does it mean for a child to imagine being a child? Is imagination the purview of children? Are children unavailable to themselves as children? Is the “child” identity and perspective constructed by the adult in an imaginative retrospective? Where does this place the reader who “wonders” and “imagines” all these hypotheticals?
Now, how about the closing line? The imagery of stairs, hands, and darkness conspire to create a metaphor about aging (ascension, enlightenment, entrance are all connected with the wisdom of growing older and learning)… "you say 'let's' going in/ 'take/ hands' smiling 'coming up/ these dark stairs." But the metaphor is confused with itself— the stairs are “dark,” “‘coming up” is either spoken description or character action depending on how one reads the open quotation marks (since the poem is focalized through the “i” it is unclear whether we are “coming up” or already “up”), the injunction “let’s” and “take hands” suggests a developmental symmetry between the “i” and the “you” which conflicts with the simple adult-child dynamic originally postulated. Who are we? Where are we? Just as confused as when we started? I hope not. What I want to suggest is that the poem’s STRUCTURAL COMPLEXITY forces the reader to make three distinct interpretations of the poem at once and with irresolvable internal tension— linear, circular, and open-ended readings of the poem— each of which construct divergent identities for speaker and interlocutor (child versus adult, self or other)… and ultimately work with one another by working against one another for us to be able to imagine different epistemological frameworks (coherentism, foundationalism, and infinitism respectively). The poem is a laboratory in which to conduct thought experiments about the nature and limitations of knowledge and/or imagination. We are and are not a child… this statement is a logical contradiction but, as the poem proves, a performative possibility (even if somewhat beyond the scope of sensible imagination)… the poetic structure(s), that is, can take us to places “beyond the map’s edge” of the poetic content itself.
I know this is long— I’m almost done!— but I wanted to walk through this exercise to make a couple of points palpable. Firstly, poetic structure can be and do things beyond that which is materially evident as “content.” As Cleanth Brooks writes in “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” “the term ‘structure’ is certainly not altogether satisfactory as a term. One means by it something far more internal than the metrical pattern, say, or than the sequence of images. The structure meant is certainly not ‘form’ in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelope which ‘contains’ the ‘content.’ The structure obviously is everywhere conditioned by the nature of the material which goes into the poem. The nature of the material sets the problem to be solved, and the solution is the ordering of the material.” Secondly and somewhat relatedly, poetic structure can be complex (e.g. highly technical or constrictive rhyme scheme and metrical patterns associated with certain literary forms and genres such as the Shakespearean or Spenserian sonnet, or whatever) but can also stage complexity (as in this case where cummings reckons with epistemological paradox) or can demand complex thought processes (as in this case where cummings forces readers to execute/compute three distinct and contradictory interpretations at the same time in order to really comprehend what the poem is all about). I also want to point out that the “if, then” conditional reasoning chain we’ve been exploring here is fairly “simple” in itself, with many arguing that propositional logic can be boiled down to one rule, the law of identity (or A is A), which can somehow (incredibly, bewilderingly!) be internally recombined to form countless “other” rules (law of excluded middle, law of non-contradiction, etc.) with potentially infinite complexity (countless fallacies, deductive inferences, syllogisms, etc.) But some imaginations falter at the conditional “if” before even getting into these deductive inferences… some folks really struggle with the nature of counterfactuals (and probably have a bone to pick with cummings for that reason). I won’t share my full solve here, but I will admit that some of the aspects of “complexity” and “simplicity” and “productive ambiguity” etc. do feature very prominently in my interpretation of the poem. If anyone wants to share their own thoughts on this matter, or if anyone is willing to tie these ideas more closely to the BtME poem itself, I encourage the conversation!
TLDR: “Beyond the Map’s Edge” may be described in terms of “deep simplicity” where internal complexity is achieved at the level of poetic structure (not extractable as discrete elements of conceptually challenging content nor outsourced via long chains of “rabbit hole” inferencing to niche facts or expert-only fields of research). This kind of internal complexity can actually reduce what I will call “unproductive ambiguity” even while it may work to obfuscate with “productive ambiguity” (which hides truth/answers until the reader can use/align/triangulate other elements within the poem to clarify, nullify, or settle the indeterminacy). Think of it this way— the correspondence of the term “wisdom” in the poem with the town of “Wisdom” which bears some significant personal relevance to JP is an extremely “simple” reading of the poem. But this one-to-one structure of exchange would yield an ungodly degree of unproductive ambiguity… do I now have to find all the place names containing “wisdom,” “truth,” “hope,” etc.? How do I deduce which of those places emerging all over the map are more likely or valid than others? No. The right kind of complexity works to reduce ambiguity once all of the components are finally “resolved”… even while the final resolution of those components maintains a certain internal “tension.” This is what I might call “internal complexity” or “structural complexity” or “interpretive/hermeneutic complexity” or “deep simplicity” (which is also the title of a book by John Gribbin about how extreme complexity in the form of “chaos” emerges from some very simple Newtonian laws and in deterministic but nonlinear systems… another relevant example, perhaps, of what I am describing here).
And now for something (not so) completely different: Anyone here from the fields of information science, communications, cryptography, etc. (or even cartography) who might be able to offer a more robust (lol, “simplified” or syllogistic) explanation of what I am trying to get at here? Would also love to hear about counterarguments or caveats to these points.
Is this circuitry? Fly-fishing? Rice grain painting!? Something else? This shot from the documentary includes the voiceover of JP discussing his varied hobbies (and aligns at the moment when he discusses his experiment with near infrared wavelengths). As we've all discussed ad nauseam by now, editing is almost entirely beyond JP's control and can misrepresent things sometimes as a result. But is anyone familiar enough with electrical work and who also remembers this scene able to tell me what JP is actually doing here (or is he just painting rice :p)? The scene comes at 23:37 in the first episode of the series.
Thank you!
With the recent waves of complaints and complaints about complaints, I’m sure everyone is excited to move on. Excellent. But I want to take the opportunity of this moment to remind folks that, as Sarah Schulman underscores, “conflict is not abuse.” Conflict is not desirable, but it can be the sign of some very good things: difference, freedom, passion. Any society or community that doesn’t include conflict should be an immediate red flag for anyone— a sign of deeply entrenched power inequities (e.g. fascism), or of deeply engrained propaganda/brainwashing (e.g. cults), or of deeply empty hearts and minds (apathy, nihilism). These are the signs of abuse.
I‘m glad to see people communicating and processing together, even when that looks tense or feels hurtful. Let’s keep it safe and productive like that— and let’s keep helping others to imagine otherwise or to move onwards (wherever that takes them).
I’m grateful to be living in a world that still makes room for difference… that’s where imagination and curiosity come from. Don’t miss out on the vibrancy of this world by idealizing a false utopia of “community.”
Anyone care to have a share and tell with “trinkets”? If folks are unwilling to discuss now, I thought this would be a fun post-hunt idea for the next convention/summit with posters/tables displaying people’s trinkets and telling the stories that go along with them.
