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22 November 2004. Two days ago, I experienced another breakthrough. I feel a little self-conscious using that word because Dan Schneider, in his "denuding" of me, belittled my use of the term, which seemed frequent to him. He was out to malign me, however, so took me to be boasting of cultural breakthroughs rather than what the context plainly indicated I was speaking of: personal breakthroughs. So his criticism didn't come closing to sticking. Still, it's gotten me worrying ever so slightly that I may be boasting whenever I use the term. (Not that I'm not capable of boasting of cultural breakthroughs I've achieved, for I do think I achieved a few.)
Okay, now that I've built up the suspense, I will reveal my breakthrough: a new term, "Charactration." All it is, is a substitute for one of the terms in my knowlecular psychology, "character." That term is one of my oldest, going back perhaps forty years! I've always been somewhat unhappy about its meaning something slightly different in normal conversation than it did in my psychology. So, this morning, when I spontaneously coined "charactration" while trying to think of an adjectivial form of "character," I embraced it at once. Nothing like a neology to prevent the confusion that old words used newly inevitably cause. Charactration is a combination of "character" as will-power and reliability combined with "concentration," which is what people with high charactration do best, so I think it fits its definition. The adjective I derived from it is long and no gem, but I like it well enough: "charactratial." Moreover, it goes well with "acceleratial" and "accommodatial," the adjectives I derived today from "accelerance" and "accommodance," the names I've given the two qualities that, with charactration, make up the three primary elements of human intelligence in my psychology.
This all has to do with poetry because I got to thinking about my terms because I wanted to explain here why I think some people simply can't get minimalist poems like "lighght" no matter how bright and educated they are. They can sometimes understand what the poems are doing intellectually, but they can't appreciate them. I say it's because they lack superior specimens of one or more of the following mental tools: (1) charactratial grip; (2) accommodatial quick-release; (3) accommodatial width; and (4) acceleratial pounce (as I now tentatively call them).
Charactratial grip is one's connection to an idea or a thought or any other mental datum or system of data. A successful poem, or passage in a poem, will break one's charactratial grip on a poem in some way, but only momentarily. According to my theory, this will cause one momentary pain--consternation, usually (which won't cause physical pain, probably). One will get pleasure from overcoming this pain quickly, by reconnecting to the poem, so the greater the pain involved, the greater the final pleasure given by the poem, at the point of the break. The strength of one's charactratial grip is important because the greater it is, the more pain its breaking will cause--and the more pleasure the reconnection to the poem will result in.
All I'm saying, in a lot of jargon (which is necessary to convey the larger picture), is that a poem (or any artwork--jokes, too) can be thought of as a sort of attack on something one holds important, and that the attack will distress one, and recovery from the attack please one, to the degree that one holds it important. In the case of "lighght," the normal reader will have a fairly strong charactratial grip on correct spelling, so will be irked when the poem breaks that with its extra "gh." If he can recover from this quickly (and thoroughly) enough, he will experience pleasure. If a person cares little or nothing about spelling--that is, if his charactratial grip on correct spelling is limited, he won't be upset by the extra "gh" nor gratified by any kind of recovery from what it did to him.
The other three mental tools are what one uses to recover from having one's charactratial grip broken. The first, superior accommodatial quick-release,
has to do with quickly letting one's charactratial grip to be broken and bringing one's accommodance into play. Accommodance is what I call a person's ability to lower one's mental energy, become mentally loose, or unfocussed. The result is an increase in memories, and in susceptibility to random environmental stimuli. Superior accommodatial quick-release frees one to quickly begin hunting for avenues to recovery from having one's charactratial grip broken. Slower accommodatial quick-release may allow one eventually to recover, but not fast enough to overcome the frustration caused by the break (which will increase till recovery).
Very much related to the preceding tool is accommodatial width, which is simply the amount of random or semi-random knowlecules one's accommodance will expose one's mind to. The more the better, generally, so a superior accommodatial width is nearly always required to recover from having one's charactratial grip broken. Acceleratial pounce is the use of accelerance, or a rapid increase in mental energy (and thus a kind of opposite of accommodance), to grab hold of a knowlecule that will allow one to repair the break one is trying to recover from quickly, so
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