Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

Karla Kelsey

An author's statement

Ideas in philosophy (in general) and Plato and phenomenology (in particular) have been a great influence on my work. Not necessarily in the sense that I think that my work enacts any sort of philosophical method, school, or rule, but in that I think that I am always concerned with the confluence of thought, language, and possibility that resonates off of traditions in philosophy. Often I am working through things in my poetry and then I will, later in the day, find an “analytical” or “critical” articulation of what I am feeling out in a work of philosophy. In Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, Plato’s Theaetetus was a great spark to my inquiries, because the picture of knowledge provided by the birds and cages in the dialogue is both horrifying and beautiful. Socrates envisions the mind as a type of aviary. Birds of knowledge fly around and the thinker/knower plucks them down when he or she wants to use them. This vision is horrifying because the knowledge-birds are trapped and the knower “plucks them down” to use them (the mind as a thing that “uses” the world seems like a very skewed and limited sense of being and thinking and seems to be the “default” notion of mind, knowledge, and language that has had vast political (and I am trying at the political in this book) and social consequences). But the vision is also beautiful in the idea that the elements of knowledge are independent of the thinker and of the cage, that they have a certain set of freedoms even though they are contained. Plato is an interesting one for me, because on the simplistic view that people generally have of him—that our works of art are imitations, several times removed, of forms, I utterly disagree with him, seeing something like Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary as very much a work of thinking, not of a representation of thought. However, when I consider his form, dialogue, and the way that his thought is built up within and between his speakers, I am very much in admiration of the way that his dialogues are thought and are great thought-vehicles for his readers. When engaging in his dialogues, his readers engage in the form of Thinking.

My work comes out of the simple idea that our thoughts are always contained by the language(s) that we know, yet through careful work with language we can think beyond and between the meanings associated with words. This beyond and between is important to all of the repetition and slight variations of repetition in the book as well as the white space and asterisks. Another philosopher who always helps me think through things is Merleau-Ponty who says somewhere: “If we set ourselves to see as things the intervals between them, the appearance of the world would be just as strikingly altered...there would not be simply the same elements differently related, the same sensations differently associated...but in truth another world.” Being able to think in and through as many worlds as possible is important to me—I deeply believe such thought is the foundation of freedom and the fact that we can grow in our capacity for such thought is, I think, one of the great glimmers of hope. Particularly in a social and political climate, such as ours, where we are trained at birth to limit our scope and action of thought. Here I think of Stein wherein a rose is a rose is a rose produces a different rose each time, a layering of roses that allows one to see more, feel more. I think of the cubist artists who asked their viewers to use their minds in an atypical way to create sense of their work. And viewers realized that, yes, it makes sense to think through the world in this way, that the paintings got at the sensation and emotion of reality in a way that really wanted the viewer to be and remain engaged.

I like to think that the images, ideas, and emotions of the book work and evolve through repetition and variation—that the different forms in the book allow different elements of the ideas and imagery to be pulled out. A central example of this is in the figure of the bird, which I hope is the traditional bird of the lyric, bird of knowledge, action of mind, figure of the airplane, bomber, bullets. Exterior and interior events inform thought and thinking is always personal and emotional. This point is very important to me: even though I like to speak of my work in philosophical terms, the work that I do is very grounded in the sensual and intellectual textures of my life. Language and thought—philosophical and poetic—are ways of considering and digging in to the textures of life. There is always a lot of talk about the way that abstraction in language and thought is cut off from “real” life. I have never understood this. Abstraction—the action of the mind revolving in synthesis and the creation of ideas—is not set apart from life and thought—it is fundamental to life and thought.