The Poetry of
Jack Scott

Notebook

Oct 26
2015

Notebook/Automythology

A further cross explanation of the difference between Notebook and Automythology. (Although, starting out, I, myself, am not totally clear on that distinction. I expect this venture to teach me some things. There will be some mis-application, but so what. Some of the poems have found their way into the wrong volumes, but would cost more energy than it is worth to correct things that are beneath notice. ”Never let the perfect stand in the way of the good.”)

The basic use of Notebook is to annotate the poems. There is usually a story behind most of them; I intend to tell those stories. The emotional sense of the poems in no way depends on these addenda; the stories themselves will also stand on their own two feet.

Many of the poems have to do with love in one or another of its many guises. Usually a form of love that is not, strictly speaking, romantic love, but which does not fit within what might be called intimate friendship. These poems are for the most part not about specific women or relationships, but rather a question or response to hypothetical situations women pose. Woman. Women. I love women and much prefer them and their company to that of men.

I can’t think of an image that pleases me more than that of a nude woman. Of course there’s more to the attraction than that, but there’s no dismissing carnal attraction as an elemental ingredient of the chemistry of the bond. Duh.

I will include herein also annotations of prose passages that will be included in the Automythology section and herein. It’s a crapshoot where some of the short stories, for instance, belong, but it really doesn’t matter. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction can be a hair’s thickness of the arbitrary.

More broadly speaking, Notebook is intended to be more of an exterior look at things, or a look at things from the outside. For someone assigned to look for linear truth this is probably the place to come. Good luck.

Automythology is more like an exercise in meditation, an interior experience, in which one views consciousness and the eye phlegm that flits and floats across it as if viewing one of those billboard type news message boards that show also stock market reports and sports results. A better analogy would be watching Roku streaming Netflix movie titles where you let them just go by idly, absently until finally something catches your interest; it is now stationary, midscreen, highlighted. You can just let it pass by or highlight it. If you’ve captured it to the oblivion of all else it is yours, now part of and about to enter into your consciousness. If you’ve chosen well, meditation can follow. It’s a sort of death¸ in that you’ve eliminated all other conscious thought by choosing the something closest to nothingness that you can handle.

So, Notebook as I see it starting out is for the outside of things, relatively objective and rational.

Automythology is for the interior, the consciousness and all the other consciousnesses that lie within.

 

®Copyright 2015 Jack Scott. All rights reserved.
From Poemystic.com