Poetics

“Representation is natural to human beings from childhood. They differ from the other animals in this: man tends most towards representation and learns his first lessons through representation… if one has not seen the thing that is represented before, its image will not produce pleasure as a representation, but because of its accomplishment, colour, or some other such cause.” —Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

(i) Prologue
To Make

The Great

Doctor Daddy in the King’s Court

Public recluse

A fifth of thought

in completely in

Notes

Black horse and the

Chair and Tree

(ii) Episode

Plot: a construction of incidents, the origin and soul of tragedy

Character: those people, of a certain appropriate sort (it is possible to be manly in character, but, Melanippe,it is not appropriate for a woman such to be so manly or clever), in action, actors, live laugh love

Thought: the torment of their brain

Diction: the torrent of their tongue, the art of the squeal

Music: throbbing embellishment

Spectacle: bound, gagged, enthralled

Mimesis, peripeteia, anagnorisis

hamartia, katharsis – a purgative that flushes by means of pity and terror

Rhythms given form

The mimes of Sophron

Be ye good or inferior

Vicious or virtuous?

For better or worse

In sickness and health

(iii) Exit

Dionysius paints us just as we are

No better or worse

In dithyrambs and nomes

Light House

Cyclopic eye, panopticonic beam

Observe and learn

Delight in representation

reversal and recognition: a change from ignorance to knowledge

The spear-head that the earth-born bear

From friendship to enmity

(iv) Choral

Phallic procession

To speak of universals

What is possible is believable

Genius or madman

Composer of plots

While tragedy occurs within one revolution of the sun

Epic is unbounded in time

(What is concentrated is more pleasurable than what is diluted with a lot of time)

Hanging in a moment, stationary yet thrumming with potential release

Fineness lies in magnitude and order

And they may well condemn you:

Impossible, improbable, harmful, contradictory or incorrect.

Still you try

To resolve

A tonic