"Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt."
(The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.)
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
The sheaf of conscious explanations is dedicated to Daniel Dennett, whose signature on the frontispiece of Consciousness Explained (1991, Boston: Little, Brown and Co.) pointed author M. A. Schorr in new directions.
Consciousness isn't explained here, as much as exploded -- the inner components are shown in orthographic projection, inviting the reader to imagine how the ticking parts work together when the system is reassembled. How Schorr is able to arrange these parts -- the image of a bridge, the biography of Wittgenstein, the linguistic architecture of Joyce and Nabokov -- into these spare and impactful ranks of meaning, without the usual apparatus of context and exposition, is a feat itself needing explanation. His clear, indisputable verses transform the problem of how to explain consciousness into an infinite regression of self-consciousness. Poems that manifest consciousness are themselves in need of explanation, and so on -- poetry all the way down.
Originally published in holotype by KaraOKe Press.
About the author
M. A. Schorr was born in Chicago in 1944. He attended the local public schools. He attended Grinnell College, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and received a masters and PhD in English and American Literature in 1974. Since 2003, Schorr has served as the Executive Director of the Robert Frost Foundation in Lawrence.
