Dear Diary Moment 9/30/2019:
Reading Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, I now see a different expression of the dialectic described in Arthur Lupia’s Uniformed: Why People Know so Little About Politics and What We Can Do About It. It basically runs from information to knowledge to competence. The term ‘information’ is almost self-explanatory (but more than that as I will explain below). The term ‘knowledge’ correlates with the bricolage at work as we collect that information and connect it. (And what is important to understand here (that is for reference) is that the process of building a knowledge base roughly correlates with the physical process of neuroplasticity.) Furthermore, it is important to know that this knowledge base is always intertwined with our more base-of-the-brain responses to the environment we are attempting to negotiate. Competence (as compared to intellect which is basically about the ability to process information into competent acts (is about the ability to fulfill a desired task.
And we see this dialectic at work in Plath’s Ariel. What she basically did was collect a lot of information about poetry through reading as well as a lot of personal, emotional responses to things. And the ‘more than that’ of the information phase was the lines she ran repeatedly ran through her head because they gave her pleasure: expressed how she felt. (I know this from having written poetry myself.) And she kept doing this until her knowledge base was filled to the point of bursting.
And as Keats pointed out: poetry results from the overflow of emotions. (Although I would boldly (perhaps arrogantly (revise that to an overflow of emotion and knowledge.) And Ariel was an expression of Plath’s competence as a poet built off of the information/knowledge process set off by her divorce to Ted Hughes –that which likely overwhelmed her knowledge base with emotional information.