In “What is Beauty for Language?”, Takaaki Yoshimoto showed that the meaning of language is based on two axes. The terms “self-expression” and “indicative expression,” which are like a cryptic term used in the Enlightenment Seminar, are used to express a fan form that begins with a verb of inspiration and ends with a verb pronoun noun, or to express psychosis (mental phenomena) on the two axes. This is how they tried to express the so-called “value” of words and sensibility. It is like the value of currency, and they tried to measure the value of art with two-dimensional coordinates. In fact, it is a strange feeling to be shown this in a diagram.
At first, however, I did not understand why a mere set of coordinates would have such value.
The dualism of emotion and logic, or something similar, was also mentioned by Soseki Natsume in his literary essay “The Dualism of Emotion and Reason. In this case, F stands for meaning and f for emotion, where F is the expression of direction and f is the expression of self.
However, what kind of strange logic is needed in the face of the daily act of writing poetry, which is almost the same as breathing or walking?
If the world of logic is almost lost and the value of meaning becomes lax, people will call it relativism. In this world, anything is possible as long as it rhymes. For example, this is the idea that whether an island is Panorama Island or Iwo Jima, they are equally considered the same island. In reality, however, Panorama Island has Panorama Island’s history, and Iwo Jima has Iwo Jima’s history, bloody sorrows, and joys. If values are made relative to everything else, there may be a situation where dignity is neglected when mixed with reality. It is a world where money (or words) can buy anything. Well, I am well aware that this is not the case in reality.
It seems impossible for an individual rhymer to create a phrase that can beat Disney+’s The Avengers, but for some, a single word from an influencer sounds like a revelation. After all, it is the kindness of the other person or the fraternity that supports this kind of everyday mechanism.
From the time literature was created, or even before that, it is memory that has mediated affection. This kind of memory is compatible with Shannon’s theory of information, and the dualism that Soseki and Yoshimoto mentioned can be divided into episodic memory (personal history: f: self-expression) and semantic memory (human history: F: instructional expression). In Shannon’s information theory, this would be information and signs (symbols, codes). If one’s episodes are too strong in expression, one will become self-centered, and if one’s meanings are too strong, one will lose one’s sense of feeling. A good work that sticks in people’s memories lives in the place where a good balance between episodes and meanings is well aimed at. Shannon’s ideas themselves have made the Internet we use today much better.
Shannon’s theory of information is equivalent to saying, “How much feeling can a poet put into a single word? It also says that the sender can decide what he or she wants to say. At the same time, he showed the reader how much of the feelings he put into the poem would be received by the reader by using a mathematical formula. If the medium is memory, the work must remain in the reader’s memory to retain its meaning. However, if the words are completely unknown to the reader, the meaning will not be understood, and if all the information is familiar to the reader, there will be no freshness, and the meaning of the writing will be lost.
The appropriate level of saltiness, then, depends on TPO and relationships, and coordinates are a concept that can be used to capture the right level of saltiness.
With the workings of AI, three-dimensional technology, and other technologies, we will soon be able to become anyone we want to be. We may even be able to exchange our memories. If the words of a poem become like a rope that holds something together, I think it will be much easier to live amidst the inconveniences that may occur in the future.