Crystallography, far more than Eunoia, is highly successful in distilling the most poignant elements of Bok’s writing. The book titles have multiple meanings. Crystallography means “the study of crystals” as well as “lucid thinking,” and Eunoia, according to Bok, means “beautiful thinking,” but according to Aristotle, as Bok is certainly aware, Eunoia means “good will.” It is difficult to discern which is more difficult, to think beautifully or to think lucidly- whatever, Bok accomplishes only the first in Crystallography. If “beautiful thinking” and “good will” are synonymous, Bok fails completely in his Eunoia. In fact, the double meaning is probably intended as a (bitter) ironic joke. But that is besides the point. The point is: Bok’s broken hearted bathos sings most clearly in Crystallography, a work of genius and beauty.
note: Eunoia reached the the top ten best seller lists in Canada and England but I think it is a depressing thing to read. Bok's stark isolation is at the heart of crystallography's genius. Its difficult to be a hyper talented genius without being a very lonely character. Bok is very much a lonely, friendless character. his performative character is his own construction, and a necessary component to his success. very sad. Especially Eunoia. its just a giant plea for attention masquerading as a clever joke.
The following poem is from Crystallography and is representative of Bok’s body of work and philosophy of poetry as a whole:
Fractal Geometry
1.
Fractals are haphazard maps
that entrap entropy in tropes.
Fractals tell their raconteurs
to counteract at every point
the contours of what thought
recounts (a line, a plot): recant
the chronicle that cannot coil
into itself—let the story stray
off course, its countless details,
pointless detours, all en route
toward a tour de force, where
the here & now of nowhere is.
Don’t ramble—lest you dream
About a random belt of words
brought to you by Mandelbrot.
In this section of the poem, Christian Bok establishes “language deliberately out of work” (poetry) as a “haphazard map” that entraps entropy in tropes. The logical derivative is: who does this map lead and from what starting point and to what destination does this map intend to lead from and to? The stanza following explains that these maps bid those who tell their stories (raconteurs) to rebel against every plot point they’ve achieved. If plot points outline the contours of thought, then thought without entropic narrative cannot travel on the map of itself. It exists, but is un-plotted. Counting to infinity is impossible- but one might attempt the beginning of it. One might discover new points on an infinite line as one recounts infinity- newer points come to be known infinitely, just as, infinitely, unnamed points most definitely exist without ever before being counted.
If the reader were to conceive of the fractal as a multi-dimensional infinite counting, he or she might begin to understand Christian Bok’s conception of a lingual map. A poem might be a map for a tour de force, but inevitably, the map leads off-course, recounting countless details. Again, recall the metaphor of counting to infinity. You could start with 1, 2, 3, but between 1 and 2 is another infinite detour 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and between 1.1 and 1.2, 1.01, 1.02, 1.03…etc. In the recounting, a poem is inclined towards a tour de force “where the here & now of nowhere is.” When some innocent acquaintance asks me how my “poetry career” is coming along, I say, “I am going nowhere at the fastest pace possible.” It is likely that this is probably the only way a poetry career comes along until it is over.
2.
Fractals are a pretty knotty
way to say: the length of any
coastline depends upon the
lengths to which a ruler goes.
A lost vacationer who strolls
along a beach patrols a spatial
breach between dimensions.
This stanza is pretty hilarious and pretty typical Bok. In this tropic entrapment of the entropic lingual map, in order to access “ruler” as a measuring device, one must first think of the ruler as the autocrat of the land outlined by the map. The coastlines of the map depend upon the lengths the ruler goes to outline the domain. These are coastlines and not “boundaries,” because technically speaking, the autocrat knows what lies beyond invisible borders but has not yet conquered it- the ocean as emblematic of the mysterious is an infinitely explore-able entity. If the autocrat turns back, crosses his own path, he finds a body of substance that is just a little different than the one he has just explored- infinitely turning crests and coves of material- waves. Man is the measure, but only insofar as he determines the lengths he goes to define domain.
The lost vacationer is a foreigner to the land ruled by the autocrat. He vacations (deliberately out of work) in the domain of an Other who is the autocrat of that domain. He becomes lost. If he strolls along the beach (lost, but “patrolling”) he wanders the contours of a domain. In patrolling, however, the lost vacationer is on the lookout for a breach. In the stanza, the breach is both the outline of the domain’s contour and, itself, a breach.
3.
A fractal is the ideal of redundancy:
the obsessive restatement (re(in)statement)
of itself, by itself, in itself, --a never-ending
message that digresses from its digressions
yet nevertheless repeats (repeats) the same
message over and over and over ad infinitum.
A fractal is the ideal of redundancy:
imagine a series
of Chinese boxes
in which each box
contains a series
of Chinese boxes.
An acoustic Fractal would be its own echo chamber.
These stanzas are pretty clear in that their sole function is to demonstrate an infinite packaging. To discover meaning, one must infinitely unpack. In its sonar fruition, the ideal fractal echoes its own screams. Echoes itself.
4.
Never forget that fractal
music sounds the same
when played at any speed.
Navigate the futile maze
this sentence plans to be.
Newfangle its simplicity.
Lost in the maze of echoes, it is futile for the vacationer to attempt discovering its heart. Navigating the maze fast or slow has no impact on how quickly one might travel through it. The simplicity of the maze becomes fangled by the gaudy showmanship of new passages wrought by new explorations.(In counting to infinity, the newest speedy counter might encounter new numbers. Fancier ones.)
5.
When two identical mirrors face each other
their cycle of self-reflection recedes forever
into an infinite exchange of self-absorption.
Each mirror
infects itself
at every scale
with the virus of its own image.
Each mirror
devours itself
at every point
with the abyss of its own dream.
When we gaze upon a fractal, we must peer
at a one-way mirror, unaware of the other
mirror, standing somewhere far behind us.
The fractal, as something that reflects light within the structures of itself, must reflect the angles of itself within itself, making itself infinite. At once, absorbing itself and projecting itself (like an infection.) Darkness cannot be reflected. The contours of something dark must be outlined or illuminated by light in order for its map to be absorbed and then reflected. The lost vacationer gazes upon a fractal, visualizing the fruition of it. In gazing, he absorbs the light of the infinite fractal and becomes a part of the interchange, unaware of his newfangled infinitude.
6.
Mirror rim (all its
sides reversed)is
still a mirror rim.
A fractal is a fatal
arc (an act as artful
as a fall): a snow-
flake knows a leaf.
Here, the fractal is a fatal arc: something that falls beautifully to its death, but lives by reflecting infinitely, the dying. Snowflakes and fall leaves, too, commit the fall that results in death. They travel the map of their domain, earth-bound whilst lingering in the sky. Language Re-presented as a fractal map, commits the same fall- and like the snowflake and the leaf, is infinitely resurrected so long as there are rulers and vacationers to perpetuate the process, infinitely reflecting and absorbing the light of language.
Man as one who creates and gazes upon the fractal is part of the dialectic. He is both within it, as a lost vacationer, and without it, as its ruler. In so far as man is within, he must dwell there. And without, it must be inside him. Denying the body is dangerous to the act of constructing and the act of dwelling. Denying the body is contradictory to “acting.”Acting means performing, and in order to perform, man must use his body. Bok needs his heart to breathe life into the motions, to act as raconteur through exhalation of the exaltations of lingual maps. But his heart is stabbed. And his cry is trapped in trope. The entropy of blood announces his tragedy- a performance that is strikingly eerie in the denial of its-self.
