Waves of Sense

Jacket2 has an article on Gertrude Stein and the Making of Tender Buttons

“I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible,” she confesses. “Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them.”[10] The referent inevitably guides, misguides, disappears, and reappears — the carafe is never fully present or absent. Every sentence is both doing and undoing, attaching and detaching. Each sentence sensitizes, but sense quickly recedes as the next sentence comes in.

This notion of writing away from sense is tricky. Say something that seems true and say its opposite and it also may seem true as Dave Bonta said. Once you are on an active dynamic, it doesn’t matter so much where in the spectrum you are. Blind men debating the elephant’s bits.
JSAbsher recently brought forward what Czeslaw Milosz said: “[I]n poetry … straining comes to nothing, for we receive the gift whether we are deserving of it or not.”
I don’t know. Luck is working at things with discipline, being open to learning and keeping alert. Refinement doesn’t spontaneously erupt. That’s magical thinking. We can lean our intention and get nothing and then be pushed when we aren’t leaning but we have to be in a state of mind to recognize the bump as salient to notice it.
What Susan Sontang said about an image being invisible, insignificant without the priming of ideology to interpret and put weight behind the image. If your point of view diverges too much from that the reader, the reader can’t arrive at the conclusion. It needs more back story, more context that is larger than a photo, than a story, than a poem. It needs to terraform and build in all the pointing signals to make the point seen but when the audience has a different bias, it can’t convince in itself. It would need to be part of an aggregate. A single voice is context only longitudinally in close, rich contact.
Text or image is missing the majority of the markers that is the bulk of the meaning. If we infill text with a comparable culture and expectations, we become the majority of the text or image that, with its minimalism, says just enough.