My friend was telling me about a poem he had written about a moment of perfection which he calls 'She Is Temptation.' He describes poetically how one single moment of time, like a camera shot, he witnessed a girl that represented to him all his ideals of beauty. After thinking how oblivious I was to my friend's spontaneity to express himself in poetry, I began thinking how his words of poetry can be conveyed to the reader more congruently with the thoughts and emotions he was experiencing in that moment of 'perfection.'
Before or after this convocation I was introducing my friend to a model that I have adopted and developed as part of my project in my course (illustration). It was originally from the Transformational Model from transformational grammarians. It describes and explores the Surface and Deep structures of any linguistically expressed formation. In brief, the Surface Structure is the sentence that you read/hear and have conscious intuitions of based on the words and their order and sequence. The Deep Structure is the deeper meaning of the sentence based on the relationships that the words carry by themselves and between each other. The Surface Structure is the level which you are conscious and aware of. And the Deep Structure is the level underneath, that you are not conscious or aware of.
Metaphorically, it is like you are on a boat in the North Atlantic and you are cruising past some icebergs. You are only seeing the parts of the icebergs that are above the surface of the water – it is the only part of the iceberg that you are aware of because that is all you can see. It's a known fact that you can only see 30% of an iceberg – the other 70% is under the surface of the water. You are unaware of the rest of the iceberg because it goes deep underwater. This goes for language as well. When you read or hear something, you are processing the surface structure (the actual words) and the deep structure (the meaning).
Another analogy in which I would like to propose to explain these levels is a quote I heard recently - “the exterior is the result of the interior.” As you look at the appearance of an object you are simply looking at it's surface structure. Below the surface you get to the interior which gives form to the exterior. The interior semantic structure gives rise to the words that are expressed in language. The same is true for any piece of art. The artist uses a composition of signifiers to communicate the deeper structure of the relationship of the signified.
An example of how a sentence can be structured based on it's Deep Structure:
- John saw Sarah hug Nick
- Nick got hugged by Sarah and John saw
Both of these sentences have different surface structures yet they have a common deep structure. In other words they are represented differently but have the same meaning.
When it clicked that it could be possible to have an image that represents my friend's poem and from this image have an analytical chunk down into other images to express more richness, we then started talk about how that could be possible. The studies I have referred to in my other post about system thinking I will incorporate into this idea.
The concept of this model is that there is a main image that represents the whole poem (grey box (1)). Parts of this main image explode out (2). Sub images then come out from the exploded main images (3). The sub-images are direct representations of the metaphors in the poem.
I will leave it here, you in the mess of confusion. I will deepen the exploration and investigation into this model.
Stay curious, stay playful.
Sebastian
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