«Art is a pencil meant to engrave the imagination.»

This sentence was certainly said by a bachelor, but it also represents a fumble on the football field of philology, which sets up another punt, this time away from a qualified theory of literature.

A better idea is that my arrogance and consciousness come in many personae. Such as the much talked about CREATOR OF TEXTS who can't count to ten:

«Art doesn't exist without the imagination and neither does poetry.»

or to twenty:

«Poetry is equal to prose, it's just when it starts getting tedious and boring that I reach for my ideology.»

Poetry is a particular way of thinking, a saber, if you will, into the imagination. This is why certain economies create fewer mentally disturbed people, a

«sensation not unlike reading literature»

and why aesthetic expression is no more than a reflection of the economy. A kind of academic Kukla, Fran and Ollie--with inaudible mumblings, books flying everywhere and some asshole trying to get your attention--ideas to be consumed and resumed and then exhumed (Man! Dose me six feet under!).

Potebnia and his disciples saw poetry as a particular era when men did all of the thinking. Thinking with a yard full of images. But instead of poetry, they imagined women whose bodies had no other function than to allow access to a group of objectionable and straight men who had been reduced to explaining their lust as a discount center for the Futurists.

Okay, let's suck on some of Potebnia's potent prose:

«The relation of image to the explanation of the image can now be defined by saying: A) 'The image is predictable, a constant distraction like Persephone's abductors.' or B) 'The image is much simpler and clearer than the explanation.' or C) 'Sod off, you old Gogolian tragedy.'»

This has serious implications for the lay-philologist, this putting Gogol in the center and then throwing Clark bars at him.

«Art doesn't exist without imagination.»

«Art is a pencil meant to engrave the imagination.»

These aren't definitions, they're deformations! Monstrous deformations, the kind that make it hard to understand that Music, Architecture and Lyric Poetry are all one art form.

After a bout of bad influenza, the academician Ovsianiko-Kulikovski was finally obligated to admit that Lyric Poetry, Architecture and Music were all one art form. Because

«Art is that which sits right down and plays with your emotions.»

And now we have advertising which exists as the total MENS ROOM (both literally "men" and figuratively "toilet") to art. Any dummy knows that thinking requires manners, but only art knows that to use words and to pass that off as creating images is to deprive art of its imagination (Man! Now I'm talkin' bad words!).

But the definition

«Art is a pencil meant to engrave the imagination.»

(a definition that is not

«Art is a pencil meant to engrave images into a mind.»)

is still notorious for what it omits and that's

«Art is, after all, the creation of symbols.»

I've resisted the temptation to exclude music on the grounds that it uses "cymbals." And, more than in any other country, my existence continues in the USA while the symbols around me corrode.

I'm sober today and soaked in theory.