Using GS extensional devices to explore Carl Sandburg's poetry.

ALTHOUGH HE BEGAN writing before the birth of general semantics, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) seems to have been guided by ideas closely related to general semantics formulations, especially those of non-identity, non-allness, self-reflexiveness, and the use of the extensional devices.

Joseph De Vito, in his introduction to the tutorial cassette program, General Semantics: Guide and Workbook (1), identified what he characterized as three deceptively simple principles of General Semantics:

1. The principle of non-identity -- no two things in the universe are identical, and no one thing is the same at two different times.

2. The principle of non-allness -- we can never know all about any-thing.

3. The principle of self-reflexiveness -- the observer is a part of what he observes.

To help us internalize these principles, Korzybski has given us extensional devices to make our verbal maps more accurately fit the territory they represent:

1. The index subscript -- reminding us that no two things are ever the same even though they may have the same word or label, e.g., car[.sub.1], car[.sub.2].

2. The date subscript -- reminding us that nothing remains the same over time, e.g., car[.sub.1916], car[.sub.2005].

3. The etc., -- emphasizing that we can never say all about anything.

By incorporating these devices into our evaluations, we approach our life situations more sanely, fostering a healthy extensional orientation--defined by Susan and Bruce Kodish in Drive Yourself Sane as "an attitude towards living which involves orienting ourselves primarily to non-verbal happenings and 'facts,' with the ability to use intensional approaches when appropriate." (2, p.169)

Many of Carl Sandburg's reflective poems provide concrete visual details that vividly illustrate the general semantics extensional devices. Conversely, the general semantics extensional devices provide insights into Sandburg's poetry. Getting extensional seemed a perennial theme for this populist activist poet. His poem "Happiness" (3) illustrates the erroneousness of separating reified high order abstractions from the numerous concrete point events from which they were abstracted. The last two lines of the poem suggest that the narrator has switched from a stressful, purely intensional orientation to a more tranquil, extensional one:

   I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what
     is happiness.
   And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of
     men.
   They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying
     to fool with them
   And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines
     river
   And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and
     children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

Dr. Sanford I. Berman in his cassette presentation on The Semantics of Happiness (4) has pointed out the futility of defining happiness (or any other reified high order abstraction) apart from the event level that has unique significance to every human being:

    "Happiness" is a high order abstraction, and each person has his own
    definition. Some people are happy by living a life of leisure, or a
    hobo's existence, while others are happy if they make more and more
    money. Some people are happy by living the life of a scholar--
    reading, doing research, learning, gaining knowledge--while others
    are happy going out every night to parties, social affairs,
    nightclubs and country clubs. Whether or not these people are really
    "happy," whatever that means, is another question, which can,
    perhaps, be best determined by a psychiatrist.

In a lesson on high order abstractions, Berman points out the ambiguity that accrues from using terms that have many simultaneous meanings, or using terms that mean different things on different levels of abstraction or specificity:

    Now, one of the dangers of high order abstractions is that they are
    often ambiguous. The more ambiguous a statement, the more it can
    mean all things to all people. The five hundred most commonly used
    words in the English language have over 14,000 dictionary
    definitions or meanings. You can well imagine how many different
    meanings other high order abstractions not so commonly used might
    have in the course of a conversation or discussion. Take a look at a
    large dictionary, and you will find as many as 40 or 50 dictionary
    definitions given for any particular word.

To each of those dictionary definitions we could assign a separate index number. Sandburg's rather cynical inductive reflections on the reification of the term government or government in action in his poem "Government" (5) could also be assigned index subscripts:

   Government--I heard about the Government and I went out to find it. I
     said I would look closely at it when I saw it.
   Then I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to the callaboose. It
     was the Government in action.
   (Government[.sub.1])

   I saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning and talk with
     a judge. Later in the day the judge dismissed a case against a
     pickpocket who was a live ward worker for the alderman. Again I saw
     this was the Government, doing things.
   (Government[.sub.2])

   I saw militiamen level their rifles at a crowd of workingmen who were
     trying to get other workingmen to stay away from a shop where there
     was a strike on. Government in action.
   (Government[.sub.3])

   Everywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of men, that
     Government has blood and bones, it is many mouths whispering into
     many ears, sending telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying
     "yes" and "no."

   Government dies as the men who form it die and are laid away in their
     graves and the new Government that comes after is human, made of
     heartbeats of blood, ambitions, lusts, and money running through it
     all, money paid and money taken, and money covered up and spoken of
     with hushed voices.
   A Government is just as secret and mysterious and sensitive as any
     human sinner carrying a load of germs, traditions and corpuscles
     handed down from fathers and mothers away back.

The last three stanzas of this poem seem to be open-ended reflections of a reified anthropomorphized personification; this calls for the etc., extensional device.

Another of Sandburg's poems, "Who am I?" (6) emphasizes the non-all-ness principle in riddle format, illustrating the impossibility of getting the complete and total truth about anything. The kaleidoscopic descriptions moving effortlessly from place to place provide the illusion of vast expanses of space without the hint of reaching closure (italics mine):

    My head knocks against the stars.
    My feet are on the hilltops.
    My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
    Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play
      with pebbles of destiny.
    I have been to hell and back many times.
    I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
    I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
    I know the passionate seizure of beauty
    And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off."
    My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

We observe one of the most poignant examples of the danger of the vast disconnect between the symbol (or verbal map) and the grim reality of what the symbol actually represents in Sandburg's poem "Buttons" (7) (italics mine):

    I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in front
      of the newspaper office.
    Buttons--red and yellow buttons--blue and black buttons--are shoved
      back and forth across the map.

    A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
    Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
    And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
    And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.

    (Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along
      a river edge,
    Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their
      throats.)
    Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war
      map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced
      young man is laughing to us?

The stark contrast between the laughing young man effortlessly moving the buttons on the map and the extensional reality of the blood-soaked soldiers gasping and dying of their wounds dramatizes the serious disconnect between the verbal symbol and the reality it represents.

Sandburg, in many of his poems, illustrates the principle of constant change--that no one thing is the same at two different times--calling for the dating subscript extensional device. When frozen in time, a landscape appears static, but as time unfolds, one becomes aware of tearing down and building up followed by tearing down and building up. Sandburg illustrates this non-identity continuous-change principle in his poem "And They Obey" (8) (italics mine):

    Smash down the cities.
    Knock the walls to pieces.
    Break the factories and cathedrals, warehouses and homes
    Into loose piles of stone and lumber and black burnt wood:
      You are the soldiers and we command you.

    Build up the cities.
    Set up the walls again.
    Put together once more the factories and cathedrals, warehouses and
      homes
    Into buildings for life and labor:
      You are workmen and citizens all: We command you.

This continual kaleidoscopic panorama of change--involving tearing down and building up reminds me of Richard P. Marsh's observation in his article "Limiting Structures of Language and Culture" that, "in Nootka, 'house' is not so much a noun as it is a verb." (9, p. 111).

In his poem "Languages" (10), Sandburg expresses the awareness that language is an activity continuously in flux, having both a time-binding and space-binding dimension, expressed in imagery of rivers, effluvia, and continual movement through time (italics mine):

         There are no handles upon a language
         Whereby men take hold of it
         And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
         It is a river, this language,
         Once in a thousand years
         Breaking a new course
         Changing its way to the ocean.
         It is mountain effluvia
         Moving to valleys
         And from nation to nation
         Crossing borders and mixing.
         Languages die like rivers.
         Words wrapped round your tongue today
         And broken to shape of thought
         Between your teeth and lips speaking
         Now and today
         Shall be faded hieroglyphics
         Ten thousand years from now.
         Sing--and singing--remember
         Your song dies and changes
         And is not here to-morrow
         Any more than the wind
         Blowing ten thousand years ago.

Sandburg occasionally brings into convergence all three general semantics principles, non-identity, non-allness, and self-reflexiveness. We can apply the index, the date, and the etc., to Sandburg's poem "Skyscraper" (11), which uses self-reflexive personification to comment on a multitude of activities and interactions taking place day and night over a period of time. The repeated phrase hour by hour calls attention to the passage of time. The references to having a soul reflects consciousness, and the catalogs of vivid but incomplete descriptions of activities (i.e., "Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar," "... men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes") and of things ("Pails clang ... Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit") create a dynamic moving image of a self-reflective (aware of its context in a larger system) process. The frenetic cataloging of detail resembles the omnivorous lines of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."

The excerpts below reflect the passage of time (calling for the date), the plethora of detail that nevertheless calls for the etc., and the self-awareness reflected by its context and awareness of place, as well as the self-reflective anthropomorphism. (In my added emphasis, bold-italic type indicates ideas associated with the date extensional device, and the italic type indicates ideas that would call for the etc., extensional device.)

    Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and
      hold the building to a turning planet.
    Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold
      together the stone walls and floors.

    Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar
      clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted.
    Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the
      press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside
      and out and use it.

    Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves
      where the wind whistles a wild song without words
    And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes
      and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
    Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back
      doors hundreds of miles away and the bricklayer who went to
      state's prison for shooting another man while drunk.
    (One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a
      straight plunge--he is here his soul has gone into the stones of
      the building.)
    One by one the floors are emptied ... The uniformed elevator men are
      gone. Pails clang ... Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues.
      Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
      and machine grime of the day.

    A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges
      butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns
      in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of
      white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
    By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a
      soul.

In much of his poetry, Carl Sandburg seems to have instinctively expressed the general semantic formulations of non-identity, non-allness, and self-reflexiveness, and to have anticipated the extensional devices--the index subscript, the date subscript, and use of the etc. Using these general semantics formulations to explore Sandburg's poetry gives us a greater appreciation for both the general semantics principles and their extensional devices and the poetry of Carl Sandburg.

REFERENCES

1. De Vito, Joseph. General Semantics: Guide and Workbook. De Land, FL: Everett, Edwards, 1971.

2. Kodish, Susan Presby and Bruce Kodish. Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics, Revised Second Edition. Pasadena, CA: Extensional Publishing, 2001

3. Sandburg, Carl. "Happiness" in Poetry X, Poetry Archives: A Continuing Selection of Classic and Contemporary Poems, http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1293/

4. Berman, Sanford I. How to Think, Communicate, and Behave Intelligently: An Introduction to General Semantics. San Diego: Educational Cassettes, 1974.

5. Sandburg, Carl "Government" in Poetry X, Poetry Archives: A Continuing Selection of Classic and Contemporary Poems, http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1288/

6. Sandburg, Carl. "Who Am I?" in Poetry X, Poetry Archives: A Continuing Selection of Classic and Contemporary Poems, http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1388/

7. Sandburg, Carl "Buttons" in Poetry X Poetry Archives: A Continuing Selection of Classic and Contemporary Poems, http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1262/

8. Sandburg, Carl "And They Obey" in Poetry X, Poetry Archives: A Continuing Selection of Classic and Contemporary Poems, http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1248/

9. Marsh, Richard P. "Limiting Structures of Language and Culture" in Teaching General Semantics, Ed. Mary S. Morain. San Francisco: International Society for General Semantics, 1969.

10. Sandburg, Carl. "Languages" in Poetry X, Poetry Archives: A Continuing Selection of Classic and Contemporary Poems, http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1312/

11. Sandburg, Carl. "Skyscraper" in Poetry X, Poetry Archives: A Continuing Selection of Classic and Contemporary Poems, http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1352/

DAVID F. MAAS*

* Dr. David Maas, Education Editor of ETC, is a Professor of English at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and the author of many ETC articles.