Objective non-correlative

■Washington Allston coined the phrase ■”objective correlative” in his ■Lectures on Art. It must have been, he looked at a vegetable, judged on human emotion, and wrote,
Take an example from one of the lower forms of organic life,— a common vegetable. Will any one assert that the surrounding inorganic elements of air, earth, heat, and water produce its psuleculiar sul? Though some, or all, of these may be essential to its development, they are so only as its predetermined correlatives, without which its existence could not be manifested; and in like manner must the peculiar form of the vegetable preexist in its life, — in its idea, — in order to evolve by these assimilants its own proper organism.

No possible modification in the degrees or proportion of these elements can change the specific form of a plant, ― for instance, a cabbage into a cauliflower; it must ever remain a cabbage, small or large, good or bad. So, too, is the external world to the mind; which needs, also, as the condition of its manifestation, its objective correlative. Hence the presence of some outward object, predetermined to correspond to the preexisting idea in its living power, is essential to the evolution of its proper end, ― the pleasurable emotion.

In simple words, the world was palatable. Things it had yet either agreed with a prior idea for pleasure, or might not exist as well, failing to meet the condition for their manifestation to the mind.

The words, “cash on the table”, would tell more or less the same, if we look up the Greek where cauliflower is derived from cabbage, ■κραμβίδιον (krambídion) as diminutive of κραμβη (krambe).

Mr. Allston’s matter is not about biochemistry or farming, as long as lemon remains component in lemon cheesecake, rather than its “predetermined correlative”. For a lemon to correlate with a cake, you put the fruit aside on the table, and right next to cheesecake only if you want the correlation to be close.

Pleasure as coming with evolution might suggest relevance of veg outside meal times. Plants can inspire aesthetic pleasure.

Classic painting had some rigor. Impressionism yet brought in multiple realizations for the same objects or settings. ■Monet’s Haystacks are very famous here. Objective correlativity did not deserve so much of a pedestal; not to everyone, or not in painting.

■T.S. Eliot endeavored to make the jacket for the potato. In ■Hamlet and His Problems he stated,
Hamlet is a stratification; (…) represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.

Beside advising to ignore the author and the design, Eliot’s critical endeavors referred to the ■thing theory.
We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us, wrote  ■Bill Brown.

Here Eliot would give in to antinomy. He placed dance with immobility in his ■Still Point of the Turning World.
At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
At the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
Wikiquote, ■Four Quartets.

This is antinomy, even if you tried the ■True Being for your excuse.

Eliot’s Hamlet lays out,
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Elicited, instantaneous — and pleasurable — emotion becomes denial on a feeling. It is antinomy to the extreme, to build a sentence of 58 words, all in the grammatical affirmative, to say in fact what a human feeling cannot be.

The description would befit an exquisite offer of raw garlic, which it yet does not look to have for the purpose, and the reservation on human feelings remains: I may be no exception at all, applying myself to garlic from time to time, without sentiment for the veg itself.

To see and win: human immunity

Well, both Allston and Eliot had their emotionally difficult times. Allston’s wife died, “leaving him saddened, lonely, and homesick”, wrote ■Jay B. Hubell. Eliot reportedly suffered from ■abulia, otherwise termed a ■sickly weakening of the will.

Objectively, vegetables are yet not persuasive as representation for human feelings, hence the title of this post.

Both were readers well practiced and men able to perceive written skill. I suspect they had an object of quiet envy, and she was Emily Dickinson, only not in those dash-loaded versions we see today.

If there is writing that has something objective and correlative, this would be her poetry. Feel welcome to compare ■a correlative for Emily Dickinson and Aristotle.

An objective correlate avoids projection. It follows the matter of language. The roles of the agens and patiens are not of emphasis, because poetic thinking is not doing. Feel welcome to my notes.

Poetry by Emily Dickinson