[ book tip by Literatur Schweiz ] The Greeks saw ether as the «quintia essenti», the fifth element, but the substance has since dissipated in natural history and the history of mind. In his lecture on poetics «In the Ether» for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the author and transmitter Perikles Monioudis outlines a short history of the ether in order to evoke another subject matter: poetry. Which, too, concerns itself with voids, empty spaces and elusiveness.
The author is not concerned with the divisions between poetry and science in his juxtaposition of the two, but much rather with what connects them. «Literature as a category of knowledge acquisition,» and the ether as an aura between hard and soft empiricism. Here, science and poetry meet at a third point: in the narrating character of a radio officer who writes poetry and spends most of his time on the high seas.
This radio operator seeks out resonance and frequencies to finally realize that words work like radio signals. In order to save electricity, «the rule of the smallest possible output» applies to signalling, and this is true in a similar way with poetry: the simplest word is the right word – the word that discretely evaporates in the ether.

(Beat Mazenauer, trans. by Simon Froehling)

[ Favourite quote ] «The transmitter - again defined by the radio officer as the meaning of the potic line - must supply the word that feeds all the other words in a line with only as much output as necessary and not a bit more.»

[ book info ] Monioudis, Perikles: Im Äther / In the Ether. (original language: Deutsch - Englisch) Rimbaud Verlagsgesellschaft, Aachen, 2005 . ISBN: 978-3-89086-628-4.
Translated from Englisch by David Dollenmayer