MFA — Surprise day 2 — Jennifer Knox

Possession — reader can see the subject everywhere in the setting
- Tracers, Echoes, Reflections, Mutations
- Seeing aspects of the subject in things around it
- Visual synchronicity
- Possession is a kind of synchronicity or haunting
- Showing the subject who is elsewhere in the world, but you see them in the way the world moves
- Intellectual dexterity
- Transposition — manage to say the Name, then leaving it entirely
- Explanations != necessary
- Surprise = distance
- Possession = familiar
- body/shape
- color
- Sound/speech/diction
- movement
- history/age as distance
- Context (high/low)
- The penguin:
  - Too many suits move in too many lines.
    They circle banquet tables, hawk-eyed,
    hunting crudites, canapés, bruscheta.
    Fingers ferry food — fish, perhaps — finding
    slack-jawed mouths already open,
    squawking at wayward children
    or bemoaning The Market,
    whatever that may be.
    At some point, who cares how long ago,
    death surfaced, claimed one, submerged again.
    Who knows how well they knew him,
    their backs turned, studiously
    deciding that he is no longer of them?
    one could never guess.
    We can say his suit was very fine, perhaps,
    that the room is tastefully furnished,
    the coffin silver, the bar, open,
    quite good, and none of them are drunk yet,
    or at least none look it.
    “Good man, good man,” they mutter,
    doing all they can to convince each other
    through well-rehearsed performances,
    that this must be the case.
    The silently bereaved already sit graveside.
Tigers and clouds
- Specific vs nonspecific
- Everything/everybody is a ratio of tigers to clouds
- Attention suggests worthiness, power, love
- Misdirection = conscious or unconscious
- Surprise = expectations
- The automatic brain says “That deserves
- Fact: the more numerous your specifics are, the more likely they are to be wrong or a lie (paper)