A few weeks ago, Ange asked:

Are there ways in which poetry could or does both exploit its own dif­fi­culty as well as its plea­sures (prosodic, sen­sual, scenic) to max­i­mize its poten­tial as a unique cul­tural product—a “super-stimulus”—that can make us smarter and more sympathetic?

Today I came across a week-​old arti­cle in the Boston Globe that sug­gests one way to start answer­ing the ques­tion. Drake Ben­nett reports on research in cog­ni­tive flu­ency, “a mea­sure of how easy it is to think about something.” A fair amount of the research sounds like the sci­en­tific for­mal­iza­tion of common sense, and the pri­mary result of the stud­ies can hardly count as novel or sur­pris­ing: our brains like to take the easy route when­ever pos­si­ble. “Fluency is an adap­tive shortcut,” Ben­nett writes. “According to psy­chol­o­gists, it helps us appor­tion lim­ited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our atten­tion and we have to quickly figure out which are worth think­ing about.”

More inter­est­ing is the way dis­flu­ency can be put to pro­duc­tive use, which smacks more than a little of Adorno’s defense of artis­tic and philo­soph­i­cal difficulty:

From today’s Times:

Some experts say that emis­sions from air­line travel are simply so large that it may be impos­si­ble to offset them.

“Buying off­sets is a nice idea, just like giving money to a soup kitchen is a nice idea, but that doesn’t end world hunger,” said Anja Koll­muss, a staff sci­en­tist for the Stock­holm Envi­ron­ment Insti­tute who is based at a branch at Tufts University.

“Buying off­sets won’t solve the prob­lem because flying around the way we do is simply unsus­tain­able,” said Ms. Koll­muss, who has researched air­line offsets.

A recent study in Britain con­cluded that one flight from London to Los Ange­les pro­duced more carbon diox­ide per person than the aver­age British com­muter pro­duces in a year by trav­el­ing by train, subway or car.

Also, from The Awl:

If to imag­ine a lan­guage is to imag­ine a form of life, what do the dead metaphors & clichés of a lan­guage tell us about the par­tic­u­lar form of life it cod­i­fies? Some­thing like this ques­tion seems to moti­vate John Coetzee’s lan­guage in Lesson 3 of Eliz­a­beth Costello, “The Lives of Ani­mals: The Philoso­phers and the Animals.” Like Paul Muldoon—whose poem for a friend with AIDS employs the stock phrases “for crying out loud” &, repeat­edly, “for the love of Mike”—Coetzee is alert to the latent poten­tial­ity of cliché. He repur­poses, revi­tal­izes, rein­vig­o­rates the laxest forms of speech, call­ing our atten­tion to their lit­eral senses, long buried beneath acquain­tance & use.

Henry pitched his tone very low in his love of nature—not on stars & suns … but tor­toises, crick­ets, muskrats, suck­ers, toads & frogs. It was impos­si­ble to go lower. Yet it gave him every advan­tage in con­ver­sa­tion: For who that found him always skilled in facts, real expe­ri­ence in objects which made their objects & expe­ri­ences appear arti­fi­cial, could tax him with tran­scen­den­tal­ism or over-​refining: And yet his posi­tion was in Nature, & so com­manded all its mir­a­cles & infinitudes.

—Emer­son, in his journals

***

Henry pitch his tone so low —
not on stars & sun —
on muskrat, sucker, frog & toad.
Who more low than that,
Mr. Bones’d like to know.
Tri­umphant Henry in palaver!