My Big Idea

Requires a few concepts as given:

That language is a mediator between different peoples' thoughts.
That thought is continuous (in the data sense, not the time sense).
That words (and therefore language) are discrete (data sense again).
That the right choices of words (skill with language) can effectively mediate thoughts from person A to person be as precisely and effectively as possible.

Therefore, appeals to common knowledge/ allusions/ word-associations in poetry and prose act as 'keys' in effective language.

So:

1.) My thoughts in my head are continuous data, like a sine wave.
2.) If I, unskillfully, try to explain my thoughts, it doesn't translate to someone else as continuous, but a disjointed sine wave, with steps and gaps.
3.) With more skill (or appeals to common knowledge/ impressions), not necessarily more words, the thoughts can be represented in the other people's head, relatively exactly.

This clearly nothing new, but it's how I think of good writers - and especially SoC writers like Woolf/ Joyce - they manage to mediate thoughts with only words, to re-present those thoughts in their readers' heads, so that the point of the piece of writing is re-created in its entirety to the reader.

The kind of skill in writing that can do this to an idea is of course present in all forms of writing, but it is primarily in SoC writing that the sense of the idea, of interiority, is re-presented so clearly, so accurately.

NB - I often think in graphs regardless of their being values (belief systems/ numerical places or otherwise) at stake. I think the analogy here is thoughts/ words with continuous data/ discrete data, that is, i) a complete set of values on an interval (continuous), ii) separate and distinct data (discrete) i.e. - separable- data.

Of course, the idea of the word as a unit of data only works well if words are "stripped of the dull patina of use", as William Caros Williams said. Again, there are links to Modm and the rejection of associated and implied meanings for words...

Also ties here to postmodernism (again) but the sense is the same, to "make it new", to stop writers being lazy and relying on years of connotative meanings for words.

Cf. ->Stein as a modernist: "A rose is a rose is a rose..." In a circle. This is what a rose is.


Update (after receiving comments on the above): I suppose, in the above example, a text (pure text) would be just language written down, the language-as-object that can be consumed. Just a physical way of mediating thoughts.
And the idea of 'noise' as well: It's very important, to be sure. Just very hard to quantify. Perhaps with translations it would be easier to compare a few different translations of the same source text. cf Pound talking about "not blocking the road" while translating, not using more than "say 4%" unneccessary "verbiage", or "blanks".
And it's a good point to compare this to Pound in the direct presentations of the image. Imagism is all about reducing the noise.