According to Octavio Paz and Claude Lévi-Strauss
"Poetry…. conceives of the text as a series of transparent strata
within which the various parts—the different verbal and semantic
currents— produce momentary configurations as they intertwine
or break apart, as they reflect each other or efface each other.
Poetry contemplates itself, fuses with itself, and obliterates itself
in the crystallizations of language. Apparitions, metamorphoses,
volatilizations, precipitations of presences. These configurations
are crystallized time…."
— Octavio Paz in The Monkey Grammarian (written in 1970)
"Strata" also seem to underlie the Lévi-Strauss "canonic formula" of myth
in its original 1955 context, described as that of permutation groups —
I do not recommend trying to make sense of the above "formula."
Related material —
