  Connections, of the kind alluded to here—a web of variously-activated relations between the particular aspect of the work to which we are presently attending and other aspects, other parts of the work, or other works, groups of works, or other artists, genres, styles, or other human experiences in all their particularity—may include what we call associations awakened by the work, but connections are not reducible to them only (and certainly not to undisciplined, random, highly subjective, or free  associations).[7]  The impossibility of the simplifying subtractive template emerges here as well: “Suppose [someone says]: ‘Associations are what matter—change it slightly and it no longer has the same associations’. But can you separate the associations from the picture, and have the same thing?” The answer is clearly, again like the case of the singing with and then without expression above, negative: “You can't say: ‘That's just as good as the other: it gives me the same associations’” (Wittgenstein 1966, 34). Here again, Wittgenstein shows the great gulf that separates what we actually do with, what we actually say about, works of art, and how we would speak of them if the conceptual pictures and templates with which he has been doing battle were correct. To extend one of Wittgenstein's examples, we would very much doubt the aesthetic discernment, and indeed the sympathetic imagination and the human connectedness, of a person who said of two poems (each of which reminded him of death) that either will do as well as the other to a bereaved friend, that they would do the same thing (where this is uttered in a manner dismissive of nuance, or as though it is being said of two detergents). Poetry, Wittgenstein is showing, does not play that kind of role in our lives, as the nature and character of our critical verbal interactions about it indicate. And he ascends, momentarily, to a remark that characterizes his underlying philosophical methodology (or one dimension of it) in the philosophy of language that is being put to use here within the context of his lectures on aesthetics: “If someone talks bosh, imagine the case in which it is not bosh. The moment you imagine it, you see at once it is not like that in our case” (Wittgenstein 1966, 34). The gulf that separates what we should say if the generalizing templates were accurate from what we in actual particularized cases do say could further call into question not only the applicability or accuracy, but indeed the very intelligibility, of the language used to express those templates, those explanatory pictures. Wittgenstein leaves that more aggressive, and ultimately more clarifying and conceptually liberating, critique for his work on language and mind in Philosophical Investigations (1958) and other writings, but one can see from these lectures alone how such an aggressive critique might be undertaken.