Ancient pcoet (2009)

DIONYSUS : 

Brekekekex koax koax— 

from you I’m catching your disease!

               -Aristophanes, The Frogs

In the realm of ancient comedy, where the essential vision remains to be reversibility, or the absence of absolute order in the universe, a god like Dionysius and a slave like Xanthias can exchange identities, even if for a moment, and divine speech can intersect with, or become one with animal language. Nonsensical noise, yet still maintaining a simulacrum of order, even over the level of art and music, the amphibian chorus nevertheless remains, and cannot be less than, an embodiment of divine logos. Here, nature itself, and its kingdom of inhuman sound, in surpassing human speech, is enclosed in an art form that represents in patterns of rhythmic lines that which we can hear but cannot comprehend .

Today, beyond the confines of art, and within a newer realm of writing, even this last envelop of order is abandoned, for a simulation of chaos, the multiple, and the unreadable. However, we no longer have nature nor the sacred as its indecipherable secret component; we already discarded the nostalgia for any mysticism or romanticism of the esoteric. What we are left with is the simple mechanism of a surface burdened with historical and political overdeterminations, and a culture captivated by its own semantic weight. To remimic the indecipherable, by some parodic use of valorized cultural forms, and to return it cold and resisting, by short-circuiting the patterns of hardened meanings, beyond the confines of themes, rhetoric, and imagery, and into the matter of language itself, is to renew a link with ancient comedy, and remember the reverse, or perverse, double of the sign.

Mtttr

MOCC IBEZ MHUX QNEA TUOI CICC IMEC

ZOFY SOGZ AUFB EVIC TEBL QWIF BUWU

OHFI IMYM KZYQR TEPH WRIO EGKK QSIY

SCYI RETY CMEX PSAS JUDT MOLF ZIRB 

WEWJ FHOH BWIH FOYP UYQR PYSE JIIM

GYJE IZFT MXUH AVPY CIZD ZQEW QEIFB

UQEM NOLN GHQG ANPY PIPY BIKY CTAF

VHER COAK TYNC SQYQ EWLH XIWV JADF

YMRT OHJV IMSR JUNV MOER OXIO SEIP 

JAHU FTOR SGIF AFAJ YUNE XUMO AURW

YQAK TKAF VOLY DHED HVAM ZJHB RUQN

UJEB EOGY CPAK HGIG RUUB DOZV ZEPL

NESN GIFA OALX SMYQ RILM JUQL VUHZ

FUHW ETTC GNAZ WYKL FAEM DEKI RIEK

CEFZ ZEAH TYIM RHUH IRRA EZEP TETO

GUSW ULLE XEUU MISK OADU SEZR GIXI

UFIJ NUHL MUVS RIAF MUPZ SSAR PESM 

ZLIW TEQC UYQC CIGX ZOSH WRET QIYA

PIJY OSRD GIHQ SROT URTI UOCU SYSM

OUSW KLON HOML KNAA XAXH OBMV EZIL

ETQU DUOJ ATSA GEWI KHIO NELZ BKOA

ZAOP GEEF FAEX CNOK KWIG CETE VUAJ

LADD IYAE EZTE UNFH FIRU SPZE LUOO 

APNK GYVM DYNT GHEO EZZT IUZO XETL

VIUS BWOE VEMI KWEP ZWIZ DERI QYEH 

CAUX AGUY DNIO JUCU OGKO HEAY RHWI

EBEA IWSY GYUH QIKR IAHD JONF HEWK

HYTS DIXB KZYT MIGH FTHE NAUN WREH

QEIR SPUG BEDN PYSE KMEC ONVU BREB

CUFU XUWZ POAK GNOW SGLI OEAX ZOUJ

AWHF  JUFS RANV PRYP FWEH IGRY VIUU

LYGR VENX EJEY JARP YKEN GULA VUCC

GAHZ KUBY ZNHO GLAF KOSQ VUZR FIWK 

CECU CZRO VICJ KOEQ UKOE NIQP PUAW 

TAQT POBM KIVR YIZD URZT UMUB ACOA 

FOSN OLWT XYWP GOBR DELG XUBE LACL

NYHC PTOV EVWA WUJR DEBE PYGM GWIN

IWKY USDZ MTTA KBHE GERF RJAP ZJAC

AONN SEMW UYGE AEIR BEEB ARWE PILM 

MYZE AGGO DAHS UAWN OZUM GCTD XIPA 

VUGV CUDE ALQL MAZO ENDN PAYG PREL

CLNO BACR IMIF PTAK ELKY JXEO JUSQ

UKDA XUHX TYLU EEXP IXMO SDAK YXGU 

ZUWY PEWQ POJIT EVWI KBUC DEXA EBET

ZJBG CIKR MIZF TBUK PIFS VUWD HURG

VISR AFWA PAQO OTME LASR KVIW BUUZ

ZHUN AZDL ZOCA FEFW MAWT IEOR OSBI

STUA DQZT CUXM LOID PWYY CEAL BEXN 

GVHA OASZ GRCX AKLA FEVZ  QYBI NAWX 

DUYR DOMN ZFEE KLYA KASN VIMC CRUH 

PHUL PEFO POEX NUIB CRHO ZEHY LYAG

DWUO UNRT SNUC UUBL VALO IMKI WHYN 

CEUY UQLT ENXY DAOW KEPX GULZ SAQG 

GLAE OWSS BAXD NAYL FOEK OCBY HYDN 

PRAP UHPI MYRC KUHM LJBO RULV PYNT

SLEB POHN LAVB ABME SOHB YERV AZEV

MYDG SQUY ZHYU GOXL NYGZ NRAE RIVM

KUHX DEVN TECP SUFE DOSZ DUZM ZMUS 

QOBS QIDY LELN SACN GNAA CAWZ VYLT

...

A feather likeness

Another peculiar phrase that I encountered recently was from a "poem" by Jackson Mac Low generated through a permutation of a part of Gertrude Stein's text from Tender Buttons. The title alone would probably make you pause: "A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair" (1999). As if the many lines in Stein's work don't sound strange enough for the ''common reader,'' Mac Low now decides to ''process" the "fifty-third paragraph of the book (exclusive of titles, etc), which begins, 'A fact is that when any direction is just like that, . . .' I selected the paragraph by random-digit chance operations using the RAND Corporation's table A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates." Mac Low continues to expound on his "method":

My source and seed texts came from the first edition of Tender Buttons, issued by Donald Evan's publishing house Claire Marie (1914), as posted online in The Bartleby Archive (1995) and The New Bartleby Library (1999), both edited by Steven van Leeuwen, with editorial contributions by Gordon Dahlquist. However, I incorporated in my file of Tender Buttons fourteen corrections written in ink in Stein's hand, which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition, now owned by the Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I "mined" the program's output for words which I included in 117 sentences (several elliptical and each one a verse line) by changes and/or additions of suffixes, pronouns, structure words, forms of "to be," etc. and changes of word order. Initially, in making these sentences, I placed lexical words' root morphemes near others that were near them in the raw output--in fact I included many phrases, and even whole verse lines, of unedited, though punctuated, output, mostly in early strophes--but I was able to do this less and less in the course of writing the poem. While composing the 117 verse-line sentences, I divided them into eight strophes that successively comprise numbers of sentences corresponding to the prime-number sequence 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19. 

-http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15566

We can easily note the care by which Mac Low chose the textual edition that he wanted to use, even including the "fourteen corrections written in ink in Steins's hand which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition," etc. I am really tempted to imagine a Borgesian tale with a Calvino-esque twist in this effort to make the anchoring of Mac Low's permutation of Stein's text as solid as possible through the recovery of the most precise and updated rendition of her writing. The permutation exercise must have its grounding in the most accurate version of the text, even to the extent of getting the copy that had the most authorial flavor of origin through a correction in ink by hand, which is the closest we can get to an autographed (and, therefore, official) copy of the book. We don't want anything less than the original set of words in the most original order so that we can be sure our permutation will indeed be that: a permutation, a new order of words undreamed of by Stein, a real version of it, and not a copy of its text. If we find a copy of her text that even had the slightest deviation, then we would already have a permutational text dated ahead of Mac Low's transformation. The care he took here is, indeed, justified.

From this ''definitive'' edition of the text, Mac Low then takes a section from it through a specified chance operation, then subjects this excerpt to a transformation using a diastic technique. This is followed by some editing whose grammatical rigor complements the mathematical impulse to pattern the results in strophes after the prime number sequence. As anyone would have remarked by now, this whole process of ''composition'' employed an antithetical pair of principles. On one end, we have the determination of the texte de départ as the most definitive textual origin from where a section was taken at random; on the other end, we have this part subjected to a rule-based word transformation aided by Hartman's chance program: "Eight strophes initially drawing upon the whole text of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. I sent the entire text through [Hartman’s] DIASTEX5..., his automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures." The meeting point in the texte d'arrivée of the extremes of randomized or arbitrary and structured procedures in writing illustrates a very paradoxical situation in the practice of aleatory poetics. 

This is probably not entirely surprising as a component of this ''method.'' In one way or another, we can see the same mixing of flavors from the very beginning of the use of "chance" procedures in pre-computational literary ''composition'' in Dadaism's Tristan Tzara himself:

POUR FAIRE UN POÈME DADAÏSTE

Prenez un journal

Prenez des ciseaux

Choisissez dans ce journal un article ayant la longueur que vous comptez donner à votre poème.

Découpez l'article

Découpez ensuite avec soin chacun des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-le dans un sac.

Agitez doucement

Sortez ensuite chaque coupure l'une après l'autre dans l'ordre où elles ont quitté le sac.

Copiez consciencieusement.

Le poème vous ressemblera.

Et vous voilà "un écrivain infiniment original et d'une sensibilité charmante, encore qu'incomprise du vulgaire."

The title could as well be rendered "How to make a poem or any text Dadaist." Interestingly, the paradigmatic source material suggested for this process comes from the definitive genre of factual writing governed by journalistic rules. The ''aesthetic procedure'' is then delivered in a number of mock-serious, step-by-step instructions worthy of the kitchen, simulating the rigors of orthodox composition. By reducing artistic creativity to a handful of repeatable steps or formulae, this user-manual a.k.a. recipe of success exploiting a ready-made language demolishes all the cherished myths that the age had of romantic agency, metaphysical order, and structured artistic composition. The pretended exhortations sprinkled in to mitigate the total arbitrariness of the process (to "shake gently," to ''take out the cuttings in the order they come out," and then to ''copy conscientiously") only succeeded to impress as a cosmic dose of superficial discipline and judiciousness. In addition, the jocular nature of these directives keeps us in an ambiguous state of reception; it is difficult to say how far they can be applied or practised.

True, the price to pay in the ''application'' of these Dadaist directives may involve the "end of intelligent writing," not only because this method tends to produce textual artifacts that go beyond poetic, epistemic and communicative paradigms of language, but also because it raises the suspicion that the final, solid or stable texts that have become more or less the point of reference in language and writing are themselves informed by an originary randomness and permutation (through reading). The rigorous steps that Mac Low followed in the finalization of the output text were nevertheless founded on an arbitrary take off point. Furthermore, the diastic approach he applied pulled out any word that just happened to have been written down in this or that line of the text by Stein herself, doubly illustrating through this variation whatever was meant by his selected starting point: "A fact is that when any direction is just like that." Hence, it would be more accurate to say that the Dadaist directive is actually less an aesthetic method to adopt or to apply than a characterization of the global absence of telos in language.

In the end, the rules that Mac Low applied rigorously, even the grammatical ones, are undermined by the arbitrary nature of his point of entry into the text. The very choice of what OULIPO-like literary permutational process to use is in itself as baseless as his employment of a set of random-digit chance operations through computational technology. The scientific tools that once were tightly tied to a deterministic view now become the very arena for the elaboration of complex transformations, and are being recruited to blur the distance in nature between meaningfully structured writing and meaninglessly aleatory linguistic variations. Much of what we also have currently in the realm of computer-generated texts or machine-aided asemia are replicating in this paradoxical space of an infinitely original (Latin, origo) language where chance and order have become very difficult to separate from one another.

Colorless green ideas

When Chomsky made the sentence ''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," he was illustrating through a sample how a string of language that we have not heard before can be produced by a speaker following the application of some governing rules or universal grammar. Whether a deep structure like this exists or not has been the subject of intense debate for decades, a complex controversy that I have neither the time nor the expertise to be involved with in a brief blog entry. What interests me here, other than the fact that a string like that can even be produced, is the way it reminds me of similar weird-sounding sentences or lines in literature.

In general, a sentence like ‘’Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’’ belongs to what we can dismiss as a member of the class of "nonsense" utterances, about which an anthology such as the one by Carolyn Wells exists. Again, broadly speaking, this type of nonsense also belongs to that sub-set which uses an "orthodox'' syntax and known lexis, distinguished from the second sub-set which no longer does. Among the known lines in Literature we can range under these two sets would be Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" which uses a familiar syntax with known and unknown words. We can argue that, despite the difficulty in determining the precise meaning of some new words and lines in the ''poem,'' anyone would still be able to recover some nonverbal meaning conveyed by the rhythms and sound effects of the piece, the same way that music does even in the absence of words. This allows the possibility to organize contests to ''semanticize'' the famous Chomskian sample. No matter how senseless it may be, some meanings can still be read into it, even if it may count as ''over reading'' (since the sentence is not of common usage).

However, what counts as weird or unfamiliar in language may just be a function of its currency in a given community or historical situation. I bet many people will also find English sentences as used in the 16th century weird or difficult to read, even nonsensical. We could also say the same thing to the varieties of English spoken around the world. There are expressions and vocabulary that an Englishman may use that an Australian may not understand, or vice versa. In short, we don't even need to go into Literature to look for weird sounding expressions because weirdness is a relative quality that is independent of any grammar, universal or not.

If we want to count all the weird expressions in a language, we may well be forced to include the majority of metaphors in everyday and literary domains. And in so far as all of language is metaphorical in nature whose weirdness had been forgotten (conceptual metaphors in Lakoff, etc.), we can even say that language itself by its very catachretic constitution, at the very bottom (or root, or any other figure that we may want to use), is informed by weirdness. It is no wonder that ostranenie or ''defamiliarization,'' by foregrounding once more this forgotten dimension of language, became a central defining technique of the ''poetic'' in the 20th century for literary criticism. The production of weird, unfamiliar language became the chief signature by which we could sense the presence of the poetic or the literary.

Of course, this is not a fool proof criterion. ''Context,'' this abstract term which we use to name all the known and unknown variables that inform the meaning of events, may not really serve as a default court of appeal since it is also unfortunately as unstable as any other scaffolding for semantic closure. However, for contrasts, it does help us understand why one expression in one time or place may sound weird or common in another. Defamiliarization is context-sensitive, so to speak. It is indeed conceivable for a writer or speaker to target a domain of expression that has the widest demographic denominator to maximize the impact of ostranenie. Some ''coinage'' have become common usage, and many others remained unable to attain this linguistic pleasure. (Just look at Shakespeare.) ''Transparent language'' is just a more epistemically-loaded way of labeling familiar and commonly used expressions. That is why we find it disturbing yet amusing when Ionesco or Beckett progressively deprives these common everyday expressions of sense in their Absurdist works.

Going back a little further, I recall Breton and the surrealists using a similar procedure of juxtaposition of incongruous terms. Look at some of the lines from ''Union libre ou Ma femme.'' 

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

Aux pensées d'éclairs de chaleur

A la taille de sablier

Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre

Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d'étoiles de

dernière grandeur

Aux dents d'empreintes de souris blanche sur la terre blanche

A la langue d'ambre et de verre frottés

Ma femme à la langue d'hostie poignardée

A la langue de poupée qui ouvre et ferme les yeux

A la langue de pierre incroyable...

If you jumble up all the things the wife is being likened to, it would be a monstrous thing. The wife here becomes a field of intersection in language, following the surrealist aesthetic of incongruous juxtaposition. This free union simply enacts the same process by which linguistic elements are conjoined to produce speech, only symbolically exaggerated to foreground and to contrast it with the constrained set of union we have come to know as transparent and literalized language. Capable of being described by any metaphorical set, the object ''wife'' suddenly becomes indescribable. André Breton writes:

[T]hese elements are, on the surface, as strange to you as they are to anyone else, and naturally you are wary of them. Poetically speaking, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, the quality of this absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world: the disclosure of a certain number of properties and of facts no less objective, in the final analysis, than the others...

We don't need to subscribe to the underpinning ideas of surrealist psychology to visibly appreciate the effects of defamiliarization in these ''poetic abuses'' of (an already catachretic) language. Quoting Reverdy, Breton explains for us the mechanics behind this linguistic weirdness: ''The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.''

Whatever radicalized form or method writing may take on today (well over the eroded notions of powerful ''images'', ''emotions'', or ''poetic reality''), it would still remind us of this primary combinatory process, even if it pushes us beyond the very substance of language itself in all its orthodox formations and conceptualizations. What may be closest could have taken us so far, and what is so familiar could in the end be a stranger we have met by chance.