Pursch's language blabatories

wa ys t o m a ke n o [n] se ns e  an d th en t he re ar e w a ys

not to make nonsen sema ybe w[ hy n ot]

. If one ask s 1’ll never know.

                                                --POME, Billy Bob Beamer

The subject of sense and nonsense is always expansive in any given direction. In addition, the very opposition between these terms becomes more interesting only when their simple antinomy is made complicated to the point where their regions collide and interchange depending on your point of view. The tenuousness of their borders is emphasized further by compositions that stylistically employ neologisms or unknown lexis, reframing a familiar language or alphabet into something unreadable, perhaps simulating the experience of illiteracy in our initial encounter with a new or foreign language; or, at its most extreme, implying that language, when detached from arbitrary meanings, is at its core really illegible, making us all foreigners even within the languages we inhabit.

Some of the recent output of a writer like John Pursch could at first be seen to be nonsense writing similar to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." Here is an excerpt from "Blabatorie" written in 2012:

Knowuce gwan ovahau wiekemta beloifin raunda wholata sauntar uvan edmottley vibrand spoddy cellt lustonulas; a sprole widahoel endamottle, whar doomdownie yousdabie. Onklar haueet umploted, darty blump ernacticle uke, erbayme afen akolliper eccidon etasucret blabatori, prapsan augspearamen gwanaribly wrayie. Murour hezeedat dagubermint ocarse nosall dadoitals undet’s phlarubav soptoicrate, oonlietaboy deglossed einehandheartears. Petwonken spaucalet undewa leedleseardge uvwhen’s awn, eenda chlopious fleamite deauvergie denizer hosawailtuem deezdaze.

True, we can recognize some phantom strings from different languages. In fact, as an experiment, if you paste samples of his texts on Google translate, the software would identify the writing to be in one of the known languages. It could be French, German, or Spanish, even Latin or Greek. In the case of our excerpt, it is supposedly English. What at first glance may just be nonsense literature could actually fall under a writing done using a constructed language (conlang, for short). If it is some sort of conlang, if it is one, it would have the support of an official group or would be part of an on-going development by a community much like Esperanto or Lojban. If it is not, maybe it could be a fictional language somewhere that Pursch picked up and retooled. If it falls under neither, we can safely assume it is some kind of "private" invention awaiting clarification. Pursch would just need a minimum set of grammar to push this private language towards becoming a conlang.

However, if there is some kind of Oulipian or permutational play here and we are simply tasked to decipher the code so that we can extract the "real" natural language behind it, or if it is an alteration of a previous source text, then these factors would just lay out for us a path of discovery from nonsense to sense, where we are simply reversing the writer's trajectory. The reader's position as puzzle-solver is once again established, albeit on a new level. Instead of representing meanings, nonsense texts like these could be seen as second-order signs representing a hidden language. Before knowing what it says, we are tasked to recognize if it is at all any one of known languages in the world, natural or constructed, or a mixture of both.

Whatever approach we take, one thing remains invariable: we are dealing with writing in unknown words and language. The presence of unknown words doesn't automatically classify the text as purely nonsensical. We can say, at the limit, that this kind of text suspends the arrival of sense because the resources that we apply with known writing, our interpretative or reading tools, just won't apply anymore. We can, of course, "feel" the musical and sonic or textural dimensions of the text, and re-establish the equivalences we learned between sound and sense. Nevertheless, we are not assured that this won't have a cultural bias or re-inject the caricature of a chart of parallel sonic, rhythmic, and semic values.

Grammar and syntax are equally indescribable. Unlike a nonsense line like "The gostak distims the doshes" or "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe" where accepted word-order and core phonotactics or morphotactics echo that of just one (historically-hybrid) language like English, Pursch's text above isn't so conforming, even multiplying the terrain of flexibilities natural languages are allowed to be capable of to include compounds that we often ally with meaningless blabbery or glossolalia. The minimum order we get is a beginning and an end where at least the arrow of reading is observed. This is the minimal motion that we can follow. Beyond being drawn, being tempted, into this direction, the textual artifact leaves us with very little else, as if we were before an ancient or future set of unreadable symbols recalling ghostly memories of bits and pieces of languages. If it could be argued that "no current theory of grammar is capable of distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones," then who can say that a set of "new sentences" is not part of any language?

After all, the "language" we have come to know may just represent the tip of a much larger universe of unofficial forms that will remain meaningless by convention. Isn't this (immeasurably larger) illegible realm a required part of the whole economy of the sign, without which sense could not happen? Isn't this the very spring from which sensible language draws its resources, and against which it has no real antinomial property? This would make the "language" we know as necessarily fragmentary, like the metapoetic style used by Billy Bob Beamer in numerous pieces like fragm epresiPOME[s, where choppy lines of text recreate this experience "artificially" within an art form supposedly representing the height of linguistic form and performance.

In this babble-like textual mélange of familiar alphabets, vaguely familiar echoes of lexical fragments, and abundantly unfamiliar neologisms, any recognizable language, structure, grammar, or meaning becomes a very limited, relative, and unstable realm in the world of fictional ideas. In their place we have Pursch's language laboratory, where linguisticity is always inaugural, and centerless morphemic and phonemic jouissance still reigns supreme, above and beyond intractable questions of sense or nonsense.