--In piece no. 13 of No Thanks, as it is often elsewhere with Cummings' penchant for tmesis, simultaneity and seriality are placed in tandem, as if language was forced to confront the very irresolvable dialectic informing its temporary movement in phonographic solution space. Why do we need a solution space? It’s less a question of need than what is simply an encounter, a disjunctive encounter, the arrival of the gap and the metaphoric dimension of the sign as a stopgap measure, the solution which simply puts the gap in sharper focus or perpetuates it, prolongs it, by plotting one (re)solution after another.
--Paradigmatic vs syntagmatic crowding, as if slots for letters had more space for just one, so that a polyphonic stream is filtered to derive the normal word morphology and syntax. Thus simultaneity demands a compromise in serial space where several signals can coexist and must be parsed into their common morphological grouping. Syllables, affixes, phonetic groups, syntax groups, or a unilinear sentence or IPs, no longer command primary aesthetic lodging in syntagmatic chain, but must compete for priority with the virtual crowd in the paradigmatic background. As if Cummings was illustrating an algorithm of linguistic online processing, the pre-utterance cognitive neural mass going through the neat grid of the Symbolic order. Everything is free grapheme, only ASGrs set the conditions to bind them. This is why the iconic is the grammatical and vice versa for Cummings (cf grammatical metaphors). In solution space, all graphemes are free until a regime of signs grids them.
--The in/famous grasshopper poem can be seen less as a mimesis of the kinetic or a visual onomatopoeia or isomorphism between graphic prosody and motion, than the provision of the space of reading motions where the recombinatory logic of semiotic notation is foregrounded and reactivated. In short, a diagram of lexicogenesis in reading motions. We are returned to a metaprosodic stance where verbal and graphic equivalences are being invoked for reconstitution in their pragmatic and informational equivalences or parallelisms. It is moving closer to the simulation of interactivity as the spacing of reading motion, returning us to the productive moment where segments and supersegments are reconstructed out of nonsegmentarity, where linearity and nonlinearity become metaprosodic options for the reconstruction of the writing system in graphematic solution space. A writerly grammatogeny, instead of a readerly one. Tinkering with the writing system’s solution spaces in a more explicit manner, above the implicit infrathin differences we introduce with each deformance, by reconfiguring its forms, order, disposition, direction, appearance, relations, values, operations, functions, organization, categories, combinations, tactics, and so on.
--Running against the monocular unilinear voice. Polyphony. One line at a time is too limiting. Multi tasking. An utterance is a crowd, parsed through an algorithm of priorities. Parentheticals as the compromise in syntagmatic chain or line, emphasis on orthogonal paradigmatic field, the simultaneous vs the serial. Metrical grid is dominantly serial syntagm. Cummings grid overlays it with the paradigmatic mass coexisting pt by pt in synchrony with the overmarked line. Line within a line, multiple syntactic processes running side by side, criss crossing, interacting, commenting on and in dialogue with each other. Such multiple articulation interlacing and implicating each other pushes the limit of the glottographic resources of the graphematic solution space. Cacophony is managed by recourse to nonglottographic prosody, letting the eye pick out the multiple interlacing syntax via scriptly signatures.
--The graphemic morphotactic arrangement of < grasshopper > would seem to be a commentary on the eventuality of the arrival of standard orthography and lexeme, representing the direction which looks like the telos of becoming in which linguistic elements and beings coincide in an isomorphic mapping format. Three timelines intersect in the space of reading, the event being divisible among the syntactic grammar of Subject, Verb, and Object (spectator, process, spectacle). The directionality of writing as a linear narrative frame against which the process of arrangement happens, a sort of slow motion frame of literacy. The grasshopper poem is diagrammatic mapping where the aesthetic entities we call word, line, sentence, syllable, CV, directionality, page, stanza, paragraph, letters, punctuation, syntax, morpheme, phoneme, and so on emerge as perceptible objects in the dynamic space of reading.
