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Chiasmus as production: A Commentary on Five Verses from the Book of Job (6th century BCE)

[painting: Guido Reni’s Le Triomphe de Job, 1622]

Commentary on Book 10: 8-13:

ח יָדֶיךָ עִצְּבוּנִי, וַיַּעֲשׂוּנִי; יַחַד סָבִיב, וַתְּבַלְּעֵנִי.

8. Your hands carved and made me round about; and yet You destroy me!

“Your hands”, the creating hands (yad, יָדֶיךָ) of Eloah: this commentary follows five verses which move – question by question – from the creator’s hands to His heart. The hands reach over from the previous verse, “there is none who saves from your Hand” (10: 7), where they imply that Eloah, who knows that Job is not guilty, still tests and shapes with hands unable to let life live. ‘Picking up the word “hand” from the end of the previous verse is a bridge to a new segment,’ notes Robert Alter [1], and in this repetition-as-join the hands flicker and shape the structure of the poem – they are open (yad: directing, creative hands, as opposed to closed hands) and they destroy; the dialectic of the hand to heart movement opens up immediately: the destruction is double – wrapped in the inevitable span of a life is a second, doubtful kernel, in which life is caught by the hands which shaped and animated it, destroyed by the “round about” motion which first creates and then distorts and destroys. The circling is cabiyb, which spins the first verset’s pairing of creation verbs – the materiality of atsab , carving, fashioning, followed by the generalised making, doing of asah. The movement between shaping substance and making from nothing, both circling round about, spectrally recalls and abstracts a pair of key metaphors before subsequent verses make them explicit: bread kneaded by hands, and clay circling on a wheel. The ‘round about’ becomes destruction – for which the Job poet’s choice of bala, literally to ‘swallow up’, fits with the idea (in early Jewish commentaries) that humankind is an offering: bread which rises to be eaten by God. In the exegetical writings of Genesis Rabbah (written circa 300 to 500 CE) a duality in creation between dust / clay, and breath, is synthesised in bread [2]. The ‘swallowing up’ also indicates the journey into the interior of God which these lines will follow, from hand to heart.

ט זְכָר-נָא, כִּי-כַחֹמֶר עֲשִׂיתָנִי; וְאֶל-עָפָר תְּשִׁיבֵנִי.

9. Remember, I pray, that like clay You worked me; and to dust You will make me return.

Mark, remember – zakar – I ask you. Job’s request is one of radical doubt: to ask God to remember, with the reader, the words of Genesis chapter 2. And beyond this earlier text, only Eloah can remember both the creation of all and of Job, and remember the future – dust is this memory’s material: aphar, the word ‘dust’ from Genesis 2:7 when the Elohim formed the human from the dust of the ground, and the dust to which Job and all humans will return. This fusion of divine and textual memory is the ground of the theodicy here: Saadiah reads this line according to a circular logic of faith – the Creator can’t forget by definition, so the remembering can only be a loop of the speaker back to themselves, ‘Remember, I pray,’ the inner speech of prayer: ‘I referred the expression to the creature, since forgetting and then recalling is inapplicable to the Creator’ [3]. If there is a gap between the promise of God’s just world, and the world as experienced, then this gap is the gap between remember asked of God, and remember asked, prayerfully, to oneself. The latter, following a faithful loop, must believe in the causal links which aren’t apparent – which connect the dust of creation with that of death in one view – but which are unperceivable by definition, because ‘meaning doesn’t catch up with life’ as Gabriel Josipovici comments on Job [4], echoing Job’s own comforter, Bildad: ‘We are yesterday, unknowing…’ (8: 8) It is also the gap between a Temple text recalled, and the actual, communicable pain of the present – the process of dusty return, shuwb, – of the world as lived, for which the metaphor of clay – chomer (bubbling up, a wave of the earth) remains inert and tied to the earlier text, unable to come to life in a material present. The next verse will transform chomer to chalab, milk, trying to come awake one metaphor closer to the de-eternalised time of subsistence.

י הֲלֹא כֶחָלָב, תַּתִּיכֵנִי; וְכַגְּבִנָּה, תַּקְפִּיאֵנִי.

10. Have You not poured me out as milk; and as cheese curdled me?

From breath-infused clay to curdling: from a mystery to a process, ‘creation stretches in time to become the beginning of an individual story’ as Jean Lévêque puts it [5]. I was poured out as milk, then in the chiasmatic crossing back a curdling into cheese created me, my form. It’s an image invoking sex and semen, as Sa’adiah elucidated in the 10th century [6], and embryonic creation – locating, and personalising the creation of all and one in clay – the duality of clay and breath is crossed back over itself into the process of a life poured out, and a body curdled: the salting and pressing of curdled milk. The Job poet favours chiasmus as a signature pattern: here, it is as if Job is claiming a power from Eloah – that in his speech he can mimic creation, just as his simile drawn from physical existence brings in a merely and only human creative process. The pull of continual creation in the world against the singular original creative act of God, and the death to come, plays out in commentaries as a puzzle of milk’s liquidity: Gregory’s Moralia focuses on the spirit, analogous to water, which turns clay into flesh – the same spirit which curdles milk into life; while Rashi notes simply that the line concerns ‘the drop from which I was born’ [7]. Given Job’s rage against an unjust creator, the dairy simile is already tinged with mockery – the clarity of breath and clay blurred in a more violent squeezing of acidic curds. The answer to this verse’s implied question might be: no, You didn’t pour me out, the merely human world of subsistence carries me. And in this new gap – between human capability and the world of Eloah the unjust divine shaper, a utopian impulse rises from the pastures. As Ernst Bloch writes of Job: ‘His dreams rise out beyond himself to a different life, a better way than the one he sees; he no longer understands the wretched world.’ [8] Those dreams appear as acute invocations of the material world, breaking into the wisdom of the proverbs and, here, the text of Genesis, stretching their structures and syntax to break around the present. The first responses to the line are found in the Book of Job itself, where the idea that Job can find a present insight into creation itself is first mocked by the comforter Eliphaz, who reasserts the total story which God only knows, “Are you the first man who was born; or were you born before the hills?” (15: 7), and then by God, who wonders, with heavy divine irony: “Where were you when I founded earth?” (38: 4).

יא עוֹר וּבָשָׂר, תַּלְבִּישֵׁנִי; וּבַעֲצָמוֹת וְגִידִים, תְּשֹׂכְכֵנִי.

11. With skin and flesh You clothed me; with bones and sinew entwined me.

The parallel pairing of labash (clothed) and cacak (entwined) sound within a matrix of consonance across the poem: echoing at this moment from the zaw of remembrance (zakar) at the start of verse 9, and onwards to the aw root for making in the next verse (asah). Clothing and entwining are parallel names for hollowness – both capture, structure, make visible, but they are not the being and substance of form: in the textual recall to Genesis of verse 9 the suffix me (ינִ) is declared a likeness to clay and dust; in verse 10, it’s embedded into milk and curdling – the is of human power and production, close here to Negri’s supposition that “Job is the power of man on earth: social, constructive power — he is production, collective labor that becomes value” [9], and who shall measure the worth of milk or the time of a human life; and now, what am I, if flesh clothes me and bones entwine me, and where am I, if my voice still cries out through the parallel pairing of sounds which bind back to memory and carry the root of making? The me escapes and, less than a gap, its void propels the reader on to the next verse to find its interior substance.

יב חַיִּים וָחֶסֶד, עָשִׂיתָ עִמָּדִי; וּפְקֻדָּתְךָ, שָׁמְרָה רוּחִי.

12. Life and loyalty You made with me; and Your precept my spirit kept.

Life and kindness course through me and are created with me – I am of their substance – and this is the answer to the hollowness of the last verse: this duality is alliterative – chay and chesed, perhaps caught better in a translation as life and loyalty – and both are created along with the form of humans, the shape of me. The making here also echoes and ends the consonance of aw sounds (asah) which buzzed around the suffix me in preceding verses. But this new-found dialectic runs immediately into absolute ambiguity: Biblical syntax lets loose subject and object here to switch around, precept keeping spirit and my spirit keeping God’s precept (despite God’s contradictory paranoia) in a live chiasmus of the human against God, a syntactical struggle of God’s suffering and Job’s scorn for the divine. “12b is often treated wrongly by commentators who, lacking the requisite courage, reverse subject and object,” writes Fokkelman [10]. Alter agrees on this reversal of preceding translations, but for reasons of context not courage: “the formulation sounds like several lines in Psalm 119, where it is the human being, or his spirit, who keeps God’s precept” [11]. Laws are kept alive by those who observe them. When syntax won’t choose, it’s a puzzle of faith and usage for interpreters. You made me with loyalty, the first half of the line states; and so I kept your law, I couldn’t do anything else – I was a vessel for it, as the alliteration of chay and chesed had intimated at an inseparable intermixing of substance and law. The verb to keep, shamar, can be read in light of a suffering, paranoid God as watching or spying: the root of the word is to hedge about; to protect with thorns [12].

יג וְאֵלֶּה, צָפַנְתָּ בִלְבָבֶךָ; יָדַעְתִּי, כִּי-זֹאת עִמָּךְ.

13. Yet these things You hid in your heart; I knew that this was with You.

We have moved inside God – from the repetition of thy hand five verses ago, which announced a new section, shelling divinity to the heart, lebab, such that your heart can be spelled out. But where, textually, are these things spelled out? Does God’s heart lie above, already cited in the text, or is the spelling out of the things in that heart still to come – sufferings under the creator’s iniquity which Job lists next? Following the live chiasmus of verse 12, the resolution to this is another pivot of syntactical faith. These reversals are a power of the text: the unresolvable chiasmus and the undimmed potential for reversals of sense which shadow it are the linguistic force of atheism carried with and made from the same substance as faith, a dialectic which Ernst Bloch charted: ‘it is really in the Book of Job that the great reversal of values begins – the discovery of Utopian potency within the religious sphere: that a man can be better, and behave better, than his God. Job has not just stepped aside from his cult and his community—his attitude is one of definite, unambiguous attack.’ [13] In a strong statement of the received ordering, Aquinas reads the heart as hiding the previous lines’ citations to creation – the text of Genesis; the chiasmus of milk and form; and the live paradox of precept and spirit: ‘Now God is said by analogy with man to conceal something in His heart when He does not show through an effect what He has in His knowledge or affection. So, therefore, he says that God conceals in His heart the things cited before, since it is not shown in effect that He recognizes as His making one whom He seems to cast down so unexpectedly’ [14]. But the movement of sense is against this faithful grain – the momentum of Job’s cry pushes us on to expect that the end of this line is a threshold: what we read next will be written inside the creator’s heart, revealed to Job in his flesh and his labour, in his pain, such that, syntactically, if God exists and is good, then we are drawn backwards into the poem, but if not, or if the struggle continues, we look forwards to the present.

Notes

[1] Alter, Robert, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes (Norton, 2010), p48

[2] Neusner, Jacob, Confronting Creation: How Judaism Reads Genesis (Wipf and Stock, 2004), p71

[3] Saadiah Ben Joseph Al Fayyūmī, The Book of Theodicy: A Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job, trans. L. E. Goodman (Yale University Press, 1988), p231

[4] Josipovici, Gabriel, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (Yale University Press, 1990), p288

[5] Lévêque, Jean, Job ou le drame de la foi [Job, or the Drama of Faith] (Cerf, 2007), p215. Original text: ’la création s’étire dans le temps et devient le commencement d’une histoire individuelle’

[6] Saadiah, The Book of Theodicy, p231

[7] Gregory’s Moralia, sive Expositio in Job was written between 578 and 595. Text of Rashi’s commentary on Job at https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/16412/jewish/Chapter-10.html (accessed 1st June 2018)

[8] Bloch, Ernst, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. Peter Thompson (Verso, 2009), p155

[9] Negri, Antonio, The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor, trans. Matteo Mandarini (Duke University Press, 2009), p83; orig. emph.

[10] Fokkelman, Jan P, The Book of Job in Form: A Literary Translation with Commentary (Brill, 2012), p221

[11] Alter, Robert, The Wisdom Books, p48

[12] Etymological grist to the Christological mills of those theologians who want to read Job as a precursor to Jesus

[13] Bloch, Ernst, Atheism in Christianity, p94

[14] Aquinas, Thomas, The Literal Exposition on Job: A Scriptural Commentary Concerning Providence, trans. Anthony Damico (Oxford University Press, 2009), p189

Huang Chao 黄巢 / flower against flower / 835-884 c.870

Huang Chao (835-884) was a scholar-rebel. Failing the entrance exam for the civil service, he turned to salt smuggling. The large smuggling networks combined with farmers and land-owners hit by drought to form the organisation for an armed peasant revolt against the Tang rulers in 875. Huang Chao led a rebellion which eventually captured the capital, and he declared himself emperor. Although Huang Chao’s occupation of Chang’an was overturned in 884, the revolt fatally weakened the Tang dynasty. Huang also wrote a small number of poems.

不第后赋菊 (Bù Dì Hòu Fù Jú)

待到秋来九月八， (Dài dào qiū lái jiǔ yuè bā)

我花开后百花杀。 (Wǒ huā kāi hòu bǎi huā shā)

冲天香阵透长安， (Chōng tiān xiāng zhèn tòu cháng’ān)

满城尽带黄金甲。 (Mǎn chéng jǐn dài huáng jīn jiǎ)

Failing the examination, or Chrysanthemums

Waiting for autumn to come, eighth of the ninth month,

My flowers bloom, then a hundred flowers die.

Bursts of fragrance pierce the skies of Chang’an,

The entire city coated in golden armour.

A threat of armed revolt within a quatrain and a season: there’s only one day left before the ninth day of the ninth month, recoded as the day of uprising. The poem is in suspension, beginning with ‘waiting’ (待, dài) which neatly rhymes with arrival (来, lái) at either end of the first tetrasyllabic unit (the upper four), just as the next season arrives and the autumn festival will be tomorrow. In the quatrain of seven character lines (qijue), the second line adds understanding to what the first line brought into being. My flowers (我花) immediately recodes the context; this autumn poem is abstracted by the first person. Its autumn is a prophetic one, hollowing out the literary idea of the festival and of chrysanthemums with a fragrant contempt: the historical nostalgia of Du Fu seeing chrysanthemums bloom for the second time, Tao Qin plucking chrysanthemums beneath the eastern fence, or the longed-for return to the golden chamber of home in Wang Changling, a thousand poems of the Tang dynasty provide the shell of Huang Chao’s turn to the future, his call to arms and his contempt for Tang power. The second line pits flower against flower across the two segments: my flowers blooming, countless, and a hundred flowers dying, an uprising of numbers which leaves any evocation of faded summer and refulgent autumn in the repetition of huā – flower 花which is grass艹 plus change 化 – turned towards the decapitation of the Tang elite, a power which had lost its purchase: “The actual elimination of the old families resulted from a virtual class war, due to the rise of new bases of power outside the imperial bureaucracy,” Mark Edward Lewis writes in China’s Cosmopolitan Empire (p206, see note). Huang infuses the flower with his own name, Huang (黄,yellow), in the next line’s location of the same structure in Chang’an, the capital city, as the flower’s fragrance soars in the first segment, and pierces / moves through Chang’an, just as chrysanthemums were added to wine on the festival day and beer was blossom-infused over a year. A revolutionary subjectivity – unifying the very air or space of communication in the entire city (满城, mǎn chéng), that is, the city with no other space for alternative power – flickers in the poem’s festival to come as name, force and season converge to turn Huang’s body into a word and his name into the future, the poet as emperor in waiting. In the last segment of the poem, three characters track this fusion, the yellow of chrysanthemum turning to gold, the gold of a new age and the glinting of armour which covers the capital as fragrance shimmers into the shine of a clasp: huáng jīn jiǎ, 黄yellow, 金golden, 甲armour.

Note:

“The old elite families might have survived this physical massacre, but they could not survive the revolution in attitudes that underlay it,” as Mark Edward Lewis further notes (China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty, Harvard University Press: 2012).

/Edmund Hardy 2018

Leigh Hunt / the Book of Love / 1816

And o’er the book they hung, and nothing said,

And every lingering page grew longer as they read.

(Leigh Hunt, from ‘The Story of Rimini’, Canto 3, published 1816)

The book over which Paolo and Francesca silently hang is the Romance of Lancelot. Nothing said: hanging there, the present is pre-figured and encompassed by an earlier text, a particular fulfilment of the past in the present which Eric Auerbach termed ‘figural interpretation’*. In these two lines, Leigh Hunt’s telling of this Florentine favourite provides a formal gloss on Dante’s encounter with the lovers in Inferno Canto 5: the “lingering page” of the Lancelot narrative shapes the textual present from five feet to twelve syllables as iambic pentameter switches to alexandrine, the line growing longer before our eyes. The text takes on the soon-to-be lovers’ heartbeats, and ingests the Romance of Lancelot so that the text of the past speaks while the life of the present merely quickens and the flesh of words is converted, not to the book of God but to the book of love: a courtly code running on a Christian engine, as elaborated in Leigh Hunt’s subsequent paraphrase of Francesca’s last words in Dante’s hell – ‘quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante’ (that day we read no further) – as the narrator’s ‘That day they read no more’, a third person transmutation of Dante’s inversion of St Augustine’s revelatory reading of Paul’s Epistles, ‘nec ultra volui legere’ (Confessiones, Book 8), no further would I read. But before no more is read, nothing is said: and in the kiss to come, the mouth is stopped again. In the expansion of the line, the time of Paolo and Francesca’s reading is the time of our reading, too, as amor beats out the syllables and changes the speed, a love in the text that leads to death – Hunt’s starkly literal horizontal pun a formal gloss on Dante’s vertically piled visual pun, “Amor condusse noi ad unA MORte” (Inferno, Canto 5, line 106, see note), a love that leads to love (via death or text), but not to life, whether eternal or not. Love cannot speak for itself – it is seen formally, in contradictory codes, and when it lingers, hung across a text which figures it, the past reaches forward to read through love which beats in the present as a courtly romance reads Francesca who reads Dante who looks through Leigh Hunt whose poem reads us, the whole growing longer as we read.

Note:

Eric Auerbach outlines the concept in his 1944 essay ‘Figura’: “Figural Interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life.’’ Eric Auerbach, Scenes From the Drama of European Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 1984), page 43. The visual pun of Inferno, Book 5, line 106 was noted by Laura Kellogg in 1989 as a Princeton graduate student (Princeton Dante Project, http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp//notes.html retrieved January 2018)

Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉) / Hyper-Dreams / 1598

The warlord-politician, daimyō, samurai and poet Toyotomi Hideyoshi wrote these lines when he knew that death was certain, following the established genre of the death poem.

露と落ち露と消えにし我が身かな浪速のことも夢のまた夢

Dew falls / Dew vanishes / As my body does ----- / Naniwa’s things / A dream and more dream

Opening with dew (tsuyu 露) and closing with a double dream (yume 夢), this poem presents a floating X between these two repetitions. The sound of water (mizu 水) spills from the repetition of tsuyu to be faintly heard in yume, but visually it begins with the rain 雨 at the top of tsuyu, its diagonal strokes abbreviated into horizontal ones as rain comes ‘late’ or delayed 夂 in dew:

Water reappears in order to evaporate as the radical ( 氵, splash!) on the left of ‘vanish’ 消, and again in ‘wave’ 浪 within the place-name Naniwa, an old name for Ōsaka literally meaning ‘Wave-Fast’: 浪速

Dew falls, dew vanishes, as my body does, the falling and disappearing pointing to the unreality of the body of condensation on the earth, a Buddhist structure of perception (mujō, impermanence) clustering around water and dew. Hideyoshi follows this with an unsounded grammatical break (Kireji or cutting-word), ka-na かな – this signals ‘wonder’, a long dash and an equation point between the two halves of the poem, the body and the city, the dew and the dream. Following the recognition of my body (waga-mi我が身) as passing, ka-na is also a drawing in and out of breath. The centre of the poem’s X is double – an unsounded breath, and then the place Naniwa, the centre of Hideyoshi’s power and the site of his clan’s castle, locus of his projects of invasion and unification. The possessions of Naniwa (浪速のことも), the things about it, Naniwa’s world, all of this is temporal power and its trappings, its defence and pride, its succession unsure*, grammatically the topic rather than the subject or object of Naniwa, which is a world-yume.

The second cross from dream 夢 to ‘more-dream’, ma-ta yume, or again-dream また夢 crosses back through Naniwa, back to the associations which cluster around dew, through the breath of ka-na, as vision to vision, the wave of the phono-semantic dream kanji itself tailing off at the base with the semantic ‘sunset’ 夕. Dream next to dream: one word for dream drops into another, which is the same, as dew from dew or a castle in Naniwa soon to be besieged.

Note:

This is another model of perception, the invocation of a city recalling, in miniature, the literary template provided by Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki (方丈記), written in 1299, a meditation on impermanence and Kyoto which opens with foam on water vanishing instead of dew. Naniwa’s castle guarded the western approach to Kyoto. In a version of dream and more-dream, Hideyoshi’s castle in Osaka was rebuilt in 1964.

Derek Walcott / the philosophy of names / 2011

[. . .] a line of gulls has arrowed

into the widening harbour of a town with no noise,

its streets growing closer like a print you can now read,

two cruise ships, schooners, a tug, ancestral canoes,

as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes

white again [. . .]

(from White Egrets, 54)

A “line of gulls” is not a line of poetry unless names and things are locked together; the line arrows into the harbour, drawing the eye closer to the town where the streets are “like a print you can now read”: aerial fantasy has made the page transparent, a crystallisation of a recurring idea* in White Egrets (and throughout Walcott's poetry) that the text is found in the world or is translated from it – the name exists before the thing does; the thing’s reality is its name. But the past tense has begun to break apart this trope, revealing a void where the primary naming is moving away from the poet, “a line of gulls has arrowed”, leaving the world to expatiate alone: “two cruise ships, schooners, a tug, ancestral canoes”. Just as the reality of names is reached in Walcott’s poem, the list is cut away by the opacity of the page, a fade which is the death of the perceiver for whom lines of text are primary forms, when the names don’t appear – a line of gulls white against white and disappearing.

Note:

“Look how the hedges / above Recanati blaze like a line of verse” (from White Egrets poem 8), suggesting that text and not light is the more primary field. Aleksei Losev’s The Philosophy of Name (1927) works out the linguistic implications of name before thing.

// Edmund Hardy 2017

Saigyō (西行) – path marks the lost heart – 12thc

吉野山こぞのしをりの道かへて

まだ見ぬかたの花をたづねむ

yoshino yama kozo no shiori no michi kaete

mada minu kata no hana wo tadzu-nemu

On Yoshino mountain the path-marks from last year –

I’ll forget the way and be guided by blossoms unseen

(Saigyō)

The first brush-strokes of the poem return us to Yoshino (吉野) mountain (山), a place familiar from many Saigyō poems: he lived on the mountain for a while during his travelling life as a monk. This year, the pathway to the famous blossoms of the mountain is split in time between this year and last (this one and you, ko zo, こぞ), the road (mishi, 道) marked out by branches bent back: shiwori (しをり), a word which puns on shi (formal poetry, as in shikei, 詩形) and ori (weave), becoming the idea of a ‘bookmark’ (shiori, 栞), a page bent back as well as a branch. The way that Saigyō went before is also the poem he wrote before. The branches are woven by a path marked out; the metrical and the lithe meet in shiori, poems which mark that which passes through them or that which they pass through. For the Buddhist devotee of detachment, this marker in the world shows a closing in - building a worldly heart from blossoms and not the heartless westward facing life of peace (westward facing is the meaning of the pen-name Saigyō): another direction (kata, かた) in the world to leave the world (and kata can also indicate world, as in ‘form’ 型, a direction in the world which is the world). For this it must be a search for the unbeseen (minu, 見ぬ, seen never), asking the blossoms (花) to be a guide in forgetfulness, the poem ending in a final complexity: tadzu-nemu indicating the intention of visiting, asking to visit, that is, asking the blossoms, a lighter approach than the mark of any path or pen, a path which is found by being unclear as it incorporates tadzu, to find unclear or difficult: たづ.

// Edmund Hardy 2017

Kālidāsa (कालिदास) / incorporeal love / 5thc CE

Avagamya kathīkrtam vapuh

priyabandhos tava nisphalodayah

bahule ‘pi gate nisākaras

tanutām duhkham Ananga! moksyati

Knowing your body’s become a story

your beloved-friend the Moon finds fruitless

the task of waning slender –

now so difficult, O incorporeal Love!

from Kumārasambhavam (कुमारसम्भवम्), ‘The Birth of Kumara’ (Sarga 4, lines 13-16)

The stanza begins with avagamya, comprehension: in the previous Sarga (canto), the love god Kama has been burnt to ash by flames from the third eye of Siva after he was sent on a mission to interrupt Siva’s meditation and turn his thoughts to love. In Sarga four, Rati, Kama’s wife, laments his death. For this Sarga, Kālidāsa chose a wave-like metre of alternating lines in ten and then eleven syllables, each line ending iambically, entropic in its drawing in and pushing out. It’s a metre associated with mourning, either called ‘Viyoginī’ (‘the woman who is separated’) or Vaitālīya (‘of the Vetalas’), the Vetalas being demons or spirits which inhabit cadavers and haunt charnel grounds. It’s a metre of re-animation – a Vetala can move the decaying body it inhabits. In the first line or quarter, Rati figures Kama’s death as becoming-story: from kathā (story) to the past participle kathīkrtam (changed into a story). To become a story is equivalent to death. Kama’s body, his vapuh (form) has become a tale, one which, metrically, as a Vetala, inhabits a memory, blowing it about. This is love divided, lamenting the loss of love, as Rati is a goddess associated with sexual desire: embodied love crying out for a body and turning to the moon, nisphalodayah, fruitless (nisphal) rising (odayah). The fruitlessness pours through the sound of night – nis, निश्, niz – into the moon’s name chosen here as nisākara (the maker of night), settling the idea of a darkness which cannot lift because grief has filled it. Nisākara as night-maker matches the story-making of kathīkrtam: when light has become a story there’s only dark, but if the story persists, the darkness is known as dark and not just the state of things. The story of moonlight is one of inciting love: this is why it is now fruitless, as desire will not be kindled without Kama. The emphasis on unfruiting as barrenness is a miniature of the poem’s overall theme: the conception of Kumara, the warrior-son of Parvati and Śiva, the only one who can defeat the demon Tāraka. But the idea of love made bodiless reveals a repetition which isn’t that of bodies reproducing: tanutām (‘slender’) heads the fourth less slender line, the metre carrying on the difficulty (‘duhkham’) of the moon’s now pointless task, holding out the syllabic hope for Kama’s re-embodiment – if only the lament can reach far enough (spoiler: it does). One way of being bodiless is to be only words, or a form which animates the markings made by another’s body: bodiless love is Ananga, and anangalekha is a love letter (lekha), another call for return, writing to avoid becoming a story.

Note:

The idea of embodiment and becoming-story also relates to writing – Kāvya (courtly) poetry is imbued with the idea of writing over oral transmission, Sheldon Pollock argues in The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University of California Press, 2009): “A poem no longer resided exclusively in the incorporeal word of the oral epoch: it was now a text-artifact” (page 87). The metres used by Kālidāsa are discussed by Hank Heifetz in notes to his English translation of the poem (Penguin Books India, 2015). The edition of the poem edited by M. R. Kale (Motilal Banarsidass, 1986) also presents the Sanskrit commentary of Mallinātha (originally published in Kolkata in 1888), which explicates fruitlessness as that of lovers who can’t ‘fruit’ in the lack of moonlight.

// Edmund Hardy 2017

#kalidasa #love #sanskrit #5thcentury

Dorothea Smartt / De- / 2008

I keep from those

that would de-

file me.

(from ‘my calling’)

De- / file: Why split a prefix at the end of a line? ‘my calling’ is part of a sequence by Dorothea Smartt which is about ‘Samboo’, a cabin boy who arrived in Lancaster from the West Indies. His real name is unknown, and his grave at Sunderland point reads ‘Here lies / Poor Samboo / A faithfull Negro Who / (Attending his Maſter from the Weſt Indies) /Died on his Arrival at Sunderland”. Smartt’s poems give Samboo the alternative name Bilal: his name is kept from us and these lines suggest an agency or reserve which kept it secret (“I keep” my name), a counter to and acknowledgement of the idea that no-one wanted to know, or that Samboo was the only name needed. The prefix ‘de’ is a negation, separation, descent, reversal, intensification: in defile it is a negation added to file which is to foul, from defouler in Old French, rendering “defile” a double suppression: to down-trample. Splitting this double negative releases the idea of ‘de filing’, to place down (“de-”) into the file, the archive, while, by the same stroke, splitting also underlines the further negation of de-filing, that is, removing from the archive. There is also, finally, a filing away of a bond – free me, file me – although, yet again, a double negation is a release and bonding in the same stroke as to “de-file” in this instance would be to re-bond, to re-pair. From all of these, a name is kept.

Note:

‘my calling’ is published in Dorothea Smartt’s ship shape (Peepal Tree Press, 2008).

#dorotheasmartt 21stc

Richard Fannande / alliteration and labour / 1457

In Christ’s Hospital, Abingdon, is hung a poem by Richard Fannande, an ironmonger, which begins “Of all werkys in this worlde”. The poem commemorates the building of Culham bridge, one of several 15th century bridges across the streams of the Thames near Abingdon. The bridge was maintained and tolled by the abbey and hospital.

Then the strengthe of the streme astoned hem stronge,

In labor and lavyng moche money was lore.

Ther loved hem a ladde was a water man longe,

He helpe stop the streme til the werke were a fore.

It was a solace to see in a somer seson

CCC. Iwysse workynge at onys.

iiii. and iiii. reulyd by reson

To wete who wrought best for the nonce

(‘The Bridges at Abingdon’, lines 39-46)

In the lines above, the difficulty of laying foundations in a strong flowing river is lightly conveyed in strong alliterative stresses: the ‘s’ sounds of the pushing current, “the strengthe of the streme astoned hem stronge”, against the ‘l’ sounds, “labor and lavyng”, lore, ladde and longe, which move through the labour of constructing a coffer dam, a watertight enclosure of wooden piles with the enclosed water removed by bucket*. This is a long alliterative run for the poem, over two lines, and in the middle of this fencing of l’s the “ladde” is marked out – an ‘l’ from the labour and lore – as a water man whose longe height enables him to “helpe stop the streme”. The alliterative line summons a further echo in the poetry of labour: as Ralph Hanna points out (see note), line 43 ends with an allusion to the first line of William Langland’s Piers Plowman: “In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne”. Whereas Will falls asleep beside a stream, “And as I lay and lenede and loked on the waters,” to see the world more clearly in a dream, Fannande also sees the world transformed: three hundred certainly working at once (“CCC. Iwysse…”) in teams of four and four (“iiii. and iiii”), ruled by reason, that is, the good of co-operative labour for the good of Abingdon, its markets and transport links: Langland’s unrhymed summer season becomes a match for such ruling reason. The alliterative lines are broken by the accounting – the l of labour and ladde divided into teams of four, a competition to find who works the best (“To wete who wrought best”). Instead of Langland’s allegories, the counting of workers presents a medieval fact, a transparent number in a direct relationship to description: the first stanza above tells us how the work was done; the second mirrors it, giving us a total of workers and their subdivision – as these modes intermix, the poem’s knowledge of the bridge is formed at the cost of its knotted alliteration, a form already rare in the south of England when Fannande was writing: here we see it fade into repetition, into the sameness of the work gangs, four and four.

Note:

Details on coffer dams and the construction of medieval bridges are from David Harrison’s The Bridges of Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2004). Harrison discusses the Abingdon bridges and the Culham bridge poem as an insight into medieval bridge construction on pages 134-135. The source for the poem is Christ’s Hospital (Abingdon, Berkshire), Governor’s Archives, Object 13 (MS), ‘Forman’s Monument’. Ralph Hanna’s commentary on the poem and edited text is ‘The Bridges at Abingdon: An Unnoticed Alliterative Poem’ in Yee? Baw For Bokes: Essays on Medieval Manuscripts and Poetics edited by Michael Calabrese and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (Marymount Institute Press, 2013).

#Fannande #15thc #alliteration #labour

Toru Dutt / borrowing to change / 1882

Toru Dutt (Bengali: তরু দত্ত) lived from 1856 to 1877. She was an Indian writer who wrote in French and English. ‘Sîta’ was published posthumously in a volume which also contained translations and versions of Sanskrit and Bengali tales.

Sîta

Three happy children in a darkened room!

What do they gaze on with wide-open eyes?

A dense, dense forest, where no sunbeam pries,

And in its centre a cleared spot.—There, bloom

Gigantic flowers on creepers that embrace

Tall trees; there, in a quiet lucid lake

The white swans glide; there, “whirring from the brake,”

The peacock springs; there, herds of wild deer race;

There, patches gleam with yellow waving grain;

There, dwells in peace the poet-anchorite.

But who is this fair lady? Not in vain

She weeps,—for lo! at every tear she sheds

Tears from three pairs of young eyes fall amain,

And bowed in sorrow are the three young heads.

It is an old, old story, and the lay

Which has evoked sad Sîta from the past

Is by a mother sung. . . . ‘Tis hushed at last

And melts the picture from their sight away,

Yet shall they dream of it until the day!

When shall those children by their mother’s side

Gather, ah me! as erst at eventide?

Where is the Sîta of the title? Sītā, born from the earth and whose name derives from the Sanskrit for furrow, first appears here as “poet-anchorite”, and then as a mood, “sad Sîta”. The poem evokes her with its repeated enchantment of “There” until Sîta appears, because her world has been described around her, although it is curious that the furrow in which she is named is a compound of cultural translation: “poet-anchorite”. Dutt grew up in a converted Christian family, so the idea of an anchoress is inflected with faith looking for faith, looking for an exemplar, but still the comparison hovers lightly as a parallel ascetic moment to offer a path of translation into the thereness of the “dense, dense” Dandaka forest*. The quotation “whirring from the brake” is a paraphrase from Alexander Pope’s ‘Windsor Forest’ – before poet-anchorite it has already overlaid another frame, a different forest. “See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,” the pheasant transmuted to a peacock (a misremembered pheasant?) but both sprung, the beating of wings a whirr. In a poem of hunting and rapacious chase, Pope’s pheasant soon whirrs fruitlessly: “Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound, / Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.” Windsor Forest, royal hunting ground, becomes Dandaka forest, cursed to grow on an ancient kingdom to desolate it with its density. Between these quotation marks Dutt borrows, changes, transmutes, and uses Pope’s poem not as a bridge but as a literal line of flight from which to steal and beat out nuance. Writing about Dutt’s sonnet on her Indian garden, ‘Sonnet. --Baugmaree’, Ellen Brinks concludes: “The irony of using an English Romantic form to claim an Indian home is neither lost, nor is it inappropriate, given her poetics. […] Dutt reclaims a Sanskrit terrain already inhabited with Orientalist and nativist presences.” (Anglophone Indian Women Writers, 1870-1920, Routledge, 2013, page 55). Dutt’s use of Pope in ‘Sîta’ matches this map-making, a form of traversal, while also imbuing it with loss: “She weeps” – and the children cry, too, the poem moving over a pivot from its happy opening to its miserable final line of severance. The repeated “There” which conjured the “old, old” tale of the forest also falls like sadness, down to Sita’s weeping: in tears she merges with the oral teller, “by a mother sung”. The layers dissolve: political regimes and cultural restrictions can make you an anchorite to live through the times. Colonial rule blocks life from the Hindu myths: “When shall those children” carries a political challenge in its final hanging question: the poem wants to know when, a sentiment in line with Dutt’s commentaries on legal and political injustices under British rule in her letters. Mixed into this, another loss: if the three happy children are read as Toru and her siblings, Aru and Abju, then her brother and sister had both died of tuberculosis when this poem was written – the three children can’t come together, and “ah me” the poem exclaims. If you don’t know why she is “sad Sîta” or what is lost when a world is forcibly submerged to become just a dream “until the day”, then, as Dutt notes caustically at the end of her poem ‘Sindhu’ to a reader who wonders what happened next: “Go, read the Ramayan.” That is, if you can’t read it then learn Sanskrit, or glimpse the dense forest of Dandaka in translation, or move towards the centre of the tale where the “lucid lake” of ‘Sîta’ awaits. Then it becomes possible to answer “who is this fair lady?” and it might be possible to move within the words of the final open question, “When shall those children…”

Note:

A hundred and twenty years later, Daljit Nagra similarly offered a translated path into Sita’s devotion, this time through an earlier Greek idea: “re-palace the Penelope-faith of his Sita” (‘Our town in the whole of India’ in Look We Have Coming to Dover!, Faber, 2007). In an afterword to Sita’s Ascent (Penguin, 2013, page 179), Vayu Naidu notes, “I was learning with each telling how to interpolate contemporary references from British news within the story”.

// Edmund Hardy 2016

Aimé Césaire / “marron” / 1946

Où allez-vous ma femme marron ma restituée ma cimarronne il vit à pierre fender et la limaille et la grenaille tremblent leur don de sabotage dans les eaux et les saisons

(from ‘Autre saison’)

Where are you going my maroon wife my restored one my cimarron it is so alive the stones are freezing and the filings and the pellets tremble their gift of sabotage in the waters and the seasons

(‘Another Season’ translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith)

“Où allez-vous”, where are you going, is the question which opens this poem. It’s asked three times. It is addressed to “ma restituée”, my restored or returned one. Restored from slavery: the speaker and companion are fugitive slaves. The question’s context changes the question: “Où allez-vous” has a different meaning in captivity (we’re getting out of here) so that, now, it has become a real marker of being a maroon – of having deserted the order of slavery, “ma femme marron”, my maroon wife. The word “marron” is French for chestnut but in the West Indies it also refers to a fugitive black slave or their descendants, indicating the founding of different maroon societies over time (see note). Césaire later coined the verb “marronner” to encompass an ongoing sense of escape, bringing the linguistic construction into the present, as Clifford argues*. The moment of becoming maroon is evoked in this earlier poem as being alive in the present (“il vit”) of a world given another season (“autre saison”). The addressee is also “ma cimarronne”, a source for “marron” in the American Spanish “cimarrón” (wild, runaway, unruled), itself leading to cima as a mountain-top, a place of escape for slaves, or cimarra, wild brushwood. Over the ground and into the peaks, these epithets are an etymological sketch of ‘maroon’ remaking. “Où allez-vous” activates these names – where are you going, now that you can go, “dans les eaux et les saisons” in the waters and the seasons where the echolalia of marron as cimarronne spills over to make the filings and pellets tremble with a gift or donation (“don”) which is named sabotage: the repetition of being restored, of being marooned.

Note:

James Clifford discusses the poem ‘The Verb “Marronner”’ and Césaire’s coined verb marronner in his essay ‘A Politics of Neologism’ in The Predicament of Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988)

/Edmund Hardy 2016

Geoffrey de Vinsauf / Platonic reversal / between 1199 and 1216

Siquis habet fundare domum, non currit ad actum

Impetosa manus: intrinseca linea cordis

Praemetitur opus, seriemque sub ordine certo

Inferior praescribit homo, totamque figurat

Ante manus cordis quam corporis; et status ejus

Est prius archetypus quam sensilis. Ipsa poesis

Spectet in hoc speculo quae lex sit danda poetis.

(from Poetria nova, lines 43 – 49)

If anyone is to lay the house foundations, his doesn’t act

With impetuous hand: the intrinsic lines of the heart

Measure out the work, the inner man determines the stages

Ahead and in a certain order; the whole is figured forth

By the heart’s before the body’s hands; and they form

The arche-model first before the senses. Poetry itself

Looks into this mirror to see the given laws for poets.

Poetria nova is a treatise on rhetoric which also embodies every example, layering rhetorical techniques over each other. This doubling begins with its first section on developing a plan and idea for writing. As earlier writers on God’s creation and on rhetoric had done (the Latin root aedifcio connecting edifice to edify*), Geoffrey de Vinsauf begins with the metaphor of house building. Its plan is complex and must precede the first stone being laid. This is clearly a Platonic model of image and substance, but the architectural metaphor is interlocked from the start with a bodily one, complicating original and copy or image and creation. The not-impetuous hand (impetosa manus) of the house builder becomes the interior “manus cordis” (heart’s hand). The exterior foundations become the prior “intrinseca linea cordis” (intrinsic lines of the heart). That the interior is already actualised as a bodily metaphor to match the exterior is a doubling pun on this dual creation, before the body’s hand the heart’s hand (Ante manus cordis quam corporis), cordis and corporis in fact both sharing the same instance of ‘manus’. This mixed interior and exterior is then doubled again in the mirror (in hoc speculo) of the last line of this excerpt: the interior model (the Platonic archetypus or arche-model) which precedes the building reflects the laws of poets; these laws are a substance which precede poetry’s actualisation just as the whole of Poetria nova is a mirror to itself as it explicates the laws of writing while also embodying them. In a miniature rendering of this within the sentence which states it, ‘poetry itself’ (Ipsa poesis) sits above lex sit danda poetis (the laws for poets), the latter having passed from poetry and through the mirror (speculo) to the left of the line, changed from substance into law. The substance of creation reverses out from the dual reflection and into live writing, and circles back. This circle escapes a restrictive borrowing of Platonic allegory in which the creation would simply be an enlarged copy of the interior model. There is no original beginning as the interior model in Poetria nova is already in the form of ‘lines’ (linea) as an image of a greater, truer poem further down if the Platonic model comes to the fore. There is also no end as the form which copies the plan can itself be an image and a model for another reversal and intermixing of inside and out when the text is read or the building entered into. This is the whole which is the figuring forth of totamque figurat (line 46), the whole figure of ideal become reality.

Note:

Katharina Berger-Meister explicates the Latin root aedifcio in her chapter ‘Mouth, Ears, Eyes: The Body in, behind and between the Lines of the Text’ in Fleshly Things and Spiritual Matters: Studies on the Medieval Body in Honour of Margaret Bridges (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), page 44. The popularity of Poetria nova across Europe is partly attributable to its ‘doubling’ of subject and form, and this is explored in Margaret Curry Woods’ Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Ohio State University Press, 2010). Roy Erikson in The Building in the Text: Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, page 7) argues that the sequence poeis / spectet / speculo / poetis in the lines discussed represents an ‘a b b a’ structure, this in itself mirroring architecture according to Erikson’s own thesis concerning buildings in text. The idea of Platonic reversals is drawn from Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense and its chapter ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’.

Juliana Berners / vestiges in the hunt / 1486

In frith or in fell

Or in fforest y yow tell

And to speke of the hert if ye wil hit lere

Ye shal cal him a calfe al the first yere

(from Boke of Seynt Albans)

Attributed to Dame Juliana Berners, believed to be Prioress of Sopwell Priory, St Albans, the metrical essay on hunting contained in the Boke of Seynt Albans collates and rewrites two earlier hunting texts (see note), English translations of Guillaume Twici’s Le Art de Venerie written before 1328 and Livre de Chasse by Gaston de Foix, continuing their emphasis on naming and identification but with a further emphasis on the structure and voice of school master to pupil in the 15th century. The master’s professed source is ‘Tristram’ (of the round table), known as a great hunter whose placement here follows the idea that he also invented the technical language of hunting. As such, Dame Juliana’s nomenclature feigns to be from the source. In the four lines above, the ‘hert’ is tracked in three landscapes (frith / fell / forest) and disappears into speech. The places of the hunt are conjoined by ‘f’ alliteration into a triangle which dissolves when it is necessary to “speke of the hert” – the hart runs into the complex prestige field of medieval hunting terminology. At this point different names track life-cycles, “cal him a calfe”, and are keys for the timing of the hunt, “al the first yere” (variously by year the red deer is called calfe, brocket, spayed, staggard, then stag or hart; and so on). Through this tracking, the hart as animal is obscured, disappearing before its image is brought to bay: its life in the poem’s world remains the trace of its free movement between frith, fell or ‘fforest’ – a vestige of wildness or glory before the hert is killed and managed very precisely and linguistically for honour, distinguished by season and antler growth, head and body part, at which point the hert’s only lesson is its name.

Note:

For more on the Boke of Seynt Albans and its sources, I refer you to chapter X of Ernest Fraser Jacob’s Essays in Later Medieval History (Manchester, 1968) which is devoted to the text.

Tillie Olsen / border capital / labour and line breaks / 1934

[...] the esthetic dance of her fingers

and the tremulo, tremulo when the hands tremble with pain.

Three dollars a week,

two fifty-five,

seventy cents a week,

(from ‘I Want You Women Up North To Know’)

Tremulo: a Latinate Italian word, familiar in English as a direction for singing with a tremble – through this excursion “the bourgeois poet” (named and parodied by Olsen) turns labour into song and pain into beauty via etymology. Olsen’s poem is adapted from a letter by Felipe Ibarro published in New Masses, January 9th, 1934, which reports on the conditions of four Mexican workers hand-embroidering children’s clothes in San Antonio, Texas – the ‘worker’s letter’ was a contemporary genre of publication in radical newspapers, in turn becoming an epistolary form for left-wing poets. Olsen’s poem begins by closely adapting Ibarro’s letter, “i want you women up north to know / how those dainty children’s dresses you buy / at macy’s, wannamaker’s, gimbels, marshall fields, / are dyed in blood”. An elaboration occurs with Olsen’s account of Catalina Rodriguez, 24, which is reflectively interrupted: “White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say, / white gulls of hands, darting, veering”. This culminates in the direct translation of suffering through a distinction of taste: “tremulo when the hands tremble with pain”. At the point at which the satirical speech of the “bourgeois poet” threatens to dominate the whole poem, Olsen returns to Ibarro’s letter, outlining the weekly wages which (economically, rhetorically) support lines such as “White rain stitching the night” – labour realised in its price which is not going to circulate any further via surplus value or etymological excursion. “Three dollars a week, / two fifty-five, / seventy cents” is presented as tremulo laid bare, Olsen showing us border capital’s active reduction of labour value down the page. Lives which pass through even a parody of lyric poetry are still marked by that poetic mode, as the lineation of wages makes its point and turns specific details into a figure for labour-time which calls to a solidarity which remains for as long as the inequity persists, that is, for as long as the figure is true.

Note:

Olsen’s poem is printed in Cary Nelson’s Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (Routledge, 2001).

//Edmund Hardy 2014

Dante / on “alluminar” / c. 1308-1321

‘Oh,’ diss’ io lui, ‘non se’ tu Oderisi,

L’onor d’ Agobbio e l’onor di quell’arte

Che “alluminar” chiamata è in Parisi?’

‘Oh,’ I said to him, are you not Oderisi,

the honour of Gubbio, and honour of the art

called ‘illumination’ in Paris?’

(Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, Canto XI)

In the circle of pride, Dante recognizes Oderisi, a famous miniature painter. In naming Oderisi’s art, the poet chooses to quote the French term “alluminar”, allowing the journey to “Parisi” at the end of the stanza in order to locate the word as spoken. The French ‘enluminer’ derives from the Latin lumina, whereas the equivalent Italian term ‘miniare’ derives from minio, the red oxide pigments used for limning: by choosing “alluminar”, Dante chooses light over earth. The light, however, is reflected and not direct. Oderisi treads Canto XI’s circle of pride because he took credit for work which merely reflected a greater created glory, and was not eternal but part of a chain of more perfect “alluminar” – Oderisi speaks of how his art was bettered by Franco Bolognese, whose paintings were in turn dimmed by the brightness of Giotto. The Canto then addresses death, “se vecchia scindi / da te la carne”, when age peels off (scindi) your flesh, recalling the material lesson of Oderisi’s gold leaf which peels away in time. By the life of “alluminar”, flesh is shown as a temporary reflector of eternal light, peeling and darkening as gilt.

Note:

Paget Toynbee first highlighted Dante’s choice of “alluminar” in 1902 (Dante Studies and Researches); John Gage’s Colour and Culture (University of California Press, 1999) expands on this, emphasizing that “alluminar” is a positive choice: “the French term gave him, as the Italian did not, the critical implication of light” (page 77).

//Edmund Hardy 2014

Jorge Luis Borges / wager of the unnameable / 1964

De estas calles que ahondan el poniente,

Una Habrá (no sé cuál) que he recorrido

Ya por última vez, indiferente

Y sin adivinarlo, sometido

Of all the streets that roll into the sunset,

There is one (not sure which) I have walked

For the last time, carelessly

Without guessing, submitting

(from ‘Límites’)

The poem begins with all the streets, “De estas calles”, mapping out everywhere you’ve ever gone – but they are sliding into the west, the zone of “setting” (“el poniente”). In this labyrinth there are already dead ends but they cannot be divined (“adivinarlo”) – among them is the street you’ve inadvertently walked for the last time. That street is unguessed, remaining hidden until every bifurcation has occurred. The limit point of the nominal system arrives within the parenthesis “(no sé cuál)”, not sure which – the street which has passed beyond the limit is unnameable, and only death could write a name within these brackets. Because the choices made at every junction are to come, yet the moment of death is unknown, these four lines of the poem can only be proved true or false in retrospect, although the more streets you have walked down and the older you are the more likely the sentence is to be true. By invoking the limit in its wager of veracity, the form of Borges’ sentence brings death into line with the plainly unnameable, no sé cuál.

//Edmund Hardy 2014

Lottie Collins / glossolalia and the celebrity of names / 1891

Lottie Collins, she had no sense,

She bought a piano for eighteen pence,

And all she played on it all day

Was, ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’

(Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children*)

Lottie Collins was a music hall star who made her name with risqué performances of ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ in Dick Whittington at Islington’s Grand Theatre in 1891. Iona and Peter Opie track the rhyme above as an adaptation of “When I was young and had no sense”, known to schoolchildren in the 1850s. “Lottie Collins, she had no sense” charts the power of a star to become a vernacular variable, outshining the older referent of “I”, who becomes Lottie Collins. Then, in turn, a popular name can remain in school yard chants as just a name, outliving music hall or film stardom, becoming four beats in a rhythm handed down or adapted. “Charlie Chaplin” was one twentieth century replacement for Collins in this rhyme, collected by the Opies at a Birmingham school in the 1950s,

Charlie Chaplin had no sense,

He bought a fiddle for eighteen pence;

And all the tunes that he could play

Was ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’

Chaplin still plays Collins' song, ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ – the patterns of the rhyme continue and halt transmission in each segment; the trace of the name “Lottie Collins” is left only in its referent glossolalia – a song title drawn from the ongoing babble which is itself made of such traces.

Lottie Collins

Note:

Source is Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children (Oxford University Press, 1959). The Opies also reference Flora Thompson’s Candleford Green in which Thompson recounts the summer of ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ (“The air that summer was alive with its strains”) and how a deviant lyric variation ‘Lottie Collins has no drawers’ was “sung by lounging youths beneath the chestnut tree on the green”.

//Edmund Hardy 2014

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