Annotated Ellipses
Donn Byrne riddled his novel The Wind Bloweth (1922) with ellipses. For example, page 158 alone features no fewer than 27 of them. The ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate the narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” What follows is an illustrated celebration of Byrne’s eccentric use of ellipses. Snippets of his text are here presented in a new order, to tell a story hidden within the ellipses. |
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Silesius of Rhodes writes:
Gary? Shall we?
The coils of memory at the back of the exposed brain. In cross-section: ellipsis in the head. The triplet darknesses of recollection. The pins, the pining of nostalgia, the stab of regret. A world half-remembered like a hairdo of a goat at an almost-forgotten party, the barrettes and French-braided déjà voodoo of lives unburied, twilight-skinned, the zombie-like dusk of thought, neurons nostalgic for a future remembered. ...then forgotten before it has occurred.
Silesius of Rhodes says:
Zellweger voice: "You had me at 'deja voodoo'..."
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Luverly. If all the empty spaces in the universe ever got together, we'd be in real trouble.
But if these are anti-ellipses --anti-matter ellipses-- showing how what was not there in the first place was left out, then the universe would gradually fill with our memories of tomorrow, our recollections of the future, the words between the emptinesses that we chose to leave out, the not-deer of deer not howling, camouflaging themselves behind the trees that are not there.
Silesius of Rhodes responds:
Optimism is a metaphysical disease. Poetry is the panacea sold in those funny little bottles. It's the alcohol in the panacea that does the real work. That's the generator of non-deer. The other stuff is closer to the coffee grounds of reality.
Guelmus adds:
Deer that "howl" should be seen by physicians. Those might be lycanthropic deer.
Gary Barwin replies:
Or perhaps the deer should be seen by 'pataphysicians. They are ellipsistropic deer, and we, seemingly always forgetting, our gap-toothed minds filtering the metaphysical riches of the world, are ellipsanthropic. When I see language in need of a haircut, I want to loan my Occam's razor out. This gentleman clearly has a Mint, but I'm not sure anything is legal tender that's coming out. When a metaphysical ship sinks, the war amid the waves is usually between the wits and the witless. The witless miraculously survive, because the wits are engaged in diving for the meaning below the wreck, or looking for the mermaid Public Transportation System. And the deer in question does not seem the least bit "ellipsistropic" to me. The ellipsis has clearly been inflicted upon the poor creature by the antecedent pronoun in the grammatical (and likely erotic) scheme of some hyperbolic (probably 19th century) purple prosateur or prosateuse. Harumph. My Occam's razor, like some Gillette models <http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/news/fortune500/gillette/> has just the necessary five blades.
Silesius of Rhodes mutters:
You will find your answer here.
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The three sad eyes of the ellipses...by Gary Barwinfor Craig ConleyThe three sad eyes of the ellipses. Something is lost. Three islands. Small songs in a sea that prefers to forget the land. The mouth opens and begins to speak; there is nothing that can be said. One world followed by another and then another. Tiny black specks at the end of the galaxy. A three frame animation where nothing appears to happen, though perhaps down on the miniscule surface, there are different kinds of silences, memories, things forgotten or left. The trailing off, the continuing on. Small black stones in the river of speech. Three tunnels waiting for the three trains of past, present, and somewhere in between. Dots lost and drifting from i’s, j’s, or umlauts, floating between words in the cloudbound grammar above the teleological cities of the sentence. Notes from a song with neither pitch nor rhythm. The dark matter music between things. Three brother molecules in a subatomic folktale, though it is unclear which is the youngest, most foolish, most likely to wed the princess. An echo of the full stop at the end of the sentence. Things end, but their ripples mark the page with their tiny fingerprints. Here I am, though what I was is forgotten, disappeared, or unclear. I grip the cliff of the page, holding on until you get here ready to imagine what I might have been.
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Paul Dean writes:
Brilliant!
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