The Right Word

[This posting is in honor of Wilfried at Crystalpunk.)

It is poetically said that when one raises a shell to the ear, one hears the ocean.  Could it also be said that when one raises a shell to the eye, one reads poetry?  In his masterpiece Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann holds a magnifying glass to the "indecipherable hieroglyphics on the shells of certain mussels" and conchs, questioning whether Mother Nature expresses herself in an organized, written code, and whether ornament can ultimately be distinguished from meaning.  Mann describes the calligraphy on a shell that practically begs to be understood: "The characters, as if drawn with a brush, blended into purely decorative lines toward the edge, but over large sections of the curved surface their meticulous complexity gave every appearance of intending to communicate something."  The shell's calligraphy bears a strong resemblance to "early Oriental scripts, much like the stroke of Old Aramaic."  But how is one to get to the bottom of such symbols?  Mann admits that "They elude our understanding and, it pains me to say, probably always will."  Yet this elusion need not be a source of discouragement.  Mann explains that ornament and meaning are like conjoined twins: "When I say they 'elude' us, that is really only the opposite of 'reveal,' for the idea that nature has painted this code, for which we lack the key, purely for ornament's sake on the shell of one of her creatures--no one can convince me of that.  Ornament and meaning have always run side by side, and the ancient scripts served simultaneously for decoration and communication.  Let no one tell me nothing is being communicated here!  For the message to be inaccessible, and for one to immerse oneself in that contradiction--that also has its pleasure."  In other words, the shell calligraphy communicates a profound mystery, pregnant with meaning and delightful to behold.  Mann admits that, "were this really a written code, nature would surely have to command her own self-generated, organized language," adding that nature's fundamental illiteracy is "precisely what makes her eerie."

Mann's allusion to "early Oriental scripts" reminds us of the lost "shell" style of calligraphy discovered in Shang culture artifacts (14th - 11th centuries BCE).  That ancient system of writing, more stylized than the early picture words, was brushed onto shells in vermilion ink.  (For a full discussion of shell-style calligraphy, see Chinese Brushwork in Calligraphy and Painting by Kwo Da-Wei, 1990.)

In our collage below, we imagine King Triton conjuring the Platonic ideals of shell calligraphy.

From A Surrealist Dictionary by J. Karl Bogartte:

SWIMMING POOL: A kind of mist secreted by pyramids when fending off an attack of vicious glow-worms.

From A Surrealist Dictionary by J. Karl Bogartte:

X-RAY: A sewing machine that uses sparks instead of thread.

From A Surrealist Dictionary by J. Karl Bogartte:

WHORE: Apparatus for telling the future; similar to a tuning-fork.

From A Surrealist Dictionary by J. Karl Bogartte:

VESTAL: Bright yellow flowers that grow out of mummies.

… three reasons to suspend disbelief

∞ a conclusion of forever

* a star in the mind

? the hook that catches

- a stitch of text

) the end of whispers

{ a crumpled page

! surprising the ending

\ the path to

: two eyes that follow

; two eyes and one grain of sand

^ the hat of the missing

$ the sibilance of sermons

` a grave way of speaking

• dividing the string into threads

† the graveyard of the second thought

§ the pregnancy of sections

From our friends at Crystalpunk: "Apes in the wild have language and it takes only a small leap of imagination to try to give them a second, human, language.  For over forty years researchers have been trying to do this with increasingly good results.  Our language, when it is passed on to a different species, becomes a new language. PrimatePoetics is born from the realization that this language should be appreciated in its own right, as the greatest revolution in literature since the invention of written Chinese 4000 years ago.  'PrimatePoetics is Here' is the first primer to this new field.  It explains where it comes from, it gives an overview of the field on an ape-by-ape basis and closes with an extensive anthology of relevant scientific and artistic sources.  But most of all 'PrimatePoetics is Here' hopes to give a feel for the outsider charm of the language of the apes."

From A Surrealist Dictionary by J. Karl Bogartte:

BOAR: A vessel used for transporting reflections.

The poet Chris Piuma scours our Dictionary of All-Consonant Words for three obscure, vowelless words from Ezra Pound's "Canto IX" (grnnh! rrnnh, pthg).  Does he find them, or will Pound's curious expressions resist interpretation for another ninety years?  Read about the spirited adventure here:

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There is a curious line in Ezra Pound's "Canto IX": grnnh! rrnnh, pthg.

The typical dictionary is not terribly helpful at elucidating this line, so we must consult a more specialized work. Craig Conley'sAll-Consonant Words Dictionaryoffers a more likely source for discovering the meanings of such obscure and vowelless words.

And yet, none of those three words appear. At first, it seems that yet another dictionary has failed us. But this is where we can use skills picked up by working with medieval texts: Perhaps these are scribal errors, mistakes in the transmission, or else they might be variants of already familiar words. Can we, then, find similar words in this dictionary?

gnnnh.

interj. a groan of pain.
<“Gnnnh!” he said, and drew himself up into a ball to escape the pain of his emergent teeth. —Diana Gabaldon,The Fiery Cross.

It is easy to misread a hastily written "n" for an "r", and we can posit with great confidence that "grnnh", especially with its exclamation point, is actually "gnnnh", this pain cry.

rrrrrrrnnng.

n. the ring of a telephone.
<When he woke up, the killer headache hadn’t gone away and the phone was ringing. A fourth ring. A fifth. He still made no move to pick it up. Rnnnnnnnnngagain. —Morrie Ruvinsky,Dream Keeper: Myth and Destiny in the Pacific Northwest.>

At first this seems an unlikely reading of "rrnnh", what with Pound's word having so fewer Rs, and an H instead of a G. But then we recall that this Canto would have been written in the late 1910s or early 1920s, when telephony was in its early stages, and ringer boxes -- which at that point weren't even in the telephones proper -- had not been perfected. There were, we can see, too few Rs. The final "ng", which we pronounce as a satisfying /ŋ/, was then the softer /ɲ/, which Pound spelt the Portuguese way, "nh".

Pthr.

n. the title of a work of art by Michael Paulus based upon illuminated eye charts of the 1800s but modified so that “clinical function is surpassed by style and frivolity” (MichaelPaulus.com).

This one is the most problematic. We can write off the capital P being in minuscule as Modernist poetic license. The "r" becoming a "g" -- it seems unlikely to be a scribal error, and you'd have to be Russian to hear those sounds as related. And, worst of all, this art work did not exist yet, and Ezra Pound's ability to foresee the future was demonstrably not that great. We must reject the dictionary's offering as untenable.

Instead I'd like to suggest that it is a transliteration, done to obscure its origins, as a kind of code. You can map "p" onto "π", "th" onto "θ", and "g" onto "γ". "πθγ", of course, isn't a word in Greek -- would that there were some Greek All-Consonant Words Dictionary that I could consult to confirm this! -- but capitalize those letters, "ΠΘΓ", and you get Pi Theta Gamma, perhaps nothing more than the name of some obscure fraternity.

Now, I am no Pound scholar, nor a member of any such fraternity, so the possible connections or the exactly meaning of this reference is still unclear. But the scenario being described in the Canto is now reasonably clear: Pound is in pain because the phone is ringing and he is sure it is just the boys down at the frat calling him again, perhaps hoping to get him to come by the house, have a few beers, whereas all he wants to do is work on his epic poem, the one that would change history, the one that would explain history, and yet he knows they will keep calling to try to get him to go, and so he cries out in pain. The birthing of an epic poem is like getting one's baby teeth in, a painful process that will change everything about how you interact with the world. But for Pound there was no one who cared enough to apply Anbesol on his tender gums -- certainly his fraternity brothers wouldn't! And so this deftly coded message was inserted into The Cantos and resisted interpretation for ninety years.