(I always say)

With the hard linguine bite of an al dente cooked sister
the nasty space encroached on
our brouhaha.
this ill arrangement of our soft (so soft) altercation
churned brown fundamentalism
with puke-green anarchy
to yield a creamy diarrhea
from the nether orifice
of a bloated politics.
better a stank definition
than
a bald mesmerism.



[I wrote this in less than five minutes one Saturday morning, using a set of nouns and adjectives I had come up with during the preceeding minute. Its truth is thus debatable; its message, however, is clear.]

u-mich legacy

[verse 1] (skinny p.)
Another freestyler sliding
Through the tricky turnstile
Colliding
With a six-three urn while
Imbibing
State Street cider, dial
The fire, flood, or bud for hire
Department, tell the
Officer, this fellow fell
Right through the floor
Of his apartment
Landed in a random
Assortment of debris
That used to be in tandem
With his old deportment
Put in the memorandum
How he cried when Candice canned him
How he lied then when we scanned him
For bumps and lacerations
—Things he never had
Back when he flied
As a bona fide fly-guy
Yeah, he was fly, but now he’s flew
His flying days are through
But fly or flew that foo is always flow
‘Cause you know
Didn’t no one throw
The spoken word like him
When all else stopped and you said go

[chorus] (Lady Ladle)
Not the flyest fly MC
Sorry for what I couldn’t be
Still the flowest that you’ll see
That’s his u-mich legacy

[verse 2] (El OraToro)
In recent times some decent rhymes inspired
Their lines, combined with rhythm’s fire
Conspire to send our spirits higher
Transpire what may, our song ain’t gon’ expire
Unlike Ali in Jack Kevorkian’s office
We float like bees and sting the scorpions off us
Deliver shots that make your liver quiver
Give vivid verbal balls till timbers shiver
Dish out verse like goulash with a ladle
To hags and newborns spoon-fed in the cradle

Spinning the spoken like vinyl records
Jumping the tokens like Chinese checkers
Bring some clippers for my white rap
Cuz it’s dense like Eiffel T.’s a kite trap
Keep the clippers for a fade route
I’ll fade you up before I fade out
Leave the tweeters for Sylvester—
Ain’t no treble to adulterate like Hester
When the bass is frequent and erupts before us
Protect your face, here comes the chorus

(Lady Ladle)
Not the flyest fly MC (the fly-est)
Sorry for what I couldn’t be (so sor-ry)
Still the flowest that you’ll see (the flow-est)
That’s his u-mich legacy (u-mich, his le-gacy)

(everybody)
Not the flyest fly MC (the fly-est)
---Never hide what you can speak
Sorry for what I couldn’t be (so sor-ry)
---The flow will show what none could see
Still the flowest that you’ll see (the flow-est)
---The flow will show its fluency
That’s his u-mich legacy (u-mich, his le-gacy)
---And that will be your legacy

chiasthmatic cough XVI

The poet wearing down the slopes
P. Street a laurel halo
One Lopez known as jackalopes
There's no such thing as J-Lo

Special Notice

Below Dunster regrets to inform you that it will not be updated for at least a week (until 02/25/05) as the author will be carving up the pistes at Big Mountain, Montana. For the week following that (until 03/06/05) posts will be sparse as the author switches from hosting a web log to hosting some very special friends. The author hopes to be able to post old chiasthmatic coughs during this time to hold over the readership. Regular posting will resume after 03/06/05; in the meantime, Below Dunster recommends that the reader take the time to peruse sections that may have been posted prior to her or his first venture Below Dunster, to revisit old goodies, and to comment feverishly while there is little chance of rebuttal or concurrence. Below Dunster would like to take this opportunity to thank its guests for their continued support and commentary. It is our hope that you will continue to tarry below Dunster, and our great pleasure to make your stay pithy, mirthful, and mythic.

Methinks we will post a c-cough for the road.

chiasthmatic cough XV

The poet under Egypt's linens
The Pharoah suicidal
The wife-to-be in extra innings
The Boston Red Sox, bridal.

THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part Five

[Note: this is the fifth installment of an essay, "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: a rare instance of bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" being posted serially. Below Dunster recommends that the reader scroll down and view the sections in ascending order.]

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Visual Pleasure
In her influential 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey addresses the cinematic concept of the “woman as image; man as bearer of the look” (Mulvey, 1973: 2186). Mulvey follows Lacan’s theory of male subjectification (see Lacan, 1949), according to which the abstract concept of the phallus exists both in the male unconscious as well as in language, and is that entity which bestows subjectivity. Men and women thus grow up, conditioned by the mind and by language, to assume the roles of subject and object, respectively. Mulvey explains how this relation is characterized in popular film, claiming that, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey, 1973: 2186). Throughout the section, Mulvey furthers the significance of “looks” in film, which supposedly represent looking in the western world. It is clear to her that “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey, 1973: 2186). The spectator, of course, has the freedom to look at the main male character as well as the female lead. Still, she claims, this look is not an objectifying one, but an identifying one. The male character is not so much an object of the male spectator’s gaze, but rather the bearer of his gaze upon the woman, the spectator’s lieutenant, as it were (in the original sense of lieutenant, "place-holder"). The male actor, then, is the idealized subject with whom the viewer identifies, while the female character is the object of the gaze of both the male role as well as the spectator.

Mulvey’s essay has been highly controversial, and rightly so, but it is of significance to this project in at least three ways. First, it is a well-known example of a piece that affirms the connection between the eye and the psychological concept of the phallus. While traditional psychoanalytic theory has been contested by most Anti-Essentialist theorists, especially feminists, the subject-object relationship between male and female is widely acknowledged as a distinction that clearly exists, but must be overcome. If we define the phallus, then, simply as the difference between man and woman (common sense tells us that both the physical interpretation of the phallus, as well as some psychological factors, are part of or even constitute this difference), we have a connection between the phallus and the gaze, as the subjective male gaze at the female object is widely acknowledged.

The issue of essence
The presentation of an essential male-female difference could get me in big trouble with contemporary theorists. Let this trouble be momentary: the main discussion of the eye-phallus metaphor does not hinge on such a distinction being essential. If the distinction is (“merely”) socially or mentally constructed, very well; so are conceptual metaphors. Furthermore, humans operate largely on socially and mentally based premises (for better or for worse; this, after all, is the contention of contemporary Anti-Essentialism), and conceptual metaphors may result from these premises—they may, in fact, perpetuate them. Also, if language codes differences and other relationships, then conceptual metaphors exert an astounding influence by virtue of corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions.

The second point Mulvey’s essay highlights, inseparable from the question of essence, may be one we have all been holding on to since the first mention of the THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS metaphor: everyone has eyes, but only half the population has a phallus! Is every gaze, including every female one, conceptualized through some phallic image, however subconsciously? Or can we only understand the male gaze, having no pervasive female metaphor? Worse yet, are we chained by the metaphor, or whatever lies behind it, to the laws of looking as put forth by Mulvey? Intuition tells us no. But it is very significant that the eye-phallus relationship exists, given that most of us feel equally able to conceptualize a female look as a male one. This ability does not discredit the past and present existence of the metaphor, but it may alter its quality in the future. A complete change would be extremely difficult, though, given the metaphor’s deep embedding in language, including its very sounds, and in prominent ancient works. There are those who would be for such a turnabout, but their task is a nearly impossible one.

THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part Four

[Note: this is the fourth installment of an essay, "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: a rare instance of bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" being posted serially. Below Dunster recommends that the reader scroll down and view the sections in ascending order.]

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Some nonlinguistic manifestations: Freud, Sophocles, and Jesus
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposed the metaphor SEEING IS TOUCHING. This metaphor may have nonlinguistic manifestations that relate to THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS. First, let us examine a few linguistic expressions that support it. Lakoff and Johnson mention the phrases “I couldn’t take my eyes off him” and “I felt his glance.” By themselves, these sentences are not very useful to our cause, but they combine with phrases like “Our eyes met” to support Lakoff and Johnson’s extension of the SEEING IS TOUCHING metaphor to EYES ARE LIMBS—a hefty step closer to our territory! Indeed, the phallus is occasionally conceptualized as a limb, as seen especially in such euphemisms as “the middle leg” (euphemisms constitute linguistic data and will be considered in more detail later in this paper). Thus, THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS can be seen as a member (pardon the pun) of the more general metaphor EYES ARE LIMBS, thereby providing further evidence for that relation as well. Kövecses (2002) adds the expression “undressing someone with ones eyes” to make explicit the sexual (and socially taboo) nature of the nonlinguistic manifestation of these metaphors.

Recall Freud’s quote about Oedipus, “the self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis.” The Latin term means “law of retaliation in kind” and means simply that the punishment must fit the crime. Oedipus had committed no offense with his eyes; rather, his crime was attributable to the phallus: he had killed his father and married his mother. The only appropriate penalty was castration, but Oedipus did not emasculate himself in the traditional sense. Instead, he fulfilled the same crime-punishment correspondence by removing his own eyes. Freud does not indicate whether he believes Oedipus was conscious of the underlying appropriateness of this substitution, or whether it was simply natural. In either case, it speaks to the conceptual relation of the eyes to the phallus.

If an essay by Sigmund Freud is the most likely place for the putting forth of a correlation between the phallus and the eyes—between the phallus and anything, for that matter—perhaps the least likely place is the New Testament. Yet the link may have been addressed by Jesus Christ himself. In the Sermon on the Mount, he declares, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt. 5:27-28, NIV, emphasis mine). This is an explicit claim of the likeness of lustful looking to physical intercourse, a correlation that, by extension, connects the agents of each action, i.e., the eyes and the phallus.

As if this statement were not forceful enough, Jesus immediately follows it with this exhortation: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Mt. 5:29, NIV). Was Oedipus a Bible reader? It would be more likely that Jesus read Sophocles, who wrote Oedipus Rex, but there is no reason to believe that either. No, every one of these men was aware of the eye-phallus relation, and Oedipus obeyed the principle announced by Jesus without ever having heard it. It is worth noting that the eye cannot really cause a person to sin, except by Jesus’s first claim, and, as mentioned already, Oedipus’s crime was not really one committed with the eyes, but rather with the phallus—much more apt to transgress. Thus, the relation between the two is necessary for the second quote of Jesus ever to apply.[1]

[1] Actually, it could also apply with other relations of the eyes to agents of mental and physical activity, such as, perhaps, those established by Lakoff and Johnson’s eyes are limbs metaphor. the eye is the phallus is most relevant however, both in the context of Jesus’s original quote as well as to this paper.

Slocomfort

I am diving below Dunster, not simply belowdunster, but below Dunster, for comfort in the Combe. Exmoor is sodden with Bristol Channel rain.

"For the truly creative mind in any field is no more than this - a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create - to create - to create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of beauty and meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create. He must pour out creation. By some strange unknown pressing inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
-Pearl S. Buck

A brief history of Dunster, Part Two


In later years Dunster Castle became less blurry, but in the process was reduced to black-and-white.


Into the 1400s the area of Exmoor was only sparsely populated, but at least one family made its home there: the Slocombes. They may or may not initially have been residents of Dunster, but they are most closely associated with an area on the other side (near side in the photo, I believe) of Dunster Castle: Slo Combe itself, from which the family derived its name. I would not be against the use of derove either, but ablaut is rare among English words of Latin origin.

Sloe are wild plum trees; they thrived (or throve)—still thrive, in fact—on the Combe, and it is comforting to know that one’s name comes from a toothsome fruit of the Rosaceae family. Remnants of a vineyard can still be seen on the Combe, which has also been a site for the raising of sheep. No trace of any artificial structure can be found, however, and it is likely that the Slocombe family lived very near the Combe and used it for commercial purposes. Some of the oldest records regarding the Slocombes show ownership of land near Dunster Castle.

The earliest known record of a Slocombe is in a document from a legal proceeding in 1308 at Dunster Castle itself, which tells of one John de Slocombe who testified in the case. I hope he did not bear false witness. Either way we can eagerly anticipate celebrating the 700th anniversary of his testimony in a few short years.

Source: The Slocum Family Project, http://www.slocombe.freeservers.com/index.html

chiasthmatic cough XIV

The poet at the banquet tables
The gourmet writing sonnets
Victorian dolls now telling fables
And Aesop, wearing bonnets.

A brief history of Dunster, Part One

It doesn't get any Belower Dunsterer

By popular request:

A brief history of Dunster, Part One

On the edge of Exmoor, Somersetshire, as it has for at least 700 years, this blurry castle overlooks the small village of Dunster. The castle stood well before that: records go back to the Norman invasion of 1066. It is unusual in that only two families have owned it since that time, the Mohans from 1066 to 1376 and the Lutrells from then until 1976, when the National Trust appropriated the castle and opened it to the public. One wonders if they intended to take over earlier and waited to give the Lutrells an even 600 years, or if they were gaping jealously across the pond at the American bicentennial celebration and suddenly desired their own event of import, having lost their share in that party to one G. Washington and his low-class comrades sometime around the Lutrells' tetracentennial.

Source: The Slocum Family Project, http://www.slocombe.freeservers.com/index.html

Tribute to the Three-tiered Vannimahns

This is a poem to
Kynstigar the Less Reserved
And his page
Chinstygger the Somewhat Refined
Who have lent me the antitheses
Of their nominal qualities
Who have defined i-over-naught
and not stopped there
but gone on to define such things
as love
justice and
His Grace the More Obscure

Who are rightly suspected
Of tagging their own
Statues they themselves erected
Who bask unscrupulously
In the chiaroscuro shade
They themselves forbade when
They said, “Never recline
Your pencil so”
Who flog fowl of bread box size
Who roll the inside three
Who liberally palatalize
J, S, and even B
Who write their wills to Mercury
Who favor poetasters
To the lyric masters and
Who are moderately familiar
With the poetry of Allen Ginsburg.

You are
Vermicular but necessary
Ova of my morning loins
And for this
I salute you.


-Yours Truly, on the 48th anniversary of Austrian independence, also on the 330th birthday of Moravian linguist and musicologist Dimitrie Cantemir and the 1104th anniversary of the death of Alfred the Great, hero of Anglo-Saxons.

chiasthmatic cough XIII

The poet citing prophecy
The augur writing verse
The choir's bent is fallacy
The dimwit's, to rehearse.

THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part Three

[Note: this is the third installment of an essay, "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: a rare instance of bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" being posted serially. Below Dunster recommends that the reader scroll down and view the sections in ascending order.]

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Some linguistic manifestations: phonosemantic evidence
A number of linguistic expressions relate the eyes and the phallus to each other. Of course, we don’t consciously think of them as indicating this relation. But how are we to account for phrases like “a piercing gaze” and “a penetrating glance”? Penetration is prototypically a phallic event. It is true that other things penetrate and pierce, but a look into the history of the accounts of visual perception lends our case some force.

Before the eye was understood as a lens and a receptor of light into a person, it was thought that the eye actually emitted rays or beams that extended from their origin at the eye to their target, the object looked at. There was thought to be an invisible, but physical, spear of sorts connecting the eye to the object of the gaze. Thus, it was actually possible for a look, i.e., the physical protrusion from the eye, to penetrate a person. The superstitious notion of the evil eye, for instance, derived from this idea.

How the phallus relates to this protrusion is easily understandable, and it is no large leap to extend this relation from the gaze to the eye itself, allowing it to stand even after the notion of the spearlike look became less fashionable.[1] But the eye-phallus metaphor penetrates deeper than fashion; in fact, it occupies an impregnable position in the structure and even the sound of the English language itself. Rather than an affair of fashion, then, we might call the phallic metaphor a matter of style.

This is not pedantry; it is phonosemantics—the study of the relationship between the sounds of words and their meanings. Saussure declared this relationship to be arbitrary, but there is evidence that in at least some cases there is a patterned connection. In English, it is most salient in word-initial consonant clusters; for instance, words beginning with gl- are often related to reflected light, e.g. gleam, glint, glow, glare, etc. Though counter-examples abound, the percentage of gl- words that fit the pattern should not be passed off as coincidental. Little formal work has been done in phonosemantics compared to other linguistic subdisciplines—the term itself is rather new—but one piece is of particular interest to us. In his paper “Style Stands Still” (in press), John Lawler categorizes the semantic features of English words that begin with the consonant cluster st-. He has found that about 70% of words beginning with this cluster possess or indicate the property “1-dimensional rigid,” enough to label the st- cluster as a classifier of that property.[2] Examples of words demonstrating this classification include stick, staff, stem, stab, stake, stave, stiff, and stilt. The word style itself, according to Lawler, is confusingly derived from the name of the ancient pen-like apparatus, stilus (Latin), and often related to the Greek stylus, which is a vertical column or pillar.

It is clear enough that the referents of these words have a phallic association, but what do they have to do with eyes? We have already seen the primitive (as Freud would call it) notion of the pole-like look, and its phallic connotation. It is compelling, but not linguistically. Here phonosemantics flies in with a crucial set of linguistic data. Consider the English verb stare, as in “he stared at the wall for several minutes.” It is a common alternative of look, with the more specific connotation of being prolonged and intense. Few starers realize, however, that it derives etymologically from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *ster-, meaning “stiff.” The relevant present-day German word, starren, means both "stare" as well as "to be rigid" (the word for rigid is simply starr). In fact, the “stare” sense of the word has come to be considered not a different meaning of the same word, but rather simply a special case of the “rigid” meaning (OED).

The English adjective stern comes from the same PIE root (*ster-) as stare, and has as one of its OED definitions the term “unbending.” When we hear the phrase “a stern look,” we tend to interpret it as “a look from a person who is (being) stern.” Could it be, though, that the word modifies the look itself much more directly, even physically? The look, that is, in the sense of the protruding beam; thus, His stare was stern = The rigid beam protruding from him was unbending.

These linguistic expressions are immensely supportive of the eye-phallus metaphor. Of course, they rely on the nonlinguistic conception of the gaze as a physical projection and on that conception’s congruity with the phallus. We turn next to some more different types of nonlinguistic manifestations of the relation.

[1] Many cultures, especially non-western ones, retain the concept of the look as a protrusion from the eye, either lacking scientific understanding of the actual process of visual perception, or disregarding it for the sake of tradition, utility, or poetry. Anglo-American English, as we have been observing, retains the notion largely for the sake of metaphorical linguistic expression, as in formal or poetic diction.
[2] For further examples, see e.g. Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word: Archetypes in the Consonants, Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson Univ. Press, 1999.

THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part Two

[Note: this is the second installment of an essay, "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: a rare instance of bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" being posted serially. Below Dunster recommends that the reader scroll down and view the sections in ascending order.]

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Conceptual metaphors and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic theory, with a different end in mind, has been responsible for some of the farthest-reaching discussions of conceptual metaphors. Fetishism, for example, relies on the metaphorical connection between the phallus and other concepts. Most psychoanalytic discourse does not mention metaphor by name, but this is simply because the terminology of the early twentieth century, and indeed that of today’s general public, reserves the term for metaphorical linguistic expressions. Psychoanalytic theorists might therefore see the term “metaphor” as making light of their theory, but the cognitive linguistic view assigns great importance to mappings supported by conceptual metaphors.

The metaphor
Among the several conceptual metaphors proposed by Sigmund Freud, one stands out as particularly interesting to the field. This metaphor, mentioned by Freud inexplicitly and almost in passing, is THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS. Under a bit of scrutiny, this concept quickly moves from ridiculous to noteworthy to downright fascinating.

In his famous 1919 essay, “The ‘Uncanny’” (“Das ‘Unheimliche’”), Freud attempts to discover the criteria for the instantiation of an uncanny event. He spends a large part of the essay investigating the German gothic classic, Der Sandmann, by E.T.A. Hoffman, whom Freud elsewhere calls “the unrivalled master of the uncanny in poetry.” The story features a young man, Nathaniel, who has suffered from a phobia of losing his eyes since a traumatic incident in his childhood. He links the man responsible for this incident, Coppelius, with the mythical Sandman, who supposedly enters children’s bedrooms at night to pour sand in their eyes. The bleeding spheres then jump out of the victims’ heads for the Sandman to collect and carry back to his lair, where he feeds them to his children. Nathaniel’s terror returns when, as a young adult, he is accosted by an eyeglass salesman named Coppola, who, Nathaniel is convinced, is really the same man as Coppelius, back from a lengthy exile.

Freud’s discussion leads him to consider the fear of losing one’s eyes in general, citing a number of cases to indicate that “no physical injury is so much dreaded by [adults] as an injury to the eye” (Freud, 1919: 938). He goes on to claim that the fear of losing one’s eyes actually tends to be nothing less than a placeholder for castration anxiety. This, he says, is often apparent in dreams, fantasies and myths. Indeed, “the self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis” (Freud, 1919: 938). Freud counters the view of opponents that it is simply natural for an organ as precious as the eye to be guarded proportionally to the phallus, and the slightly bolder view that castration anxiety is simply one form of that type of rational fear of losing an organ, by claiming that this stance cannot account for data from dreams, myths, and fantasies, “nor can it dispel the impression that the threat of being castrated in especial excites a peculiarly violent and obscure emotion, and that this emotion is what first gives the idea of losing other organs its intense coloring” (Freud, 1919: 938). [2005 note: A professor pointed out to me that Freud's claim "sounds (eerily, perhaps, or uncannily) very much like certain forms of generative grammar discourse." Some readers will find this comment amusing.]

Regardless of one’s position with respect to psychoanalytic theory, Freud’s THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS metaphor has physical, psychological, and even linguistic merit. We will approach these areas individually, but will find that they are hardly separable.

There are two perspectives from which we must view this relation, determined by two predominant interpretations of the phallus. One is the Freudian/Lacanian interpretation of the phallus as a somewhat abstract signifier, simultaneously defining male subjectivity and female objectivity. In this case, the phallus is not really the male organ, but an abstract concept existing, according to Freud, in the unconscious, and, according to Lacan, also in language. The other interpretation is simply the anatomical feature, the erect penis.

The eye must also be considered with regard to its non-physical (psychological, mythological, etc.) significance as well as its anatomical role. For the latter, we can further examine both the structure and the function of the physical eye. Though a conceptual metaphor’s source domain is, by definition, that domain which is necessary in order to understand the target domain, we will not spend much time characterizing the physical interpretation of the phallus, since another assumption of a cognitive metaphor is that the source domain is already fairly well understood.

Below Whatster?

by popular request,

A brief history of Dunster

is coming soon to Below Dunster!

THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part One

For unknown reasons I became inclined, about fifteen minutes ago, to post at Below Dunster the text of an essay I once wrote, entitled "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: A rare instance of a bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" It will follow in daily installments, just as the tales of Dickens were once published (though this is not a work of fiction); I encourage the reader to peruse the sections in order. By the way, although peruse is commonly thought to mean something like skim, it actually means the opposite: to read or examine thoroughly, with great care. In fact, sixty-six percent of the American Heritage Usage Panel finds the former use unacceptable; I am not so anti-philistine, but it is in the latter sense that I intend the recommendation of the previous sentence. You are, of course, authorized to skim, especially if the alternative is to shun.

If you are interested in language, cognition, psychoanalysis, film, literature, gender studies, animism, or what is called everyday life, you should find at least something of interest to you in the excerpts that follow.

It can be amusing to note, when reading old writings of one's own, what stupid things one once found fit to say. No doubt such things found their way into this essay; they do not necessarily depict my current views.

Enjoy, and comment copiously!



Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare:
A rare instance of a bidirectional cognitive metaphor?

Summary
Work in the area of cognitive metaphor over the last 20 or so years has assumed that metaphors, as a rule, are unidirectional (e.g., Kövecses 2002); that is, a metaphor’s source and target domains cannot be reversed without forfeiting the salience of the metaphor. Indeed, this is generally the case, but no research I know of has even seriously considered bidirectional conceptual metaphors as a category. This essay discusses a specific conceptual metaphor, THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, and its arguable bidirectionality, and seeks to draw some conclusions about the nature of and basis for bidirectional metaphors in general. Along the way, I will explore a number of other peculiarities, justifications, and implications of the eye-phallus relationship.

Introduction to cognitive metaphor
In the discipline of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is defined as a mapping of qualities from a source domain to a target domain. In print, these mappings are written as A IS B (always in small caps), where B is the source domain and A is the target domain. An example is A LIFETIME IS A DAY, where properties of A DAY are mapped onto A LIFETIME. The purpose of this mapping, and of cognitive metaphors, is to help us understand a relatively abstract concept by considering a more concrete one. Death (the end of a lifetime) is difficult to grasp, but practically everyone is familiar with a sunset (the end of a day). Thus, the metaphor helps us conceptualize death in a less alien way.

Such a conceptual metaphor may or may not manifest itself linguistically in an expression that a poet would call metaphor. In fact, a major contention of the discipline is that metaphor is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon, but a cognitive one, originating and primarily transpiring in the mind. Our already considered conception of death, as well as instances like Oedipus’s reasoning out of the riddle of the Sphinx, would be considered nonlinguistic manifestations of A LIFETIME IS A DAY, while such expressions as “his life's sun is at its zenith” are linguistic manifestations of the same conceptual metaphor; we will call these “metaphorical linguistic expressions.” Other conceptual metaphors may not have corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions, but all metaphorical expressions rely on some conceptual metaphor, whether it is a common one or one established by the speaker or writer.[1]

Another consideration with regard to conceptual metaphors is whether they are universal or culture-specific. One is always wary of classifying anything as universal, but studies from several cultures and languages suggest that some metaphors, especially ones relying on the human anatomy, light/dark, and up/down as target domains, are near-universal. In any case, the claim that conceptual metaphors are based in the mind and not in language is strong enough to merit study regardless of their universality, which can be investigated separately. One of the upshots of regarding a comparison as a conceptual metaphor, then, is that the validity of the comparison is greatly supported by its mental basis (as opposed to the supposedly more transient nature of language).[2]

[1] See Kövecses (2002, pp. 42-55) for a brief discussion of metaphors in literature and their relation to conceptual metaphors; they will also be addressed in a different light later in this paper.
[2] The question of the degree of the human mind’s stability is a troubling one, but being scrutinized by greater minds in different papers.

chiasthmatic cough XII

The poet shopping at Kris Kringle
Toy-nuts employing themes
The Death Star luring with a jingle
Coke ads, with tractor beams.

chiasthmatic cough XI

The poet’s internet was down
The quick concurrer scribbled
Jay-Z was hired as a clown
And Bozo’s nizzle dribbled.

chiasthmatic cough X

The poet mentions salmonella
The surgeon general woos
The club thrives thanks to Ray Kinsella
The Field of Dreams, to dues.

chiasthmatic cough IX

The poet writes of Cinderella
The Brothers Grimm of eros
Moses sick with salmonella
The raw-egg fan, of Pharaohs.

A Toughy for Daffy

When the rain raineth
And the goose winketh
Little wotteth the gosling
What the goose thinketh.
-Anon.

Yes, it's raining here in Santa Monica, and the gosling and I wot not a thing of the goose's mental machinations. I do want to call to your attention, however, the word wotteth, and ask you to stare at it for several seconds. It won't help with the goose, but it will incline you to say, "man, that is one wacko language we have."

I can't tell you all the possible phrases one could make using the letters from raineth, winketh, wotteth, and thinketh, but I can tell you you'd have more "the"s at your disposal than with your average four-word set. And "eth"s. Moreover, I can tell you that the word solver can be re-arranged to form lovers, something I first considered while reading page 290 of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory (formerly Conclusive Evidence), where he talks about the pitfalls he incorporates into chess problems he designs, "to lead the would-be solver astray." Thus I thought also of would-be lovers, which did not, but could have, made me think of Cinderella's two step-sisters with respect to the prince. This in turn leads to the scene where one of these chops off her heel in an effort to fit in the glass slipper, which no doubt was supremely uncomfortable even without a severed foot (the real significance of the fairy-tale is that it prefigures ladies’ dress-shoe-shopping of today: every soirée instance of pandemic blistering is more aptly called a Cinderella story than the Mets’ '86 World Series win).

But the heel: there is no indication that the sister’s heel shortage led to an untimely death; on the contrary, her loggerheadedness seems to have gone on undiminished. My use of the l-word does not betray spite for that profession—my late great-grandfather Bloom was a logger by trade, and a good one at that—no, we have the British Bard himself to thank for its pejoration. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Biron exclaims, on having his guilt exposed by Dumain, "Ah, you whoreson loggerhead, you were born to do me shame!" This is the same Biron of the even better speech,

“Shot, by heaven! Proceed, sweet Cupid:
thou hast thumped him with thy bird-bolt under the
left pap. In faith, secrets!”

Secrets, indeed: mark how it all connects, for it surely does. One of the two most popular versions of the myth has a leaf falling on Achilles’ heel when his mother, the goddess Thetis, dips him in the river Styx to immortalize him. Note that the heel is the part of the body closest to the ground, whereas the head is the uppermost part, and that a leaf is the uppermost part of tree, whereas the trunk, or log, is the section closest to the ground. Thus the leaf is linked to the heel by the same relationship (arguably the opposite) as the log is linked to the head, and we can think of loggerhead and leaferheel as synonymous, leaving open the possibility of their antonymy. The other version of the myth holds that Achilles’ heel remained undipped, and thus vulnerable, simply because that is where Thetis was holding him. Either account works for us, though the former is more intriguing.

Few disagree that Achilles perished by an arrow—either of Paris or Apollo, or through some supernatural working of the latter in the former’s arrow—to the heel. “Shot, by heaven!” and also “under the left pap,” only not directly under it, but about four and a half feet lower, assuming normal-to-large stature. Since the rest of him was immortal, a blow to any place other than the heel would have failed. This makes us wonder: what if Achilles, whether to fit in a certain slipper or for some other reason, had previously cut off the self-same heel? Two results are likely—either the arrow would have missed, since there would have been nothing there to hit, or the arrow would have been harmless, since it would have hit an invulnerable part of Achilles’ foot. In either case, Achilles would have survived the shot!

But what are the chances of Achilles doing such a thing? Greater than we might think. Thetis, seeing from prophecy that her son was fated to die, disguised him as a female and put him under the care of Lycomedes of Scyros. Initially the fifteen-year-old Achilles refused to dress as a girl until he realized it was the only way to get at King Lycomedes’ daughter, and thus he gave in to being essentially identified as his own sister. Given the friskiness of the gods and of the ancient Greeks in general, it is not inconceivable that Achilles might have entered a situation in which, for love or greed, he would have chopped off his own heel. In fact, Achilles seems like the type who would rather lose his heel than dress as a girl, and so we can go so far as to say that the heelless story would have been even more likely than the Iliad’s account! What is more, Achilles and the wicked step-sister are linked linguistically and perhaps ontologically by their statuses as loggerhead and leaferheel.

I have come across those who would have had me write stati instead of statuses. The same would probably prefer syllabi to syllabuses, and so would err on two counts. First, in English we generally form the plural by adding –s or –es. This is the case even with foreign words, for instance, we write the plural of chateau as chateaus, even though in French it is chateaux (though I have seen exceptions). Thus, if we are speaking English, which we are, it makes most sense to say syllabuses. The second count is more informative: even in Latin, the plural of syllabus is not and never has been syllabi! Syllabus is a noun of the fourth declension (unlike cactus, for instance, which is of the second; that is what makes its Latin plural cacti), hence the Latin plural of syllabus is syllabūs (with a long u).

The bottom line is that Achilles would have been better off without that heel. If only leaferheel had been a loggerhead and sliced it off! History would have been changed considerably: the Greeks would still have sacked Troy, of course, but other, psychologically more significant, alterations of the space-time continuum would have ensued. Achilles’ child, for instance, with whom he had left his wife Deidamia (the aforementioned daughter of the king) pregnant, would not have grown up fatherless, which some studies have shown contributes to adolescent alienation.

I am utterly certain that I wished to expound several other connections between the Greek hero and Cinderella’s steppie, but in the process of following some have abandoned the others. Feel free to supplement this account in the comments section.

We could say the moral of it all is that a fairy godmother beats a god-for-a-mother, or that it is better to go to the ball in a pumpkin pulled by mice than to have been dunked as a kid headfirst in hell’s river by your own mother. But that might be reading too much into things. Really, it is simply that for some it pays to be step-sister to a coal-covered beauty with a kick-ass fairy godmother, and for some it doesn’t.

chiasthmatic cough VIII

The poet being called a hottie
The bonnie lass a prophet
Skeptics being trained to potty
The toddling tyke, to scoff at.

A better anniversary

Thus far the day has been spent in celebration of Below Dunster's one week anniversary. But today also marks an anniversary of much greater note:

The 7.419354838709677419354838709677
41935483870967741935483870967742 month anniversary of Justin and Alexis Bailey!!!

I must say it has been a stupendous 7.4193548387096774193548387
0967741935483870967741935483870967742 months. Alexis, thanks for being my perfect buddy, lover, and friend—“I know the angles of a hundred seats and backs / Each corresponding to a moment, word, or mooncrust with you on a bench.”

A modest poem for you on this memorable day:


So it has been 7.41935483870967742 months!
—a number that is but approximate,
unlike my love, which loves exact.
Gladly would I quaff canola for two months
For one moment to you to be proximate:
Your nearness is what holds my heart intact.
7.41935483870967742! Whereas
That 2 denotes the figure’s periodicity
Our 2-ness, undivided, is our felicity!


I love you dearly, Lexi, and wish you a sensational 7.4193548387096
7741935483870967741935483870967741935483870967742 month anniversary!

one week! (the interval, not the song)

Photo by Peter Schmid, http://www.fotocommunity.de/pc/pc/mypics/10323

Merry Birthday, Below Dunster!

a c-cough revolution (and all-new c-cough VII!)

It is without political design that I have, for the first time, subverted the original form of the chiasthmatic cough. The switch of subject from poet to non-poet is purely occasional, that is, motivated by today's occasion, which is the one-week anniversary of Below Dunster. Amid the Roman candles and other pyrotechnica I was inclined to make Below Dunster itself the subject of a c-cough--but how I resisted! For I recall the days when metric innovation and national upheaval were one, when formal novelty constituted a call not only for a new form of literature but for a new form of government, when monarchies were toppled by coffeehouse song-singers and cellar-corner verse-scratchers. I remember the Neo-Classical tenet that dependence on certain formal factors for the satisfaction of eternal rules in poetry is essential not only for poetic order but also for social stability, and that these rules are understood by all rational people. But just as this movement was built ironically on the rediscovery--and redistribution--of Aristotle's Poetics, so this post is built on a negation: the altered c-cough form is not attempted regicide. For as long as Slo Combe tarries Below Dunster, the poet is king of the chiasthmatic cough. And since wild plum groves have little power of locomotion, that will be a long time.

I trust the fears of the faithful have been assuaged. But I must further confess the relative obscurity of the anniversary cough in the previous post, and so, for once, rather than gloat in the ivory tower as many poets do, I will do what few have ever done, and supply an alternate. Thus, for those unschooled to General Sherman and to British regional dialects:


chiasthmatic cough VII

B-Dunster’s one-week birthday
The pruny infant’s hypedness
Bananas brown from UV-rays
Beach bums, from overripeness.

chiasthmatic cough VI: all new!

The weblog’s anniversary
The couple’s url
A Cockney Sherman’s bursary
The preppy’s “Wars are ‘ell.”

chiasthmatic cough V

The poet all up in the Word
The preacher-man emceeing
Ulysses finding faith absurd
Agnostics, odysseying.

chiasthmatic cough IV: all new!

The poet discoursing on names
Onomasts metaphoring
Bullfighters transferring blames
And Adam, matadoring.

On certain names

I will count the comments of Tracy, Liz, and Cat-via-Liz as three ayes. Technically we now need a nay for victory, but three-nil will suffice.

Several of you will recognize among what follows common remarks of mine, delivered most notably one late night in the Michigan Undergound. It is no exhaustive treatise on names or naming, but serves as a primer on what might be called “alternative naming.” To wit:


An excellent thing to do is to name your kid Pete, spelled M-I-C-H-A-E-L. But, you say (those who have not yet received this primer), isn’t that the name Michael? Maybe in Ireland. But if Catherine can be spelled C-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E, C-A-T-H-A-R-I-N-E, C-A-T-H-R-Y-N, K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E, K-A-T-H-A-R-I-N-E, K-A-T-H-R-Y-N, and probably several other variations, few of which are phonetic, and the Scottish can have Kilconquhar pronounced “kuh-nóch-eR,” then we can have Pete spelled M-I-C-H-A-E-L. If you need other justifications, call it a silent M, I, C, H, A, E, and L, all of which occur in English—most, at least; the rest occur as silent letters in Thai, left over from Sanskrit—and an epenthesized P, EE, and T, which also occur.

I am grieved by the need to present so many data in defense of Pete, spelled M-I-C-H-A-E-L, instead of just declaring, “Pete, spelled M-I-C-H-A-E-L.” Usually this name takes only about a sentence to introduce and then we can move on to the next one, but to keep the posting area tidy I want to preclude some of the commoner objections.

At any rate, it is noble to name your kid Pete, spelled M-I-C-H-A-E-L.

Another great thing to do is to name your child Purp e. That’s one word, P-U-R-P-_-E. Some find this name difficult to pronounce; I won’t try to present the phonetics here, but it really isn’t that tough. The important thing to emphasize is that this is one name and one word, not a first and middle name or two-word first name. Many have tried to deduce the missing letter, positing results such as Purpse (sometimes leaving the second P silent such that the name becomes homophonous with a lady’s handbag), Purpke (two syllables), Purpqe (this still won’t help U-less Scrabble players as proper names are contra los rulos), Purpie (cute), and even—it’s true—Purple. Hm. I get it, like the color?

Look: there is no missing letter. If it helps, consider the blank a letter, but just call the letter “blank.” To avoid problems down the road, though, I recommend not even considering the blank a letter, and just taking in the name holistically as Purp e.

Here’s why: there are names that DO contain blanks as what can only be described as letters, at least in written form. Among these is the Grand Behemoth of all given names, to which I will skip directly. Parents should think long and hard before assigning it to a child, because it will have irreversible effects on the bearer’s very experience of reality, perhaps even on her or his metaphysics. Just now I have divulged that the name can suit both male and female children, which must be expected of a nominal Zeus. But enough pomp—here is the Maharaja of all human names:



Powerful; I know. Let me repeat it for emphasis:



Wow, that is heavy.
You may by now have recognized why this name should be given only in exceptional cases, for whenever there is silence, this child will think its name is being called! The quieter the environment, the more urgent the call will seem, and I can only imagine the effects of utter silence. These I expect to be most pronounced during test-taking and at night. In the early stages, expect this child to be whirling around constantly and blurting, “Who said my name?” Also, during roll call, ______ will wonder how there could possibly be so many kids of the same name enrolled, and why none of the others showed up. S/he will, however, be honored by the amount of time devoted to her or him over the PA, and will enormously enjoy watching network television after 2am, when everyone else thinks the stations are off the air.

Like any intelligent being, the child will soon learn that it is not always being summoned, just as girls named Daisy know they are not being addressed every time someone discusses the flower, and in the process it will acquire a sense of discernment far exceeding its years.

Note that, for practical purposes, such as filling out electronic forms, the spelling must be conformed to one containing characters, which is where the blanks come in. You will thereby be constructing a special “written version” of the name, as the true name is simply spelled ______ (pretend that line isn't there--even this posting form won't let me enter the actual spelling). Lamentably, you will have to choose how many blanks to enter; for aesthetic reasons, I recommend four, _-_-_-_, and most will agree.

I think it is clear that naming your child _______ can be the source of immense and manifold difficulties, but that the benefits can be galactic in scope.

That’s all for today’s onomastics. Before closing, however, I find it only appropriate to take a special moment to honor all those named , Purp e, and Pete, spelled M-I-C-H-A-E-L.
Thank you.

Below Dunster is open to queries about these and other names, and is willing to operate as a naming service-for-hire on an individual basis.

chiasthmatic cough III

The poet dies another day
James Bond puffs opium
The woman's tubes are cathode ray
The T.V. set's, fallopian.

Vote here

Whetted by the previous post, Below Dunster is currently taking votes as to whether I should post my brief treatise on ideal first names.

A 3-1 aye-nay ratio will win the post. Cast your vote in the comments section.


*Also coming soon: the treatise "On the mixing of fruit and grain products." There is no poll for this one.

*Not coming soon, or ever, but considered axiomatic: the hilarity of saying "What is this, the RC?" Comments are welcome on this, too.

Be sure to specify whether your comment relates to "first names" or "RC."

Pam

It is a sincere hope of mine to ask someone named Pam what her full first name is and have her answer not Pamela but Pamphlet.

In general I think Pamphlet would be a great name, simultaneously exhibiting a Classical and a diminutive feel.

As for that person called Pam, Pamegronate would be decent consolation too, as would Pamina (as in Die Zauberflöte), Pambulance, Pamnesty, Pamshackle, and Pample.

It would also be great to meet a "Pam" who spelled her name Pamn.

What if, from now on, every time you tripped a random citizen of earth perished? (You, personally, not people in general.) Would you do anything differently? Walk more carefully? Avoid hiking? Or would you just figure what happens happens, and proceed normally with life? Note: saying you would walk around tripping intentionally is an invalid response; for the trippage to register it must be a true, inadvertent trip.

like Michael Jordan

Endorsing lots of things, that is.

*Below Dunster further endorses the acceptance of ain't as Standard English.*

Being able to collapse am not, is not, have not, or has not into a single syllable is prosodically valuable; the ability to preserve ambiguity between those four forms is also worthwhile. For instance, a poem I once wrote ("On To R") depended on it.

*Below Dunster further endorses double negatives, the splitting of infinitives, the stranding of prepositions, beginning sentences with conjunctions, the use of the passive voice and the first person in formal writing, and the spelling of both yes and hurray as A--Y-I-Y--Y-I-Y.*

Oh a yiy yiy. And I motion for it to quickly be decided by the hoi polloi, who I ain't on bad terms with.


Below Dunster does not endorse the interchangeability of you're and your or of they're, there, their and ninja. Below Dunster discourages the use of the word obviously and the mixing of fruit and grain products.

like Garth Brooks

Shameless, that is.

*Below Dunster endorses the web log located at www.towit.blogspot.com*

Here’s my reconstruction of a bathroom sign at Flags West truck stop in southeastern Idaho, where we stopped for some Good 'n Plenty and Pull 'n Peel on our cross-country drive in August. By the way, drop the ells from the latter candy and you get Pu 'n Pee, which is the other reason we were there.

So the sign: my question is, what on earth is going on on the right? Are they just pointing out that that direction also exists? What about up and down, then, and in between? The other two arrows seem to be directing people to restrooms, so we can assume the right one is too. But who is supposed to use that one? “Other”? No one? Invisible people???

Moreover, it is unclear whether men may use the bathroom here. Apparently they must first become handicapped.

Even if they succeed by getting caught pilfering some trucker’s tobacco chew, the sign says they must approach their bathroom in reverse. Hm. Is it because the women’s is that way too, so they must face away? (Watch out when you open the door, ladies, there’s a guy in a wheelchair barreling toward it—backwards!) That’s after drumming up an extra wheelchair at a truck stop in rural Idaho.

A Martian, I think, would take from this sign that all triangle-shaped earthlings are called women, but that only those with gargantuan derrieres are accessible. And located to the left. And never, ever, go right unless you are invisible. Yes, that’s what a Martian would take from it.

Anyway, I peed on some clover out back; the pu had to wait till Utah.

chiasthmatic cough II

The poet on the midnight watch
The sentry penning ballads
Health nuts lacking in the crotch
And eunuchs, eating salads.

A long sentence: on a chunk of barbarian limestone, hammered bronze and crimson-dyed linen repose in the shape of a centurion, or, rather, the centurion rests behind the molded deceptor that is the Herculian breastplate not glinting under his hunched trunk, a breastplate beaten specifically for him into the general Grecian form worn by a thousand marble statues and as many puppet officers; this one, though more man than toy, sits postured like a marionette whose frame has been fumbled or discarded, or whose strings have been severed altogether, slumping solitary in the alpine sun—slumbering in a peak traverse’s aftermath, perhaps, or withering in battle’s—his helmetless head lacking only laurel to be the stuff of busts, slaloming hair pressed forward even on the sides, curling up templeward, the top-hair valiantly defending glistening forehead corners from ultra-violet—not so for the rest of his face, where relentless sun rays pin the eyelids down, only the left accessible from the sky, actually, but the right following suit, or perhaps having its own reason to be lowered toward the cheek’s first wrinkle, not at the dimple but horizontally across from midnose, the first wrinkle of a fighter foreign to smiles and acquainted with squints, winces, and the windmilling tip of a Tunisian scimitar fourteen years before.

A long sentence: life

A long sentence: Maybe I should write hundreds of dozen-page sentences, just to learn how not to garden-path myself like horses raced past barns will do to you, and see if it can convincingly be done without simply stringing reduced relative clause upon reduced relative clause into an indeed long but dumbly cumbersome neck chain—dashes and semicolons seem to me cheap links, but I will certainly need some; on this first attempt I am struggling already eight or nine lines later, struggling mostly because my thoughts and words are playing leapfrog but not alternatingly, and the ware of this Barnes and Noble bookseller is insidiously distracting, what with arresting titles like The Shrewd Christian and Because of Romek, almost as if they were arranged here by the Sentence Length Police, which enforces kay-gee-bee-ically at popular retailers of almost-exclusively-rot like this place is, and now I have even stood up to peruse the aforementioned titles and a few others serving the SLP, which I have already (knowing surely almost nothing of the Cyclopes I will rouse) recognized as a foe I must shrewdly evade (a shrewd Christian I will be, and I’m not talking finances like Neil Atkinson), and now I have allowed this sentence to be altogether determined by my immediate environs, and so I will succumb after a single page, content because it is a debut effort, and call it a sentence.

For your pleasure I have decided to publish some of my old chiasthmatic coughs here periodically. Those of you unfamiliar with the form will soon, I hope, come to know, love, and perhaps improve on it. 'Twas fitting to begin with the one that started it all (see the previous post). More to come.

chiasthmatic cough I

The poet at his easel
The painter at his pad
Stag goes the weasel
And "pop," the dateless lad.

A detail from the facade of my high school in Vienna--the oldest in the city (est. 1553). To see some more shots of the school, visit http://www.akg.asn-wien.ac.at/default_ie_nn7.htm and select "Schulrundgand" from the menu at left.

pretty sweet picture I like to call "Gallic Ghost"

“Gun for the hills, Alfonso. Gun for the hills.”

I don’t know anyone named Alfonso, but if I did, and was in charge of him, and wanted him to shoot toward raised earth too small to merit the appellation “mountain,” that’s probably how I would say it.

Calmly, see. Because whatever is up there to be fired at, we’re in no hurry. And with the solemn, confirmatory repetition after a short pause, for the same reason, and the added one that he may not have heard me right, because of the almost unthinkable calmness of the initial order.

Maybe I did know someone named Alfonso, but his name was actually Christoph, I’m fairly certain, and it was he doing both the ordering and the shooting, and there were no hills nearby. We had made a gun for bottle rockets, and when I say made, I mean it in the sense that one makes a boulder a table or a snow bank a slide: without altering its ontology at all; the action is more properly described by “designate” than “make.”

But we made that gun, dammit, made it out of a single plank with a thin protrusion running the full length of one edge and a groove the full length of the other—basic tongue-and-groove material—the idea being that one could link boards like this together ad libitum to make a floor or walls or a raft, except probably not a raft. But we had a floor and walls already, and a raft would have been great, but we only had one such board, and you probably can’t make raft out of that kind of plank anyway. So when we lightened the Turk’s stash of this particular piece it was clear that we would make a gun out of it.

Like I said, we didn’t have to alter it one bit; the groove simply functioned as a runner for the ammo; all we had to do was hold the plank on its edge, low on the hip like Rambo did real guns, and maintain our aim until the rocket fired.

One day soon after we had made it I was with Alfonso, I mean Christoph, when we had some trouble with this kid named after the Pope. Not the guy who is the Pope now, or even the one at the time, which is the same guy; the kid’s name was Gregor—the German version of the name—and he happened to be Christoph’s older brother.

To make a long story short, as one genius and a million fakes have put it, Christoph and Gregor got into a fraternal tussle over explosives or gummy candy or some other jewel we used to deal. Before I knew it, as another original person, maybe the same one, but probably a different one, and a million frauds (the same ones) have said, Gregor had gotten command of the gun and was loading a bottle rocket into the shaft. I remember Christoph’s cartoonishly pathetic jump-turn and the squeal that escaped before the rocket had fired, and I remember the little boom-on-a-stick streaking across the courtyard to Christoph’s left buttock, and the tiny scorched circle it left there, like the eye of a weasel. But only now, as I recall what Gregor yelled at him when he started bawling like a toddler, does it return to me that I guess Christoph’s name was Alfonso after all.

Now, those crabs have got it half right, they who are twice as developed as we are, although I’m not saying we are dumber—I would feel pretty comfortable taking on a crab in Mahjong, or any arthropod for that matter; I am speaking solely in terms of systems of locomotion: the crabs have quite simply got us there.

And when I say us, I mean you, because I personally have got one up even on the crabs. Of course I need to walk sideways sometimes, as the crabs always do and as everyone else sometimes must, to fit through or to avoid detection or what have you, but, as a rule, I walk backwards. It has been almost three years now since I last walked facing forward, and I no longer know why anyone would, who has really thought about it. Most people haven’t, though, and even then there would be those who stuck with forwardness for the sake of tradition, and those who avoided new trends because they take pride in such avoidance for its own sake, like people (I know quite a few) who refuse to use a cellular phone, even though it would be great for their job and family, “so as not to be like all those people who use cell phones,” whatever kind of person that is. I know lots of different types who use them.

Most of those, however, still walk in a forward orientation, and, like I said, they don’t even think about it, and that is why I am writing this, just like the guy who invented cell phones probably wrote an article whose basic message was why are you still walking around like that when you could be talking to someone far away at the same time. I bet no one gave him a hard time for that.

I will gladly reveal, right off, the chief reason for walking backwards at all times: no one can follow you without your knowledge. It’s a little-considered statistical fact that pedestrians are being followed 99 percent of the time, and almost 100 percent of that time they have no idea by whom. When you’re walking backward, it’s quite simple; pursuers and incidental trailers are in plain view, and I hardly need to make an argument for the fact that you are much less likely to be shot, stabbed, or otherwise punctured in the back. Many injurious and fatal attacks currently target the back, and while I am not the sort to guarantee the ceasing of such incidents (there will always be wackos), the one is bad enough principle tells us that if we can eliminate any backstabbings at all, we will have done some good in this world.

The attentive reader will have noted, perhaps commented aloud to a nearby drinker of chai, that many who follow us when we walk are not strangers, let alone ill-intentioned, but are in fact aquaintances of various degrees. So much the better! Friends may be hard enough to come by; why minimize your odds of recognizing them? Furthermore, I confess that in my forward days I occasionally trailed an acquaintance, knowingly, wavering in my decision whether or not to greet. How I wish the target had turned, seen me, and thus made the choice plain! Enough decisions are daily made. Any amiable citizen of the world should surely wish to lighten others’ burdens by making the to-greet-or-not-to-greet choice simpler for them.

Now, we can all acknowledge that there are but two ways to monitor those who walk behind: either we can employ a sort of rear view mirror, or we can walk backward. The former method may seem appealing at first, but is opposed by issues ranging from financial to sartorial. Such a mirror device would cost money, of course, but it would also need to be polished, perhaps oiled, depending on the mechanism, and periodically replaced. Moreover, it would surely soon function as a divider of the classes, with standard models running at only a few times the cost of manufacturing, and the cost of others soon exceeding three or even four digits, what with ornamentation, lights, radio receivers, and other amenities. Need we yet another exacerbator of the class struggle? Besides, the affixation element of the mirror would cause severe damage to the coiffure, and the whole apparatus would be difficult to keep from looking—pardon my French—dorky.

The mirror is out. We are left with backward walking, and I am pleased to announce that there are other advanatages to this option. Anyone who has trained as a defensive back in football knows that walking and running backward are excellent developers of the calf muscles, especially the upper gastrocnemius, whose fitness renders the athletic yet unbrute upper calf definition so highly (and vainly, in both senses of the word) sought after. Walking forward, incidentally, targets the soleus, or lower calf muscle, more directly, often effecting a thick-ankled look and thus minimizing the pleasant taper responsible for high contrast between calf and ankle.

Of course backward walkers need to turn their head at times to see where they are going, and more than one objector has smugly noted that it makes as much sense to walk forward and periodically check for followers. This does make sense—until one thinks about image and impression. Imagine someone walking along facing forward, glancing over their shoulder at short intervals. I think this pedestrian is paranoid! Of course he is; if not, he certainly looks like it. Who wants to look so worried, yea, neurotic? Rightly or not, we judge such glancers as timid, uncertain at best, and—I’ll say it again: paranoid.

Here I think we may rest our case, for no one resolutely walking backward has ever looked paranoid.

contrived? slightly.

In a conversation with one Emily Harris (now Loney) in Espresso Royale Cafe in Ann Arbor, MI, I was driven to declare, "obscurity is the mother of niches." As I walked out it occurred to me that if obscurity became grandmother of a male child, that child would be a son of a niche.

Dare I continue? I dare:

I have heard "son of a witch" as a euphemism for the original phrase. The German pronunciation of {w} is /v/; thus someone with a German accent would pronounce that phrase "son of a vitch." In Russian, however, it is {b} that makes the /v/ sound. Thus, if one overheard a person exclaim "son of a vitch!", one would have trouble telling whether the person were a German speaker employing the witch euphemism or a Russian speaker with a pottymouth.

vat could vee interestinger?

I have the opposite of that winter depression they describe--seasonal affective disorder, I believe--the phenomenon by which the grayness of the air lends its color to the spirit. Not that sunshine weighs me down; it is that I feel safer under clouds. I feel encased, not in the sense of being imprisoned, but in the sense of being blanketed, cradled. Perhaps it is the absence of a celestial vastness by which to be oppressed. There is no visible threat of falling heavenly bodies, no scorching light-heat so spontaneously able to strike that it only had to leave home eight minutes ago.

For the same reasons I like my hair long and my collars up: I've got a world to deal with in there.

from a middle-of-night not long ago

To me a novel that repeated the term "Anglo-Saxon" for four hundred pages would be spellbinding. What am I doing in this New World?

Here I am, choking on German chocolate (hazelnut), with nothing but an Old-World spirit and a bandaid on my pointer. Do not hold the loaf in mid-air as you slice it, especially not with a phone clenched between your jaw and shoulder.

What man in Los Angeles wallows and gasps in his bed at night, weeping for Angle-land, Spartacus, and last night's dream?

Sometimes I long to have lived in pre-Haroldian Britain, before non-monks were literate, before Bede, even, when no one wrote in the vernacular. Life would have been simple for one like me. No drive to produce--what would I have produced? I might have died in battle with the Saxons by now (well, surely by now..."by then"?), but life would have been simple.

And I would have fought like hell.

Odd Port II

My mind’s an odd port to spend an evening.
Why? It’s easy to pass the standard screening
Hence a motley mix of ships it harbors
Upheld by little more than Neptune’s garters
Therein lies the trouble. That man’s a myth
Thus, wears no clips to hold his socks up with.
Still, many vessels turn their bows its way
Picture Joppa, Dover, or Calais—
Countless kinds of craft are there to find
But none like those that anchor in my mind
At times a tiny tugboat brings a barge
Of finest pearls and emeralds at no charge
Less seldom, worthwhile cargo costs two fortunes
Yet is devoured like stolen fish by urchins
Most often, worthless, but exotic, ware
Lands and stirs up notice here and there

But half the vessels bound for here, I wager
Are sunk by spirits small and tempests major
Another third—perhaps the saddest sort
Lines the ocean bottom of my port
Having docked successfully, but later
Abandoned by some uncommitted trader

And so my mind consists of wishful wharves
Seeking titans, hosting mostly dwarves
I know if ever I’m to house the former
I must compete with beaches that are warmer
And since the climate here is so unsteady
That’s a contest that I’ve lost already.
I wonder, could I make myself a boat
And sail to a haven less remote?

What’s this? Cargo travels now by air?
Well then, there is little time to spare
I’ve heard that planes are trustier than ships
Alas, my island has no landing strips
Besides, the seven seas have been my friend—
Why bring that pact so quickly to an end?

My current harbor’s working madly now
Each sailor trying to loose this knot—but how?
Aha! This inkling leaves me merrier:
I’ll make myself an aircraft carrier!

A poem about fruit (sort of)

A Poem About Fruit (sort of)

Would you rather
Eat an orange or a banana
WHOLE?
The banana is bigger,
But would probably conform
Better to your esophagus
(And small intestine, for that matter,
As I'm not sure how
Stomachs do with peels).


originally written on an unpeeled banana in English class, 04/02/02

From the Chronicles of A

I pass freely between worlds. For all I know, you do too: for all I know, I know you in another, or we may have just barely missed each other on a thousand slips between the realms of Latium and Gotham, of pre-Justinian Byzantium and post-modern Sorbonne, of cool and so-called gothic, of waking and dreaming. If so, my apologies for not saying good day; I am frequently in a hurry when world-switching. But I think you do not make such trips, not as easily as I do. I once told a professor of metaphysics of my travels, by which I mean my identity, and to my surprise found him less credulous than a physicist (non-meta) who the year before had bought my story until he realized I was a fan of Berkeley--the man of ideas, not the city or its college--and concluded I could not be trusted on any matter. I kept the money and so partially confirmed his conclusion. (Do not say the tender implied by the phrase “he bought my story” is not real, lest you betray your unfamiliarity with reality.) Unfortunately I could not convince even the most sensible of airline executives to accept said money for a transatlantic ticket until I got hold, through a mutual masseuse, of the CEO of Frantumai, an obscure Italian carrier that was having a bad year on account of internal problems related to its archaic bookkeeping methods. More on that later, maybe; I was speaking of various intellectuals who have led me to believe my situation is rare if not unparalleled. An American semanticist of my acquaintance assumed that I was attempting to live some mental exercise in predicate logic; he understood art well enough (without knowing so) not to convince me to abandon it, but was himself none the better for it, and went on speaking of unicorns, Santa Claus, and various quantifiers. Perhaps the closest I have come to being believed was by the son of an seventeenth-century Westphalian baron, who had no trouble accepting the possibility of my travels, but assured me that his was the best of all possible worlds. Alas, to be believed only by the poster child of gullibility is meager consolation.

But consolation is not necessary, indeed is a void category, for a winner, and I am a winner if I am a man at all. For instance, I once won a toaster oven and a luggage set, respectively, for my Old Icelandic rendition of “YMCA” and my Sindarin performance of “Put Me In, Coach (I’m Ready to Play)” at the third annual krc-re-pifǿlikh festival: “today’s hits in yesterday’s tongues,” held in Clare, Michigan. (The event’s name is thought to be Esclyvian for DO-RE-MI; fascinatingly, the middle particles appear to be cognates. This theory and even the proper back translation of DO-RE-MI are under dispute as they are based on a questionable reconstruction of Melpitian [B]; both issues and several others are treated in a special session krc-re-pifǿlikh offers every year in addition to the rotating seminars.) To this day no one else has carried away two Golden Uvulas from the same k-r-p festival.

What I am saying is that I am no loser.

On Toddling

On Toddling

Between an ageless poet’s birth and weaning
Comes ample beating:
Peaceless pummeling with blocks
Unpacified by commas.
It typically takes mamas
Nine months more of getting clocked
Before conceding
A poem’s form might not reflect its meaning

not often is a g followed by a d

by "they" I meant Ogden Nash, an under-celebrated poet who has been criticized as a writer of mere doggerel. Can this be true of a man who writes such lines as

"The pig, if I am not mistaken,
Supplies us sausage, ham, and bacon.
Let others say his heart is big,
I call it stupid of the pig."

and

"Tell me octopus, I begs,
Is those things arms, or is they legs?
I marvel at thee, octopus,
If I were you, I'd call me us." ?

It cannot.

A more obscure welcome

Here:

Welcome to Below Dunster!

I hope you will find something to nod about, laugh at, comment on, and [verb] [preposition].

You know what they say:

"One bliss for which
There is no match
Is when you itch
To up and scratch."

Let this be a place of much itch-scratching, and thus much bliss.