Below Dunster

Pope's c-cough of sorts

2006-05-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

In honor of Alexander Pope's 274th birthday we post an excerpt from his Essay On Man that is reminiscent in form and spirit of Below Dunster's chiasthmatic coughs:

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king.
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his muse.

We say "reminiscent" (as opposed to "similar," "evocative," etc.) because, of course, Dunster was replete with coughs wrought chiasthmatically from well before the days of Pope--regrettably, few have survived. O happy realm, whose people pray for coughs to linger centuries!
Well, we need say little more about this man or his pen. Suffice it to say we wish he had been a Dunsterian, but we console ourselves in his Dunsteriad-evoking work, The Dunciad (1728: The Dunciad: An Heroic Poem; 1729: The Dunciad Variorum; 1742: The New Dunciad; 1743: The Dunciad in Four Books), in which Pope makes clear his pinings for a hypothetical Below Dunster-like world, sadly ignorant that such a domain was in fact flourishing on his own island and surely would have honored an artist of his caliber with the magnificentest of sloes. It is not unlikely that, had the above quatrain been genuinely chiasthmatic, Dunsterians of the time may have heard from afar and transported the short man below Dunster directly.
Posthumously Below Dunster honors him with plums and a post.

two for form, three for you

2006-05-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

a morsel in five
then five-plus-two syllables
and then, again, five
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (10/16/2003)

when muses wear bit
and bridle, or hack and then
abscond, leaving this
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/03/2003)

how hopes rise in Fall
with my turbulence and peace
on a Gaul-bound plane
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/11/2003)

combe-sprawling and soaked
grass and me sotted with sloe
and you, and you too
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (05/16/2006)

century of love
for you, whether I lived three
years or all of it
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/31/2100)

2006-05-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

399aftershock

worth pondering

2006-05-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

chiasthmatic cough XXVI

2006-05-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

The poet lacking time to post
The British mailer, vision
Jews are clipped to save the most
Coupons, for circumcision.

Exhibit Kaf

2006-05-08T22:16:00.000-07:00

special thanks to Gabriel B. Wickizer

An old ode to an old friend

2006-05-07T21:58:00.000-07:00

where the showing up would happen

MIKLAS
(in Sapphic stanza)

Once, for instance, shaved like a monk, you showed up
Wearing painted sneakers and jeans. Your artwork
Was a model of ardor: I remember
Pens of yours running

Out of ink, not due to your scholarly zeal,
But because your trousers were saturated
With it. Sometimes, out of your blue, you took to
Rolling on cobble,

Adding new hues: purple from mixing blood with
Blue already present. An otherwise drab
Vindobona public Gymnasium gained
Dash on your easel.

Sewers were your forts, and at times I joined you
Under Amadeus' deathday city's streets,
Trudging through those soggy canals against the
Laws of our fathers.

Seven years I spent on the teeter-totter
Keeping you in balance with canon’s children;
Seven years I lived as the liaison be-
Tween you and Normal.

Now that I’ve been gone for a weighty eight years,
Has the seesaw tilted you up or down, friend?
Either way, your paints must have spilled, my poor boy
Miklas, my Vincent.

.

The dripping spigot

2006-05-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

On the eve of a new day (“At last!” some say), a new form—new to this venue, this shadow of the universal Below Dunster, that is—a new form that we hope will usher in, drop by drop, the cool contents of a new era of Dunsterian fecundity.

The dripping spigot lends itself to pith, mirth, and myth alike. It is based on a descending number of syllables in alternating lines (see the boldface) and an ascending syllable count in the other lines (italics):

3 . . absentee
0 . .
2 . . ballots
1 . . are
1 . . in
2 . . demand
0 . .
3 . . great demand

The only other requirement is that the last word of line 6 (which may be the only word of line 6) be repeated as the last word of line 8. It is through this repetition, spilling from line 7’s subtle or screaming silence, that the lightness or the depth of the poem will typically be enforced, and through which the reader, aware or unaware, will absorb the tightness of the artistic piece. [If that last phrase launched in your spleen a fairy backflip (layout, not tuck) of Proustian remembrance, it may be that you have encountered it already on page 52 of Yours Truly’s thesis “Intrusion, Fusion, and Illusion: Vladimir Nabokov and the Artistic Rearrangement of Reality” (a terrible titular denouement following a sonic and semantic tour de force of introductory ascension and the standard colon-peak), where I disagreed with Page Stegner—the same—as to the significance of the number 36 in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.]

A caveat: newlings may be tempted to disregard lines 2 and 7 of the dripping spigot, as they contain zero syllables, but the essence of the form is captured in the poet’s consideration of these lines. Do not think of them as spaces, but as crucial lines that happen to contain no syllables (for a related, though distinct, phenomenon see “On certain names,” January 23, 2005).
Some examples:

. . . . . .

On, Vixen!

Santa
needs
you
big time

so big time

. . . . . .

Alexis

nectar
of
God’s
meadow

my meadow

. . . . . .

Edelweiss

Trophy
Of
Alp-
En quests

Rugged quests

. . . . . .

chiasthmatic cough XXV

2006-05-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

The poet used to be a pauper
The prince plumbs truth’s crevasses
Mules are made with zinc and copper
Brass, by mares and asses.

(technically, a variant of chiasthmatic cough XXIV--with all feminine endings, in honor of the comments under "why I walk," April 15, 2006)

chiasthmatic cough XXIV

2006-05-05T18:18:00.000-07:00

The poet messes with your head
The shrink plumbs truth’s crevasses
Mules are made with white and red
Pink, by mares and asses

a stutter in time

2006-05-05T15:41:00.000-07:00

399omega

Sonnet to an old friend

2006-05-03T22:10:00.000-07:00

(Roman Madly, ever-young Berlinian emigré painter and sometime Dunsterian, best known for his still life Cherries On a Wall)

399psi
penultimacy's apex

Roman, under alien guise excelling
Germanic for thy first eleven years
A merry can of germs at length rebelling
A country or a boy the Birth-marked rears.
Can Ada chronicle thy splintered tree?
Check republics, kingdoms: find it! Will
It ally with a thornclad shrubbery
Hungry for the dust of Europe’s mill?
.
Then mark the soft-striated trunk of Roman
And/or a twig reclining at its base
Slovenly a tick explodes the metaphor—
You crane your beastly neck to see its omen:
Belle jumping where no prince will give her chase
Nor wayward Latin swain has roamed before.
__________________________________

the lineaments of unfulfilled desire

2006-05-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

399chi

oh, for a c-cough! where the sloes excel
'neath Dunster-Old's rheumatic wrack
aching for thee—
It is not well!

oh, for a c-cough! lest like gray Flamel
at last thy long-pneumatic knack
turns from the lee—
Thou art not well!

oh, for a c-cough! in the plumtree dell
for sans that hiasthmatic hack
hale though I be
I am not well!

i.e.,

2006-05-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

2006-05-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

399phi

.

Below Yumster

2006-04-30T21:32:00.000-07:00

399upsilon

Unbeknownst to many, Wienerschnitzel come with a vertically balanced lemon slice.
Unbeknownster, some also levitate.

2006-04-29T19:57:00.000-07:00

399tau

Ballad of the Erstwhile Warrior

2006-04-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

399sigma

Ballad of the Erstwhile Warrior
An ancient study in slant rhyme

In days when monarchs were the norm
And weapons were of mettle
There was a man whose nerves were too
And led men into battle

He had slain lions, bears, a giant
Without the aid of sword
And co-fleshed with the king’s own seed:
His bravery’s reward

Years later, having grown and wised
He scored his in-law’s office
And stoutly governed his domain
And won the land great profits

His military tact and wile
Shame those of Scipio
While his charisma was the model
Employed by Cicero

But in this tale of his great fall
Kings’ armies hardly move-
The real battle lines were drawn
To sabotage true love:

Our king stood where he should have not
For while his men were dying
He promenaded on the roof
Their bathing wives espying

Seeing one that looked appealing
He summoned her with speed
They quickly rounded second base
And soon had done the deed

The king thought naught of it while he
Relaxed his male segment
But he was newly petrified
On hearing she was pregnant

About this time, her husband came
To bring news from the war
“Sir, our prospects are tremendous,
Just one fight or two more.”

Now, this man and the king were partners
Almost from pubescence
But since the wife now had been too
A plan was of the essence

“Go home and rest with your dear wife,”
Said King to cloak his fumble
(Surely he’ll think the child is his
After they sleep ensemble)

But hardly had the king expected
His soldier’s noble care
“My brothers lie on stones,” he said
And slept out on the stairs

At this the king was straight distraught
He knew his plan was foiled
In haste a new one he devised
This time better oiled

He wrote a letter, gave it him
Upon the man’s departure
“Take this to the general, please,
Sure-footed speedy marcher”

The man obeyed, not ever guessing
The sentence that it hid
For in the letter stood the words
“Make sure he doesn’t live”

The general, following the order
Placed him far ahead
Soon he was fighting all alone
And finally he was dead

The noble soldier never knew
He’d lost more than his life—
The same man who had taken that
Also had his wife

The king, with little time elapsed
Made the dame his bride
Then, like his virtue and her ex
Their newborn promptly died.

chiasthmatic cough XXIII

2006-04-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

The poet has a (Cretan) dream
El Greco, beef with Nyx
Casanova picks up steam
The locomotive, chicks.

I have a (Cretan) dream

2006-04-27T12:47:00.000-07:00

399rho

April 13, 2004: this little book, whose real-life blurriness is faithfully preserved in the above picture, receives its first entry. The subject is one Theodore (or Theodrin, or Theoden, or Theops, or Theoprecedesthep, or perhaps simply Theo, after all; no one is quite sure) Tokopoulos, a man of my invention whose name is based on that of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco. I was thinking about El Greco, I remember, because of a scene in Nabokov’s Ada, Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle that refers to El Greco’s painting “The Cretan Dream” in the context of a bizarre love triangle being described not emotionally but spatially, yea, geometrically, i.e., as an actual triangle.

April 27, 2006: Two years and two weeks later, the same little book (having lain fallow, with Below Dunster, for 399) receives its last entry, something about halving infinity, which had to do, in the middle of the night, with—guess whom—El Greco. The middle-of-nightness, the evolution of the El Greco theme, and the conviction that, of all the things that are tough to do, “picking up steam” must be one of the toughest (keeps slipping through your fingers), inspired and formed the skeleton of a c-cough whose eventual form can be seen in the next post.

Another dream during the same night involved a game of trilingual Scrabble (in English, French, and Russian, though I do not speak the latter) in which Lucette’s KREMLIN was disallowed not for being a proper name but for having been coined by a Frenchman—apparently at this stage that man’s language had faded out of the dream and the game. Thus a kickball entered, under my own boot and in reverse (yes, spheres can roll in reverse) a vermin-trapping cage of the kind in which I saw a raccoon perish in an Oregon barn when I was Lucette’s age; this time, though, the scene was the edge/bank (Lat. ripa) of Hogwarts Lake with the ghost of Ada still hovering about as Snape (my best mate) approached asymptotically, never fully to arrive. The whole thing, I tenderly recall, transpired to a soundtrack of the trance hit “Revelation” by 4 Strings.

You can tell this dream is authentic because the made-up kind always make sense. They are symbolic to the max, fraught with Potterian plainness and receiving a facile denouement later in the tale. Such dreams do not make it Below Dunster.

2006-04-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

399pi
"a busy day"

Exhibit Yod

2006-04-25T17:43:00.000-07:00

AD 2006: The following fragment of an undated memoir is discovered Below Dunster, the text of which we feel it is our duty to make available, rendering the apparently tellworthy events of a particular waning afternoon (judging from the second portion) at DuPont Circle, that nonpareil of D.C. traffic foci. We have reason to believe the originator’s mother tongue was not English but perhaps an otherwise lost language of the Finno-Ugric group, a Nordic pidgin of some sort, or even Esperanto. One thing is certain: he knows his Kipling.
The account begins, we further believe, at the precise moment that witnessed the I alighting on a bench on the Circle’s south side (determined ostsüdometrically), facing in.

Across the circle, a hemp-clad couplet was juggling bowling pins back and forth in a jolly attestation to hippie immortality, and a dumb crowd was gathering to let its toddlers kink their otherwise soft and limber necks in the manner they had learned from their white aristocratic uncles Herbert, Marvin, and Rob, the tennis fanatics. From my bench a flimsy Frisbee flip away, my scrutiny rested at first with the male hippie alone, whose too-long tee-shirt drably concealed a treasure map of moles maculating his upper back, in texture like that of a bovine snout spanned across an equine flank, and in front, the classic concave chest commonly connected with runners of cross-country. Though presumably attached to this, his arms were of the thickest-at-the-elbow type that look as though they may actually originate at the sleeve’s end (due mostly to the latter’s seeming vacancy), mystically remaining tethered to the torso. He belonged to the scattered class of curious bipeds who, if not for the rudely protruding head, would appear the same standing on their hands as on their feet, rendering redundant any description of the sub-stomach region, and though the lawn obscured his feet, I knew he was the kind of person of whom it is superfluous to say he wore no shoes. The juggler, meanwhile, who could perhaps have passed for an engineer-in-training but for those silly pins, was transfigured by his newfound local—very local—fame, and the almost certain anarchistic antics of his mind partied hard behind a strained and pasty grin derived from some invisible horse bit, commandeered by the little gremlin (also unseeable) perched upon his scapula. This hippie smiled tautly, and tossed smoothly, until his broad-lipped fixedness stretched and blurred the scene into one gyrating Gestalt; watched and watcher alike formed the periphery of a fuzzy, fulgent fan-belt in the air, whose lemniscate flutter and waft set me in a weak trance, and Mogli, had Kaa employed this method, would have in a minute been mere python meat.

Discarding that toothsome image, let us consider other curios. Note how the She, the woman partner, has not been noticed or described. It may be that my She-bound eyebeam was impeded by an obese auntie (Marvin’s Missus?); perhaps the second juggler was small or even Lilliputian, although the pins’ trajectory testified otherwise. Unblocked, the gaze of Yours Truly might have registered the jugglerette’s navy hooded sweatshirt with the logo of some obscure non-brand, and vertically striped hemp trousers whose aesthetic infirmity was not quite mitigated by self-applied marks of ball-point pen from the ankles, which were actually at mid-calf, to the pockets bulging with homemade hacky sacks. She had, I am sure, short hair arranged like the tuft on a Bactrian camel’s front hump, and may have shared other features with that beast. Whether she smiled, I do not know. I picture that, if corresponding points on the two jugglers’ lips were joined by unseen thread, the outer corners of her lips must have flared forward like the mouth of a manta ray, the center sucked tight to her incisors, and from this contortion it would not be unconservative to conclude that her jockey-gremlin counterpart was either feeble-armed or absent. But in all likelihood her mouth did nothing of the sort; I, for one, have never witnessed such a horn-lipped visage, and the thought of one is absurd to the reasonable mind. What matters is that she formed the other focus of the projectile path, that she, together with the engineer hippie, whipped into motion the pin piston that now seemed to generate the very traffic of DuPont Circle, forming the eye of a locomotive hurricane so convincing that mixers of metaphors searched the sky for smoke, and half expected a red—no, rainbow—caboose to putt-putt by at any moment.

A pin dropped (one could not hear it) in the cushy grass, and the train stopped, with not nearly so catastrophic consequences as one might have feared: DuPont traffic rambled on, the sky was smokeless as before, and the caboose held fast on page four of Generic Children’s Book. How tenderly do I recall my first edition of Der Zug mit Sommersprossen (The Freckled Train), that great treatise of underdog vigor, that paragon of pedagogical publications, that Solomon of children’s literature! Faith, all other kiddie books are pale copies, impish impostors that should have long been burned by Bradbury’s loyal firemen! Erzähler, verberge dich; narrateur, cache-toi! Apologies; yes, the jugglers: evidently they were nice people or wackos, because they were now teaching a girl of eight or so, named Mindy or Haley, how to juggle. I cannot imagine a person named Mindy or Haley being able to juggle—well, maybe Haley; let us hope her name was Haley—but it is in the nature of hippies to try and teach the intractable and convince the inexorable. Ah, her name was Mindy.

In a Sadist moment that I could not help, I previewed the hilarity of one partner intentionally making a bad toss, perhaps at the other’s knee or pancreas. “Hippie rushed to Georgetown Hospital after taking bowling bin to pancreas, pot spared.” It was then that I vowed not to perish before ascertaining the actual shape and function of the pancreas. “Man goes to grave with not a clue of pancreases”—let it not be so! Or was it pancreae? I must survive to extirpate this trivium, too. O Death, strike not soon!

Sadism subsiding, I recognized for the first time another aspect of the juggling, the aspect which a writer of so-called Romance might have called “the dance” (I would rather have a permanent dull pain administered to my brachial nerve than beschmutz my eyes with such artless blather; I would not even wipe myself with its recycled pages, or accoutre my cute gerbil’s dwelling)—but I need not call it that, nor need I give it any name; let us simply see me responding to the skillful interplay, the kindly kindling of a trade route that lent the pins a highway and the hippies meaning, for without a prop of some sort a hippie gropes in vain for meaning. I saw the balanced reciprocity of tosses, a fond exchange between accomplices of such intimacy that plastic cylinders could serve as words, sidekicks of such security that they would burn so much organic fuel for an act in which, technically speaking, not a blessed Joule of work was done.
“O hippie pot among us,” I cried,

“Let thy fumes infuse us with this amity;
O cormorant, be distant,
O oxpecker, adjacent;
Share with us all thy symbiotic mystery!”

[Here a lacuna of unalarming magnitude interrupts the manuscript] Suddenly

The original Marathoner, Henry Thoreau, and Truly Yours
Were sitting in the Circle in a circle
(If three can make one)
Contemplating breakdance.
I know two out of three are dead already,
But give the story a chance.

Henry David said to stand a chance
You have to take the beat and make it yours.
That I knew already,
So I laid the beat down on his circul-
arity. Henry thought it was a breakdance
Move, so I said, “Sure, the Walden Pound—a new one.”

The fact is, no more than one
In 42,000 (meters) gets the chance
To transcend the Vanilla Ice visage of breakdance—
If it’s you, the charge is yours
To run the news outside the Nike circle;
The Marathoner’s shown you how already.

Of course, he fell when he had finished, and we’re not all ready
To do that. At this point Henry butted back in with one
Of his not-sure-whether-to-laugh-or-kick-him-out-of-the-circle
(And the Circle)
Statements: “Just give Greece a chance.”
Mr. Marathon quipped, “We had it, used it well, and now it’s yours;
Quit musing, pond-man, and breakdance.”

It quickly was confirmed the man knew nothing of breakdance
(Another thing I felt I knew already),
So I stated my opinion, then asked the Greek, “what’s yours?”
“Disregarding Henry,” he replied, “there is no one
So clumsy. Now, my boy, it’s your chance.”
And I stepped into the circle.

When I did, up from the circle
Leapt the leprechauns of breakdance,
Lending silver-footedness and chance,
That coupled with the spunk I had already
(Yes, three can make one!)
To forge a feat of motion that I wish I could make yours.

When I looked up, Henry had found his chance to leave already.
As for breakdance in the circle, the only dancer left was Truly Yours;
The Greek had run off to report the victory was won.

VN, Part II; or, Fun With Humbert

2006-04-25T16:38:00.000-07:00

399omikron

Humbert, spittle on my cake, fire in my oven. Hum-bert. The tip of the tongue doing mostly nothing, sitting tight for a nervous mumble and belch, letting the lesser epiglottis usher the stubborn air over the retreating tongue-top to stop at the lip: a flopped potty-break leaving the tongue little to do but check the schwa before the stench escapes.

Exhibit Tet

2006-04-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

399xi

AD 1564: Around this day, William Shakspere (Shaxpere, Shaksper, Shakespear, Shake-speare, Shakespeare, etc.), the Bard himself, is born in Stratford-upon-Avon. “Around this day,” because it must be extrapolated from his baptism, which took place on April 26, and these usually took place a few days after birth (to clear the little nippers of that nasty original sin before they died in infancy). Shakspere’s birthday is usually fixed to the 23rd, but this is mainly in order to create a memorable, eerie, and artificial symmetry with his deathday, April 23, 1616. (Those of you who frequent Below Dunster know what we think of artificial symmetry and contrived coincidences.) Thus we have decided to stray deliberately from the 23rd-tradition and to exhibit on the—quite possibly more likely—24th.

Vladimir Nabokov—the Other Bard, in Below Dunster’s reliable opinion—speaks of Shakspere’s birthday as were it undisputedly on April 22, but this is only because his own birthday was April 22, 1899. For this bit of arrogant calendrical tomfoolery VN has been duly punished by having his birthday reference omitted from Below Dunster’s April 22 posts. For a rather better bit of sleight of hand, Exhibit Tet honors him nonetheless by duplicating here, in full, his ode to Shakspere. Written in Russian in 1924, it was translated into English by Dmitri when Yours Truly was in the first grade. We have elected to display the English version here, which makes no clearer than the Russian what was Nabokov’s stance on the true origin of Shakspere’s opera:

Shakespeare

Amid grandees of times Elizabethan
you shimmered too, you followed sumptuous custom;
the circle of ruff, the silv'ry satin that
encased your thigh, the wedgelike beard - in all of this
you were like other men. Thus was enfolded
your godlike thunder in a succinct cape.

Haughty, aloof from theatre's alarums,
you easily, regretlessly relinquished
the laurels twinning into a dry wreath,
concealing for all time your monstrous genius
beneath a mask; and yet, your phantasm's echoes
still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor,
his anguish; Falstaff's visage, like an udder
with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear.
You are among us, you're alive; your name, though,
your image, too - deceiving, thus, the world
you have submerged in your beloved Lethe.
It's true, of course, a usurer had grown
accustomed, for a sum, to sign your work
(that Shakespeare - Will - who played the Ghost in Hamlet,
who lives in pubs, and died before he could
digest in full his portion of a boar's head)...

The frigate breathed, your country you were leaving.
To Italy you went. A female voice
called singsong through the iron's pattern
called to her balcony the tall inglesse,
grown languid from the lemon-tinted moon
and Verona's streets. My inclination is
to imagine, possibly, the droll
and kind creator of Don Quixote
exchanging with you a few casual words
while waiting for fresh horses - and the evening
was surely blue. The well behind the tavern
contained a pail's pure tinkling sound... Reply
whom did you love? Reveal yourself - whose memoirs
refer to you in passing? Look what numbers
of lowly, worthless souls have left their trace,
what countless names Brantome has for the asking!
Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder,
you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!

No! At the destined hour, when you felt banished
by God from your existence, you recalled
those secret manuscripts, fully aware
that your supremacy would rest unblemished
by public rumor's unashamed brand,
that ever, midst the shifting dust of ages,
faceless you'd stay, like immortality
itself - then vanished in the distance, smiling.

Copyright 1979 Vladimir Nabokov Estate
English version copyright 1988 Dmitri Nabokov

2006-04-23T23:34:00.000-07:00

apparently even eidur has found his way Below Dunster!

2006-04-23T23:28:00.000-07:00

399nu
Oh, give me an exhibit!

you do the maff

2006-04-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

(399mu)

Maybe--just maybe--to the city's credit, what is in the green box is not the number it resembles perfectly. Maybe it is simply an introductory formula: "lo," as in "lo and behold," heralding the imminence of Hour Parking. This would also create a primitive, but nevertheless cute, rhyme with the red box's contents as well.

Alternatively, this could be an oblique reference to Jupiter's fourth (in Galileo's reckoning; I believe the count is now at sixty-three) and shortest-named satellite, Io, or to the eponymous Greek maiden, who was transmogrified into a heifer by Zeus (a.k.a. Jupiter; the symmetry should not be alarming, as all four of Galileo's Jovian moons are named for paramours of that lubricious god-father) to hide her from a jealous Hera. Santa Monica has always revered the Classics.

Later, perhaps, we will consider the possibility that this space is specially designed for time-warp vehicles.

A confluence of techno

2006-04-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

From Paris to Berlin
And every disco I get in
My heart is pumpin' for love
Pumpin' for love

'Cause when I'm thinking of you
And all the things we could do
My heart is pumpin' for love
You left me longing for you

-Infernal / Disco Bee

How can we dance while our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning

-Midnight Oil / Novaspace

399lambda

2006-04-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

399lambda

"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches"

The truth

2006-04-20T23:43:00.000-07:00

399kappa
Magna est veritas, et praevalebit

4/20

2006-04-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

(click to enlarge)

Surely we were destined for this chair, and it for this day and hour!

Exhibit Het(iv)

2006-04-19T23:39:00.000-07:00

[note: do not proceed unless you have been through all Exhibit Het's prior material]

03/11/04 [logo]

Free writing. Not sure what is free about it. This pen cost
dix-sept ducats, the card was cheap but hardly gratis.
Birches died for this.

Let me tell you what is especially not free: the writing; that is,
the noun, not the gerund. What can it do of its own
accord? The lines on this card are its cell bars (though
it seems to fit neatly between them); a caged hamster is
freer than this writing, penned in its five-by-eight paddock.
That’s inches, not feet, syllables, or stresses. “Order of the
signifier”—I can’t get that out of my head.

On re-reading 1-10’s card I for the first time XXX saw
words of mine that pleased me more than I remember them having
done on their inking. items rearranged is smite. no such
thing as otems or titmens, but there are mittens, XXX
smitten on an indian run. this is why free-writing,
though non-existent, pleases.

Exhibit Het(iii)

2006-04-19T23:27:00.000-07:00

[note: do not proceed unless you have been through all Exhibit Het's prior material]

01/10/04 [logo] [jagged doodle] ink: i am converted.

Let us see if I can complete the experiment. I will
likely confuse even the author, not to mention the typist,

if it is another, and the biographer. Yes, ink on my fingers.
You see, I believe in the weight of things like spaces,

of special pens, card stock, lines, location, standing, sitting,
incline of writing surface. What lack of lyricism.

I knew these would look like couplets. They too are weighty—
whether spaced or no! Hm, this may be, as American

banter (ignorantly tralatitious(!)) puts it, “the way to go.” Maybe
British banter too. I wonder: is banter banter? It certainly is

banter. It may be time I invented a system of graphemes.
By misaligning this card with another I can divert or derail
an entire line. Brah-voh.

Exhibit Het(ii)

2006-04-19T23:19:00.000-07:00

[note: do not proceed unless you have been through all Exhibit Het's prior material]

01/10/04 [logo]

But who am I? (Yes.) I am no patronizing know-all

narrator, no(t a) marathonic messenger who crumbles, expiring

after twenty seven miles of speed-spires and a word: /Nike/.

I am no artless metaphor—Greek moving-van with meaning in

its bed. My bed comforts crazies, monks, and boswells:

I am Benjy, Bede, and Botkin all in one, the essence of

narrative synthesis, united in some seventies recording prophet’s

silent accord, and the syncopated scraping of my quill is

the new jazz that psychedelic rocker could not pre-empt.

Exhibit Het(i)

2006-04-19T23:10:00.000-07:00

[note: do not proceed unless you have been through all Exhibit Het's prior material]

01/10/04 [logo]

Son of the south, Baldy of pre-Guillaume Britain, exiled XX from-
the-rough-putting king of distant northern land or backwards-
named second-tier professor of poetics.
Confused? You are the first. ....................................[chess knight]

The first to mingle with . . . I am confused. Flick-scratch
my asperous scalp with an inverse fillip of the fourth finger.
still
confused. Be not confused by line breaks here; this is an
experiment in spacing. Nor say that truth is not in the
spaces.
You see I long to fill what should have been spaces, whether
will or pen provides that longing. The spaces are there to be
filled, but also to give freedom to the eye: to deviate without

being captured. [Not a very controlled experiment, as you see]
I feared graying, and XXX am pleased see the opposite

Exhibit Het

2006-04-19T23:01:00.000-07:00

AD 2005: Someone claims—in no other place than Below Dunster’s maiden post—once to have claimed to be “Benjy, Bede and Botkin all in one.”

Today we furnish evidence in favor and illumination of that all-but-forgotten claim, made, in fact, precisely one year and one week prior to this exhibit’s claim (not the claim made by this exhibit, but the claim exhibited in it). The purpose of this exhibit is manifold; its import is hunky enough that the exhibit itself spans five (5) posts—a Below Dunster first—that must (must) be read as a unit. Properly defined, the following four posts constitute a sub-exhibit to this one, but to keep the cataloguing system clean we will not tamper too much with the nomenclature.

The attentive inspectrix will note that this exhibit’s posts depict four (4) 5-by-8 slices of cardstock, selectively discolored with an 18-centimeter (7.0866etc.-inch) tapered rotring fountain pen, three (3) on the same day, January 10, 2004 (birthday of my neighbor), one (1) on a different day, March 11, 2004, but with reference to the first day (i.e., that of the other three cards, not that of the formless void and fiat lux). The images may be enlarged by clicking on them. Each post includes an unedited transcript of its card to assist the reader—unedited to reflect the card’s own slapdash composition at a hobbled kitchen table—yielding here or there a slightly worrisome comma deputizing for more substantial punctuation, and the like. This is not code; it is mistake: Exhibit Het exposes all.
Read, then, and connect.

chiasthmatic cough XXII

2006-04-19T22:57:00.000-07:00

399iota

The poet battling sleeplessness
Insomniacs composing
Van Wink defining Hostessness
And Twinkies, freely dozing.

2006-04-19T00:20:00.000-07:00

this fork has speared its last

plain and simple

2006-04-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

399theta

the fine print

2006-04-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

When I think about the fine print—which is about all I ever do with it—I cannot help wondering if I really own my stuff. I wonder, for that matter, if I really am a tenant, if I really have a bank account, if I really am American, even if I really was born when and where the normal print says I was. This is because, from what fine print I’ve read, I get the distinct impression that things are not as they seem.

The fine print is a hidden track, a B-side extended cut with a million verses and the chorus “P.S. Not!” The fine print is everywhere, ever making the normal print out to be a liar and a fraud. It is a study in contradiction, an exercise in negation. For this reason, to a certain extent, you can tell what the fine print says just by reading the normal print. For instance:
Normal print: “Free.” Fine print: “bla bla bla bla S+H $1999 bla bla bla bla.”
Normal print: “Congratulations, you win!” Fine print: “bla bla bla bla no you lose bla bla bla bla ya big loser bla bla bla bla.”
Normal print: “No purchase necessary.” Fine print: “bla bla bla bla except round trip airfare to Dakar bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.”
Normal print: “I love you.” Fine print: “bla bla bla bla it’s not you, it’s me bla bla bla bla.”

But I’m not here to talk about money or love. I want to consider the uncertain extent, the part you can’t predict just from the normal print. This is the freaky part. It comes down mainly to who owns what and who owes whom what. I’d wager my toaster oven and my entire luggage set (even if they're probably not mine to wager) that almost everything in the world that is owned by someone is actually owned by someone else.

There are really two worlds, then: the Normal Print World and the Fine Print World. The first, most of us are familiar with, but about the second there can only be speculation. Who are we? Whose stuff is our stuff? Whose is our stuff? Whither goest thou?

As many of you know, Below Dunster has committed itself to leading the charge when it comes to speculation, and Below Dunster vows to remain at the cutting edge of speculation for as long as it is Below Dunster. Below Dunster also strongly recommends that you speculate as to the nature of the Fine Print World; Below Dunster further strongly attempts to dissuade you from genuinely researching the matter, as this would be almost certain to engender either deep sleep or bitter warfare. Feel free to use the Comments section for your speculation, though you may or may not in fact be free to do so.

By reading the above, the reader (hereafter the reader) has acknowledged that in the introduction to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu argues that “nothing is more distinguishing than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even ‘common’” (1813). The context for this claim is Bourdieu’s earlier point that the recognition of an aesthetic dimension is not exclusive to art, but that even objects or practices satisfying primary needs have become subjects of aesthetic inquiry. It is noteworthy that he doesn’t actually say that being able to think of something common as beautiful or not is distinguishing, but that the distinction comes from the ability to alter the status of an everyday occurrence from plain to aesthetically significant. By “status” he surely means an ascribed, non-essential label, and it is clear that in his Marxist perspective this is a capacity that only the ruling class enjoys.
.....The investment by the ruling class in common items does not come from a deep, genuine interest in them, but rather from the need to have everything be noble—thus, to eradicate that which is common. Seen this way, most of us would probably see elite taste as less distinguishing than disgusting. In any case, the attempted purification of the banal allows for an interesting, almost humorous perspective on elite taste and its effects. After all, the common is still only eradicated in the sense that fewer items are labeled as common. Clothes, food, and toilets still exist. Conferring aesthetic status on these things, in practice, simply allows other well-to-dos to display them in museums, to publish magazines about them, and to sell them at outrageous prices.
.....It is easy to see how the cycle created by the supposed refinement of everyday needs perpetuates class difference. Since practically everyone consumes food, wears clothes, and goes to the bathroom, every single person is almost constantly carrying around a marker of her or his class. This is a phenomenon that would not exist if art alone were the subject of aesthetic discussion. Hardly anyone carries paintings around in plain view, books stay in backpacks and on shelves, and music blares in the car or in headphones. Even given the marking of class by taste, it would not be as divisive if it concerned only art, because one could go through the entire day without revealing that class marker. As it is, we may literally wear our class on our sleeve—or sit on it while reading bathroom humor.
.....Curiously, Bourdieu says that popular taste works in a sort of reverse way. Not only does it value art, but it “performs a systematic reduction of the things of art to the things of life” (1813). This reduction brings about an expectation from art to represent “real, everyday life.” The result is a paradox: if art really should reflect everyday life, what could be more artistic than food and clothing? Yet bearers of popular taste hardly find these things aesthetically significant. It seems that the practice of aesthetics is basically a matter of appropriating what is not already associated with the self. Thus, for the ruling class, it is to appropriate the banal, and, for the general populace, to appropriate the artistic. The reader retains her/his right to speculate in the Comments section.
.....Bourdieu astutely characterizes these values as playing out along the lines of function and form. The basic difference between elite and popular taste, then, is that one seeks value in an item’s form, while the other seeks it in the item’s function. While the latter value seems more practical, of course, this distinction still perpetuates social difference. Furthermore, one might think that it is simply the case that whatever taste is held by the ruling class will be considered elite, and that the class distinction, with regard to aesthetics, comes from this alone. But it actually matters that the difference in values goes in the direction it does; i.e., that form goes with the elite and function goes with the popular. Everything that exists, certainly everything that exists physically, has a form of some sort, and this form is inherent and plain to see. Not everything has a function, and even fewer things have a plainly recognizable function. Thus, bearers of elite taste—the ruling class—do not merely appropriate a specific dimension of an item; they appropriate more items.
.....In the course of this discussion, we obviously do not mean that the ruling class appropriates all toilets, while the general populace appropriates paintings. Toilets, clothing, and food are not confiscated from proletariat homes, nor do the workers bring home murals from museums. But the ruling class gets to speak on all these matters, in a lofty, “noble” way, while the populace gets to speak on less, and to a “less important” audience. That is, it doesn’t get to speak on anything at all, in a way that has influence in society. On that note, even speaking, one of the most common practices there is, has been appropriated by the ruling class; one might argue, even, that this appropriation was fundamental to all others.
.....All this makes for a great Marxist view of aesthetics, and a great theory of yet another way in which the ruling class dominates the general population. It does sound like a good analysis of how things may have worked in pre-revolution France, or even in the United States in the early twentieth century. While it certainly is the case that specific groups have great, almost absolute influence over what is considered beautiful or valuable, this particular account seems outdated, or at least not quite appropriate in today’s American setting.
.....The ruling class’s drive today is not to have tastes that are above the rest of the population’s, but to influence the rest of the population to have the same tastes. Success and affluence come from having influenced the greatest number of people, of any kind, to agree on a certain item’s value. Form seems to be the defining aesthetic for both classes now (as if there were still exactly two), probably as the working class has recognized opportunities afforded by social rights movements to actually emulate the ruling class in some ways.
A huge factor in this development has been the pervasiveness of the mass media. Modern communication methods allow the tastes of a certain group to be broadcast to the vast majority of the population. A desire for affirmation causes everyone who can to assimilate to the ruling class as much as possible, for the sake of gaining respect, prestige, and influence of their own.
.....While this assimilation has been prevalent, there has also been a considerable amount of rebellion in the aesthetic realm. In many ways, it has become popular to like and affirm that which is not popular. Certain movements in music, most notably, the emo movement, have taken this definition of aesthetic value to extremes: a relatively fair assessment of emo followers’ approach is that it is acceptable to appreciate a certain music group or piece of music until it becomes “popular.” Quite paradoxically, and very interestingly, this approach leads back to the view of the popular as gross—very interesting, because tenants of this view in today’s America tend not to be members of the ruling class.
.....In general, there has been a diversification, a legitimized one at that, of what items can have aesthetic status. Emo and Abercrombie exist in the same country, and both have a significant number of followers. And, while the greatest value is indeed placed on the “popular” these days, there remain those who exemplify Bourdieu’s elite taste. His assessment, then, accurately describes many non-American societies, past and perhaps present, and even holds in some circles today. We should take it as an assessment of a particular culture’s system, not as a universal trend, and use it to get at the methods and mechanisms of power and popularization in our own. Moreover, the reader pledges undying fealty to Below Dunster and its agents.

chiasthmatic cough XXI

2006-04-18T22:13:00.000-07:00

The poet feuds with rival clans
Scots seek out slanted rhymes
Florists hunt for real fans
Bowling, for columbines.

Exhibit Zayin

2006-04-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

399eta

AD 1308: Exactly 1000 years after Constantine becomes Caesar at Carnuntum (see Exhibit Bet), John de Slocombe, of Dunster (see any post here, but especially A Brief History of Dunster, Part Two, February 11, 2005), becomes the first Slocombe on record when he testifies in a legal proceeding at Dunster Castle. His testimony constitutes an attempt to clear the name "John" of its powerful connection to subterfuge, cemented by John of England approximately 100 years earlier (see Exhibit Vav and Subterfuge, April 15, 2006.)

Alas: the same year, Albert I of Austria, first ruler of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty that will not end until 1918, when Austria-Hungary will lose in the Great War, is murdered by his nephew John in Windisch, once the Roman camp Vindonissa--more Johannine subterfuge!!! This incident offsets John de Slocombe's testimony, calling into question once again the uprightness of Johns everywhere.

chiasthmatic cough XX

2006-04-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

The poet forming several theses
The scholar using meter
Peter Peter bathes in feces
A piglet, pumpkin-eater.

where the stone is at?

2006-04-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

399zeta

Easter Sunday

Why I walk

2006-04-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

While walking I chanced upon receiver, and could not help saying, “You know, you look a lot like deceiver—but I bet you get that all the time!” “Indeed I do,” receiver said. “In fact, it seems I’m always getting things.”

Not much later I saw deceiver and said, “You know, you look a lot like receiver—but I bet you get that all the time!” “Actually,” he said, “I never get that.” But I know he does.

Subterfuge

2006-04-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

(of Exhibit Vav fame)

399epsilon

To play with subterfuge is to play with fire. Thus, pyromania:

tub refuges—for when bathroom fixtures play hide-and-seek.
stub refuge—that little machine that eats your ticket.
refuge tubs—where other stuff hides, I guess.
bust refuge—better known as a bra.
bert’s fugue—a favorite composition here; also, perhaps, the mental condition from which Ernie’s poor buddy suffers, not unlike Ginny Weasley’s erstwhile plight, though that was occasioned not by stress, but by You Know Who.)
fur tee bugs—problems with shaggy golf implements
bugs fer tue—a favorite order for lovebirds. Ones who actually are birds. And who can’t spell.

Sadly, I did not come to play. English was not always below Dunster; indeed—and also sadly—subterfuge preceeded it:

Subterfuge
Rebus fuget, "the rebus will escape," or—and only history will tell which is meant (“will,” for history is not all past)—"he will escape with the things."

We see that subterfuge is not just a constant of the past, but also a bringer of omens. In a word, prophecy, or, prophecy in a word. Subterfuge. S-U-B-T-E-R-F-U-G-E. Subterfuge.

O subterfuge in Dunster!
Rei fugent sub Dunstero, "the things will flee below Dunster"
—or will they flee Below Dunster? A world of difference—will Dunster be a refuge or a tyrant? As ever, only history will tell, but be assured:
it will tell through subterfuge.

Exhibit Vav

2006-04-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

AD 1211: Subterfuge! John of Enland (of Robin Hood, Magna Carta, and Exhibit He fame) deals treacherously with Prince Llywelyn, Prince of Aberffraw and Lord of Snowdonia, of Exhibit Dalet and Exhibit He fame and of general superior repute, by invading Gwynedd. This—not his grave taxation of the Nottinghamites or his alleged illiteracy or his mindboggling lechery—is the reason for his perpetual submersion in shame.

2006-04-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

399delta

coming tomorrow: the golden egg

chiasthmatic cough XIX

2006-04-14T12:07:00.000-07:00

The poet wears phylacteries
Talmudists write tonkas
Chocolate from Thailand's factories
Nikes, from Willie Wonka's.

Exhibit Che

2006-04-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

Exhibit He

2006-04-14T11:57:00.000-07:00

AD 1205: King John I of England, of Robin Hood and Magna Carta fame, attempting to build an alliance against the French, gives Prince Llewelyn of Exhibit Dalet his illegitimate daughter Joan in marriage. Joan becomes Lady of Wales and prefigures, although the title was not established until just after Joan’s tenure, a certain Princess of Wales of later years.

This same year, Wenceslaus I of Bohemia, hero of Czechs everywhere, is born, paving the way for a billion things named in his honor, including Prague’s great square and a not-very Christmassy Christmas carol.

Exhibit Dalet

2006-04-13T17:23:00.000-07:00

AD 1240: Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (the Great), Prince of Aberffraw and Lord of Snowdonia, Prince of Gwynedd, dies at Aberconwy on April 11. 766 years later, to the day, he is honored Below Dunster.

Exhibit Gimel

2006-04-13T17:21:00.000-07:00

AD 272: Gaius Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus, later the Constantine of Exhibit Bet, is born in Naissus (now Niš, Yugoslavia). 100 years later, Constantius III of Exhibit Alef is born in the same Naissus (now the same Niš, the same Yugoslavia). That same year, probably, though not certainly, Athaulf of the same Exhibit Alef is born somewhere in (the same) eastern Europe.

Exhibit Bet, or just Exhibet

2006-04-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

AD 308: Constantine I, later called the Great, is declared Caesar, that is, Junior Emperor of Gaul and Britannia, at the Congress of Carnuntum. The ruins of Carnuntum, unlike Yours Truly, remain to this day (April 13, 2006) not far from Vienna, Austria (then Vindobona). The letter K is engraved on many of the stones.

Exhibit Alef

2006-04-13T15:10:00.000-07:00

AD 412: Constantius III, Roman magister militium, drives Athaulf, king of the Visigoths, from Italy. Dunster's lore-masters maintain that Athaulf left of his own accord, for reasons soon to be explored, as he remained a military and political force in Gaul and Hispania.

Important to this exhibit is the alternative, and in fact more prevalent, spelling of Athaulf’s name (which means “father-wolf”) as Ataulf. This variance has occasioned no small dispute among the Revisionists, as the Dunsteriad attests—a dispute we think will be resolved here, Below Dunster, perhaps even during 399.

Of things to come; chiasthmatic cough XVIII

2006-04-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

399gamma
The Ides of April

there follow several exhibits to serve as background for future segments of the Dunsteriad. An introductory chiasthmatic cough is called for:

The poet found exhibiting
The Louvre and Prado rhyming
The stopwatch poop prohibiting
Constipation, timing.

kindly make way for hooligans

2006-04-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

from the Schwedenplatz subway stop in Vienna:

"Please vacate this seat for pregnant grim reapers whose torsos look like the profile of a bearded old man, for nursing dementors, for Marty McFly, for green Sigmund Freuds, and for ruffians with Oedipus complexes who are compensating for something and who have just been crapped on by the largest bird in history"

Spoon-feeding

2006-04-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

399 beta

Below Dunster has realized that the non-Dunsterians among you—those who have not been observing these last 399 days—may wonder about what has seemed like a hiatus, yea, a dry spell. We hope to unveil its significance to you over the course of day 399, which, as you can tell, is an extended day that honors events centering around a certain leap year 399 leap years ago—AD 412—a celebration fittingly encompassing today, 4/12, fittingly having included yesterday, 4/11 (as has already been hinted in yesterday’s epitaphs and as will only become clearer), and fittingly covering the upcoming days. The Dunsteriad constitutes the best account of these events, but there is a real sense in which Below Dunster itself is the supreme Dunsteriad, a meta-Dunsteriad or sur-Dunsteriad of sorts. Thus: be near to both.

kick in the face

2006-04-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

a little shot I like to call
"Look at me when I'm talking to you."

does it hurt, you ask? well, no; it happened more than four months ago. but it did then, if that's what you mean.

chiasthmatic cough XVII

2006-04-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

The poet at a loss for coughs
The choking man, for words
Hungry flies alight on “-ov”s
Svetlanas marry turds.

Llywelyn

2006-04-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

Llywelyn ab Iorwerth "the Great"

Prince of Aberffraw and Lord of Snowdonia

Prince of Gwynedd

b. ca 1173

d. April 11, 1240

RIP, JB

2006-04-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

James Anthony Bailey

b. July 4, 1847

d. April 11, 1906

let Dunster be your circus

THE DUNSTERIAD

2006-04-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

399

Life is life, na na na na na

out of the void, some leaves and white dots

.
.

THE DUNSTERIAD

Of Dunster and its past, and of the poet’s lineage

Prologue

Longline may have served to sing of Spear-Danes
but to fix the story of your generation,
to tally the long line of freaks, dukes, pikes, and une-
xpected breaks that left your left
leg shorter than (yes) your right and then, again, longer,
unexpected breaks and unexpect-
orated words that choked in Somerset silence
on your hobble through history—
spit on by heaven two hundred days a year and
spit in by your cuckoo mothers (when they could find the time),
spit out by Romans and the rest like a foul plum
until I slurped you up, flesh, stone, and skin
and sowed you in a new combe—
well, for this the meter has yet to be born.

Long ago you beat your swords into plowshares and now
it falls to us to beat those plowshares into pens
to till a field left fallow these four hundred days save one.
Feeble implements, but out of this left field we must write
to save our lives and yours,
and write out of left field we will.

So a pox on rhythm and fie upon line;
the tax is mine to hex a meter to erect
a monument a mile high: a mile spent, a meter gained.
if the blocks fit, that is (tetris twice is tetres, not tetra)—meter
must be robust, if it will be the dish in which I mix my metas phor
dish, not as in pie, of course, but as in Petri:

Meter, meter, mupmkin eater,
Had a mum and couldn’t feed her
Once umon a tipe he sends
For sope meanut P&P’s
and muts thep in a pen’s roop toilet
Homing this will finally foil it
Indeed, the mummy finds the mellets
Swipping there for all to spell it
And, used to testing what it sniffs
It swimes a maw at thep, but whiffs
Again she aips her canine arp—
Try nupber two then mroves the charp:
Candy careening off the walls
Water mainting several stalls
Quickly the putt devours both
(Sopething lisms pight call porothe)
And finds itself charpingly poved
And (dare I say it) puch ipmroved
They say that dogs aren’t good with cocoa
but this was Lennon to mum’s Yoko
No—the coating massed just fine
The meanuts were the catch this tipe
For pany ponths the mummy ailed
Till at last the reamer hailed
And grip and firply swung his scythe
And thus evicted mummy’s lithe
The technicolor tuppy smlit
Exmosing tens of cherry-mit-
Like balls on the decremit
Stopach walls. Ammarently
Sope ants pade off with thep and glee
For now I see thep every day
Parching by in macks of eight
But they don’t carry (doctor’s orders!)
They’ve hired a little meanut morter
—nice for thep, but for py mart,
He’s driving meanuts with his cart!
But I summose his biz is his
The poral of the story is
Before you drink your water, boil it
And don’t eat candy frop the toilet.

Like that, see. Quite the story, meter’s and mine,
but like Uriah and that man and later Di, meter had something special
that the king or the other man or we took from it
still, while Petri did his best to stall the countdown,
it cannot peter out for good.
So I ply my bent pen
monometer
to the furrow:
blastoff.

2006-04-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

398

The Eve of Bakkuppinnit

2006-04-09T22:57:00.000-07:00

397

if not, this is the next-best place.

2006-04-08T21:18:00.000-07:00

396

2006-04-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

395
Perscribere est deplorare; condere est orare

2006-04-06T12:24:00.000-07:00

394

2006-04-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

393
Carmina morte carent

2006-04-04T23:19:00.000-07:00

392

(I always say)

2005-03-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

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

2005-03-07T13:41:00.000-08:00

[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

2005-02-18T18:16:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-18T18:01:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-17T02:24:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-17T02:22:00.000-08:00

[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

2005-02-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

[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

2005-02-14T22:40:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-14T22:27:00.000-08:00

"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

2005-02-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-10T22:44:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-07T16:15:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-07T16:13:00.000-08:00

[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

2005-02-04T13:13:00.000-08:00

[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?

2005-02-03T19:34:00.000-08:00

by popular request,

A brief history of Dunster

is coming soon to Below Dunster!

THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part One

2005-02-02T19:35:00.000-08:00

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

2005-02-02T12:06:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-31T23:19:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-27T18:29:00.000-08:00

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

chiasthmatic cough IX

2005-01-27T18:15:00.000-08:00

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

A Toughy for Daffy

2005-01-27T16:49:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-26T11:30:00.000-08:00

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

2005-01-25T16:16:00.000-08:00

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)

2005-01-25T13:54:00.000-08:00

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!)

2005-01-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

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!

2005-01-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

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

chiasthmatic cough V

2005-01-23T14:12:00.000-08:00

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

chiasthmatic cough IV: all new!

2005-01-21T13:52:00.000-08:00

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