An Inconsistent Oracle

English 205
May 4, 2010

An Inconsistent Oracle:
Trickster Art & Magic in Truth & Bright Water

                        They massacred the buffalo

                        Kitty-corner from the bank

                        The taxis run across my feet

                        And my eyes have turned to blanks
                                ──Neil Young

    One of earliest myth cycles is that of the trickster.  Trickster appears without warning and, before they leave, the world has been irrevocably changed in some manner.  In Thomas King's Truth & Bright Water the trickster appears as Monroe Swimmer, the "famous Indian artist" and an avatar for the author.  Monroe moves into an old church and proceeds to force a confrontation between authenticity and expectation on a liminal battlefield where reality, mythology, and history blur together in the fog that shrouds the bridge linking the two towns of Truth and Bright Water.  "[T]trickster stories point to the way ordinary, conventional reality is an illusory construction produced out of a particular univocal interpretation of phenomena appearing as signs" (Doueihi qtd by Smith), and to achieve such ends, Monroe enlists the help of an apprentice: the story's 15 year old narrator, Tecumseh.  Through assisting with Monroe's artistic work, Tecumseh learns the world is far larger, and far stranger, than he has conceived from his small corner of it.

    The summation and substantial representation of the Native American Trickster is Coyote. In a critical essay of King's previous novels, Dawn Karima Pettigrew considers the "innate irreverence [which] accompanies Coyote's actions. Unimpressed by titles, rules, or systems, Coyote exhibits a gentle bewilderment coupled with a complete absence of fear or fawning. The white man fails to frighten Coyote. He refuses to be reduced to a victim by the majority culture's vision and values" (Pettigrew 217-18).  Monroe Swimmer is analogous to Coyote, and the famous Indian artist irreverently moves into the old Christian church and, over the course of the novel, proceeds to paint it out of existence.  "[N]o one noticed that Monroe had ... begun to paint the outside walls of the church... [he] began with the east wall first, and because that wall faced over prairies and because you couldn't see it from Truth or Bright Water, no one knew anything was happening..." (King 30).   This act shows an absence of fear or fawning towards the white man's title, system, and rules.  Monroe does not participate in Indian Days, instead he sets up iron decoy buffalo fetishes to lure the bison back to their homeland.  In this, Monroe refuses to play the victim—that is, to pretend to be the sort of Indian expected by the conquering race of tourists—yet operates (via using iron, metal-works, paint, and modern techniques) in methods that are not at all traditional to his tribe or people.  Pettigrew goes on to suggest that although Coyote is "initially open to the contact with white people, [he] quickly becomes cognizant that their societal structures exist to exclude and oppress him. Coyote responds to these social, cultural, and economic barriers by beating their architects at their own game" (218).  Again, this description could as easily be used to describe Monroe's time in Toronto where he became the "famous Indian artist"—as King relates it: "Miles figured Monroe got lucky, that he landed in Toronto just as being an Indian was becoming chic [...] [his] paintings began to sell, and in no time at all, according to Miles, Monroe was rich" (King 28). This got Monroe into trouble with several museums for painting indians into works of art he is meant to restore.  Monroe masters the world of art as measured by the white people, then returns to Bright Water to use their architecture to perform restorations of his own.

    The fact that "in Thomas King's novels, the trickster takes these concepts and uses them to benefit Blackfoot characters who at-tempt to survive life on Canadian reservations in the modern era" (Pettigrew 219) is undeniable when examining—as Pettigrew does in her essay—King's first two novels.  But this begs the question as to the absence of a direct Coyote character in Truth & Bright Water.  It becomes easier then, and perhaps necessary, to consider Monroe as fulfilling this role. Like Coyote, Monroe shows a pridefulness that could easily be written off as egotistical arrogance.  But with Monroe taking the role of Coyote, such an attitude becomes more a matter of magic than ego.  He knows his role and function in the world and is glad to take the mantle.  When Tecumseh first encounters Monroe, he doesn't recognize who he is: "'Famous Indian artist,' says the man, as if he's announcing someone important... 'What?' 'You're supposed to say "famous Indian artist" after you say "Monroe Swimmer"'" (King 46-47).  This "man" is, in fact, the famous Indian artist himself.  The moniker needs to be spoken because—in Trickster lore—words are magic, and Monroe has come to bring fortune and hazard to Truth and Bright Water.  The most notable thing about Monroe when Tecumseh first meets him is his hair, "which reminds me of Graham Greene's hair in Dances With Wolves" (King 47) and which turns out to actually be a wig and not real hair, Tecumseh soon takes the role of apprentice to Monroe, and sees first hand—if without full understanding—of the plans and schemes this trickster has in store.

    When Tecumseh visits Monroe at the church, he takes in the strange and curious changes Monroe is making, and is quickly drawn into the trickster's plans. "There's no altar at the front of the church. I look around to see where Monroe has moved it and that's when I see the buffalo. It's not real, and I know that right away, but it's pretty good" (King 48). Monroe questions Tecumseh directly, "'What'd you think of my buffalo?' 'Is it paper mâché?' 'The real ones are on their way.' [...] Monroe puts on the wig and starts rolling around the room. He circles the buffalo a couple times. 'I'm planning to do some restoration work'" (King 49).  This is the first time Monroe discusses his restoration project.  Although he is known for his work in painting restoration, his current work involves restoring something more than a canvas.  Later in the novel, he and Tecumseh again discuss the project, and again the wig is involved: "I'm hoping Monroe will take the wig off and help.  But he doesn't. 'What do you think?' It's a buffalo. Or, at least, it's the outline of a buffalo. Flat iron wire bent into the shape of a buffalo... 'It's my new restoration project ... I'm going to save the world'" (King 139).  This sort of grand scheme is nothing usual for Trickster, who is often a multi-tasker of mythology playing roles as creator of worlds, destroyer of worlds, and, in some cases, acts to restore the world.

    Tecumseh's involvement in this restoration becomes more laborious.  Monroe enlists him to help at the church in moving his iron silhouettes; his buffalo decoys.  "At first," Tecumseh tells us, "I think all the buffalo are the same," but Tecumseh is catching a glimpse behind the curtain of the trickster.  He sees the working machinations first-hand, even if he doesn't realize the purpose, he knows the intent, "I can see that they are all different shapes and sizes" (King 139).  To fully immerse his apprentice in the workings of his magical plans, Monroe puts the wig on Tecumseh.  Tecumseh doesn't like the wig, he "can see even less now" and the "wig itself smells funny."  But this gesture between Trickster and his charge displays something tangible involving the inclusion of power.  Trickster, in mythology, is almost never on the same level as the gods.  Trickster merely uses mundane powers to fool others into doing the actual work or, when magic is involved, it usually comes in the form of hedge-magic, sympathetic magic; those process which gain power through perception and belief.  "'Before we're done,'" Monroe tells [Tecumseh], "'buffalo will return'" (King 143-44).  The magical ritual has started, but it takes some time, and a number of physical trappings, to achieve its influence. Monroe hasn't yet made the church fully invisible, but already it blends in with the prairie and sky around it.  Monroe warns Tecumseh not to tell anyone about their work because "'If they hear about it, it won't work." It is not the people of Bright Water with which Monroe is concerned, "Real buffalo,'" he whispers, 'can spot a decoy a mile away'" (King 145).  Monroe warns Tecumseh against saying anything because, like speaking his moniker, words hold power and speaking about the work in progress could lead to the words being carried on the winds to reach the buffalo, wherever they may be, and keep them from returning.

    This creates a dichotomy in Tecumseh's world, as exemplified by two conversations in particular.  His cousin, Lum, is firmly planted in the real, modern and present world: "'Garbage,' he says, his voice hissing into the wind. 'The new buffalo'" (King 162).  Lum represents a new generation of indian who does not believe in the traditions of folklore and ghost dances and dog soldiers and magic.  He is fully involved in Indian Days and doesn't have much patience for ideas involving art and restoration.  Contrarily, Aunt Cassie's life involves mystery and unanswerable questions.  In one exchange with Tecumseh, the magic at work is stated directly and aloud, "Auntie Cassie looks towards Truth. 'I hear Monroe is painting the church.' 'You should see it,' I say. 'He's making the church disappear'" (King 174).  Monroe's turning the church invisible can be seen from a realistic perspective as merely using paint to camouflage the building to appear as part of the landscape surrounding it.  On another level of perception, Monroe makes the church's history disappear as he turns it into a place of art and magic—his home—and thus, the church as a Christian house of worship has genuinely vanished.  In this latter sense, we see as well how Tecumseh is learning these same methods from Monroe, "I take my shirt off and rub dirt on my body to kill my scent and help me blend with the landscape...'" (King 205), his actions reflecting what he has learned from the restoration project of his mentor.

    Monroe's message becomes overt and undisguised when he tells Tecumseh, "'Magic ... if you want the herds to return, you have to understand magic. [...] Realism will only take you so far'" (208). Monroe, trickster that he is, is also a reflected manifestation of the author, and so Monroe telling us that magic is afoot and that realism won't bring a conclusion is King slipping in a glimpse of the authorial structure at work, hinting that the novel's conclusion will involve a certain brand of magic; realism alone will not bring us, the readers, to where the author wishes us to be.

    Later, when Tecumseh last mentions the buffalo, he sees that "a few of them have wandered off and aren't where they're supposed to be, but most of the have stayed put. Monroe said they might move around a bit and that it isn't a worry as long as they stay in sight."  Given that the church (may or may not) exist out on the prairie, iron decoys of buffalo moving about on their own doesn't come as a surprise.  Realism brought us only so far.  For something truly remarkable, if we use eyes willing to see, we find that magic will show us other paths.

    Soldier, Tecumseh's dog, has found many of the paths which the human characters traverse in the novel.  Soldier is named after the dog soldiers of old Cheyenne lore, indian warriors who staked themselves to a piece of land to defend it against all invaders, both in this world and the next.  The formation of the Dog Soldier came about after a Cheyenne warrior named Porcupine Bear had a vision of two cousins involved in a fight (Hoig).  This source vision manifest in King's novel through the three canine character—Soldier and the two Cousins.  These dogs are a crucial part of the landscape and act as symbols for both discovery and protection.  When, just prior to the conclusion of the novel, Soldier runs away from Tecumseh, Monroe views it with eyes looking at a different world than the landscape of prairies and mountains and big sky:

        "'Looks like he's on a mission,' says Monroe.
        "Soldier trots down the side of the coulee and disappears into the fog. I'm fairly sure I know where he's going, and I'm not sure it's a good idea.
        "'You better go find him,' says Monroe. 'No telling how far he'll go this time.' He leans against the truck and straightens the ribbon so it lies on the bone like lines of blood. 'When you do,' he says, 'ask him not to both the buffalo.'
        "I don't catch up with Soldier." (King 268-69)

Monroe is the trickster and Soldier is the defender and psychopomp, this passage becomes prophecy; a dark foretelling of the death that soon follows.  Tecumseh cannot catch up to Soldier because the dog must travel a path which leads to sunless lands where the living cannot go.  But this possible trek which Soldier makes, is, like the fog that shrouds the bridge spanning the river between Truth and Bright Water, is obscured and ultimately never definitively revealed.

    Monroe's message to the indians of the reservation, like his art, is not always consistent, and by the novel's end both are left unclear, but that uncertainty is part of what he teaches.  What we learn, much like what we experience, requires the proper eyes with which to see, the proper ears with which to hear.  If we hold rigid expectations about what is going to happen, as Lum and others in Bright Water did, then that is all that we may allow to occur.  If we, like Monroe and to some extent Tecumseh, open ourselves to other possibilities, then what we experience around us will continually be surprising and new.  In a previous novel by King, the narrator and Coyote are talking.  The conversation could almost as easily be placed in Truth & Bright Water as being between Tecumseh (a first-person narrator whose name is mentioned only once) and Monroe.  "'There are no truths, Coyote,' I says. 'Only stories.' 'Okay,' says Coyote. 'Tell me a story'" (King qtd by Ruppert).  The story in this latter novel could be summarized as the trickster climbing to the rooftop of an invisible church and yawping to the world: the buffalo have returned and magic is afoot!

Bibliography

Hart, Mickey and Jay Stevens and Fredric Leiberman. Drumming at the Edge of Magic. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990. Print.

Hoig, Stan. The Peace Chiefs of the Cheyennes. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Internet file. 16 April 2010.

King, Thomas. Truth & Bright Water. 2000. Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.

Pettigrew, Dawn Karima. "Coyote discovers America: The cultural survival of the trickster in the novels of Thomas King." Wicazo Sa Review 12.1 (1997). EBSCO. Web. 29 April 2010.

Rose, Wendy. "Just What's All This Fuss about Whiteshamanism Anyway?" Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization. Aarhus, Denmark: Seklos, Dept. of Eng., Univ. of Aarhus, 1984. EBSCO. Web. 19 April 2010.

Ruppert, James. "When coyote dreams." World & I 8.6 (1993). EBSCO. Web. 30 April 2010.

Smith, Carlton. "Coyote, Contingency, and Community: Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water and Postmodern Trickster." American Indian Quarterly 21.3 (1997). EBSCO. Web. 29 April 2010.

"Truth & Bright Water Reading Guide." Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2001. HarperCollins. PDF. 22 April 2010.



~•~

Sing to Me in Tongues of Fire

English 205
13 April  2010

Sing to Me in Tongues of Fire

    The oldest shared human experience is gathering around a fire.  Once gathered around the fire—for protection against what lurks in the darkness beyond reach of the fire's light—the oldest shared human interaction is the telling of stories.  These earliest human stories regard our place as humans in relation to the mutually non-exclusive worlds of nature and of the mysterious unknown.  It is in the liminal space where these two worlds come together and separate where we find the source of all human science, religion, story, and poetry.  In that space then, the fire becomes is the metaphor for the source of what is knowable among the mystery, and what is knowable is related person to person through the stories told.  Here is the beginning of the oral tradition which would, thousands of years along in human legacy, become the poetry of our culture.  Not the poetry of the written page, to be pontificated upon from towers of glass and steel, nor read silently in hip and trendy cafés of the Lower East Side, but the poetry of sound and movement, of science and nature, of oral traditional, of what Jimmie Killingsworth called, "the poetry of the body."  Dr. Killingsworth uses this phrase in direct application of the work of Walt Whitman, and it is with Whitman where we enter into the stream of oral poetic tradition.  First, we make the journey backwards, upstream towards that source of early humans gathered around a fire to tell stories of the things beyond the reach of their kenning, what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls "the river out of Eden" (qtd. in Drout 269), to discover anaphora as one of the key devices in making the leap from oral tradition to the written word, before a slingshot return to Whitman in order to follow the wake of his influence on those downstream from him.

    As we venture forth from this metaphoric realm of original stories, it is apropos to note that Whitman begins one of his better known poems with the titular line, "I sing the Body electric."  In doing this, he deliberately invokes one of the earliest-known epic poems to have made that leap from oral to written tradition: Homer's The Odyssey ("Sing to me of the man, O Muse" (Homer)).  Whitman is well aware of his place along the river of tradition and displays in the majority of his work, as displayed by his intricate use of cadence; of meter.  As Michael D. C. Drout observes, "One of the major features of any traditional poetic style is meter, however construed (whether by stress, quantity, syllable count, and other tradition-dependent criteria). Meter serves as an important feature of poetic, traditional language" (286-287).  Even though Whitman does not use intentional rhyme scheme, his meter is precise and carefully composed to reflect the traditional referentiality where his work resides.  Drout goes on to say that "if the meter is a marked feature of the poetry, then it is likely to be imitated, and in fact this is exactly what we see across oral traditions: meter is [...] one of the tests of traditionally of poetry" (287).

    This use of repetition is integral to oral storytelling.  Repetition in this manner is used not merely for alliteration but as a mnemonic to serve the purpose of iteration.  This can be seen in works ranging from The Iliad's seemingly endless "Catalogue of Ships" (which serves to familiarize the audience with the participants of the conflict) to the Torah's genealogical lists of who begat whom (which acquaints the audience with the integral ancestral heritage of the protagonists), to the religious refrain that begins each Sura of the Qur'an.  This sort of repetition shows the importance of the information given.  According to Drout, "important elements are more likely to be able to be re-transmitted and thus spread to other individuals. Thus this cultural poetics helps to explain how information gets put into and accessed from what Maurice Halbwachs in 1950 called the 'collective memory'" (283).  A most effective way to illustrate this is in the use of anaphora—a device Whitman excelled at and used often.

    John Miles Foley points out, as quoted by Drout, that anaphora can extend "beyond the poetic line into formula, scene, and theme."  Given this observation, we can easily find examples in Whitman's work of anaphoric themes (e.g. death, nature, the body).  But in using anaphora strictly in the verbal sense, it may just as easily be understood as to why it originated in the oral tradition: such repetition reduces the demands on cognitive ability to memorize a poem or story.  Since, according to both Drout and Foley—and indirectly by the research of Dawkins—such examples can be found in most every language and culture, we could look back at Dawkins' citation of the river flowing out of Eden to consider his hypothesis that such repetitions are a result of natural process, and part of the make up of human genetics.  This recalls our earlier point from Killingsworth, that Whitman's verse is a "poetry of the body," an idea Amitai Avi-Ram expounds upon at the beginning of his essay, "The Body and the Simulacrum."  "Traditional metrical forms," Avi-Ram tells us, "work by invoking in the reader a clear sense of rhythm, might more properly be called 'poetry of the body.'"  He continues, extending this concept to "ballads, hymns, nursery rhymes, and jingles [which] all seem to invite in the reader a sympathetic response to their rhythms in a way that can be and often is directly reflected in movements and feelings in the body" (93-94)  It is Avi-Ram's conclusion that Whitman's verses:

can be understood not as a simple liberation of the body but as a shifting of the body from a realm of direct experience available through palpable and audible musical rhythms in poetry toward an imaginary item which has only a problematic relation to the body itself, a being whose existence can only be inferred by thought. (94)

This being of thought is akin to the idea of the poetic body's muscle memory; in hearing the anaphoric repetition and the cadence of the verse, the body responds to and remembers that rhythm.  It is that memory that is exercised when repeating or re-reading that poem at a later time.

    But if Whitman's cadence and repetition are remnants of the oral tradition predating Homer, what evidence of a tradition exist leading up to his work?  Whitman certainly did not develop a spontaneous act of aesthetics and suddenly manifest this poetic device in the mid 19th Century after it lay dormant for 27 centuries.  As was stated above, Whitman was (forgive the pun) well versed in knowing his heritage.  Working back from Whitman's own age, we will cite three examples in the English language of works using this "poetry of the body"—the devices of alliterative cadence and anaphora.

    Not long before Whitman began his poetic career, the American Romantic Edgar Allan Poe often used (and some could rightfully argue, committed the perfection of it) anaphora, particularly in his poem "The Bells."  Poe not only uses anaphora to perfection in this poem, but uses the form of the poem itself to resemble the subject matter, with each successive verse he describes the bells building from tinkling sleigh bells to the deafening crescendo of a death knell.  Examine: (verse 1) "To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells, /Bells, bells, bells - / From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells."  (Verse 2) "To the swinging and the ringing / Of the bells, bells, bells, / Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells - To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!"  (3) "Of the bells, / Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells - / In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!"  Until, at last, in the fourth verse, the clamor is almost palpable—bringing us back to the idea of poetry as calling for the body to physically respond with movement:

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

It is such an effect that following an aural rendition, that silence consumes the ear in the absence of the poetic chant.

    Another, briefer, example of this technique of repetition and sound, comes from William Blake in his penultimately famous poem, "Tyger."  His use of anaphroa is not only shown in the words, but also in the punctuation (emphasis mine):

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

    William Shakesphere, bringing poetry to stage presentations in a manner befitting the oral tradition of acting out stories for dramatic effect in the opening scene of Julius Caesar, when Marullus (somewhat rhetorically) asks after Flavius, "And do you now put on your best attire? / And do you now cull out a holiday? / And do you now strew flowers in his way / That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?"  In this example, the lines themselves do not necessarily call to the body to respond, but instead, the description is of a physical reaction within the body of the subject (Pompey's blood).

    Having stepped out of poetry into the narrative of dramatic theatre, we can reverse our chronological journey, and jump into the wake of Whitman's anaphoric influence, landing squarely in the middle of more blood (Revolutionary France) resulting from the pen of a English literary giant, Charles Dickens (again, emphasis mine).  "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair..."

    A bridge between Dickens and Whitman, between England and America, can be found in the personage of T. S. Eliot.  Though there are several examples of anaphora in "The Waste Land," it is his use of this device in the infamous conclusion to "The Hollow Men" which is of interest here.  "Here we go round the prickly pear / Prickly pear prickly pear..." sounds like a nursery rhyme which calls to the body for response; to, perhaps, literally dance around this poetic prickly pear cactus.  The verse offers one of the most unforgettable conclusions in poetic lore, "Between the desire / And the spasm / Between the potency / And the existence / Between the essence / And the descent / Falls the Shadow... / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."  In a few short, starkly cadenced lines, we've been lead through idea, reality, conception, birth, and finally, not just death of a single body, but the death of the world, the ultimate call which leaves no chance for a bodily reply.

    This conjuring of massive annihilation makes the step from Eliot in the the early 20th Century, to Elie Weisel's description of holocaust in the middle of the century particularly apt.  In another use of anaphora calling to the body to respond, Weisel uses his phrase repeatedly in his narrative memoir, Night, to tell of how annihilation of many bodies caused the death of his God and his hope:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.  Never shall I forget that smoke.  Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.  Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.  Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.  Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.  Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.  Never.

Additionally, there is a trait in this similar to that of Poe's—the form of the piece resembling what it describes.  "Seven times cursed and seven times sealed," is invoked in the first of seven sentences, all of which begin with the binding phrase.  What Weisel does is not only invoke the wrath of God in his Biblical (Torahian?) narrative style, but he enacts that seven-fold curse through the idea of words as being magical, as is illustrated not only in the Book of Genesis from Weisel's religion (Tetragrammaton: the unutterable Name of God), but a common trait throughout myriad mythologies from Chinese belief in words having come from the web spinnings of spiders, to the Egyptian never speaking their secret names so as to prevent another from holding power over them.  Wiesel spells out the curse in words, sentencing them to the page.

    Between the time of Weisel's experiences and his publishing them, the poet Allen Ginsberg produced a work that shares so many similarities and connections to Whitman as to be almost innumerable.  The very title of Howl is easily seen to be connective with Whitman's "barbaric yawp" from the roof tops of the world (an image that, itself, appears in Ginsberg's magna opus).  The style and device connection is even more evident when Ginsberg, 46 lines in a row and more than a dozen additional to that, uses the pronoun/verb combination "who..." "...vanished/wandered/lit/studied/loaned/thought/jumped/lounged/disappeared/reappeared/burned/distributed/broke/bit/howled," to cite a few.  Ginsberg also is a poet who performed his work, not merely as readings from a page, but enacted with improvasational inflictions, music, and with bodily response to the poetry's call for movement.

    That call for movement from the sound of words itself reveals itself in the latter part of the 20th Century through the lyric poetry of modern music.  Where modern poetry has become introverted, read in silence far more often than aloud—moreso now than had ever been in the past thanks in large part to other forms of media as well as a change in attitude towards poetry itself.  This is where some songwriters have become far more the voices of poetic literature and oral traditoional than do the modern writers who claim the mantle of being poets.  Citing examples is intimidatingly plentiful, but we shall focus on an singular case, and one which is directly and texturally inspired by Ginsberg's Howl.

    Roger Waters, on the Pink Floyd album Animals, displays his poetic tradition proudly. On the lengthy song, "Dogs," eleven lines in a row all begin with a phrase that appears to be asking a question, but like its forebearer in Howl, instead makes an uncomfortable state of simple, if poetic, fact with a pronoun/verb combination: "Who was born in a house full of pain. / Who was trained... / Who was told... / Who was broken... / Who was fitted... / Who was given... / Who was breaking... / Who was only... / Who was ground... / Who was found... / Who was dragged down by the stone."  This despairing alliterative repetition is repeated in Waters' successive work, The Wall.  Anaphora shows up numerous times in not only the lyrical verses, but extends to repeated musical phrases—leitmotifs—as well.  Given our theme in the 20th Century examples, one verse in particular stands out.  Waters tells us sadly:

I've got a little black book with my poems in.
I've got a bag with a toothbrush and a comb in.
When I'm a good dog they sometimes throw me a bone in.
I've got elastic bands keeping my shoes on.
I've got those swollen hand blues.
I've got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.
    ...
I've got a pair of Gohill's boots
And I've got fading roots.

Amidst a rock opera concerning a child who grew up without a father (who was killed in World War II), we see this ancient device of anaphora and repeatative alliteration citing the exclusively modern paraphenalia of elastic bands, television, and a trendy shop for purchasing the latest in foot fashion wear, as well as the writing of poetry itself.

    In making this journey, we have seen how a poetic device which began shortly after humans first gathered around a fire as a memnonic to be able to recite the stories heard from others as stories of our own became a means to relate history, convery aspects of religion, instruct, entertain, warn, and finally to become the memnoic for silently calling our own bodies to respond to the memory of cadenced words when we recall, to ourselves, the lyrics to a favorite song.  The connecting historical tradition of  anaphora, rhythm, and the oral tradition of poetic storytelling has journeyed a long way since flowing out of that distant mythic Eden in our collective distant past, and splashes us continually, even right where we are sitting now.

Bibliography

Avi-Ram, Amitai. "Free Verse in Whitman and Ginsberg: The Body and the Simulacrum." The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life. Iowa City: U. of Iowa Press, 1992. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. New York: Dover, 1992. Print.

Canada, Dr. Mark. "Walt Whitman." Mark Canada's Work. UNC-Pembroke. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. Print.

Doty, Mark. "Form, Eros, and the Unspeakable: Whitman's Stanzas." Virginia Quarterly Review, 2005. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.

Drout, Michael D. C. "A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory." Oral Tradition 21.2 (2006). Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Eliot, T. S. Poems, 1909-1925. London: Faber and Faber, 1925. Print.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl, and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996. Print.

Hall, Donald. "The Art of Poetry No. 1." The Paris Review 21 (Spring-Summer 1959). Paris Review. Web. 9 Apr, 2010.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Press. 1996. Print.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina, 1989. Google Books. 23 Mar. 2010.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Avenel, 1981. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

Waters, Roger. "Dogs." Animals. Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd, 1977. Album.

—. "Nobody Home." The Wall. Pink Floyd. Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, James Guthrie, Roger Waters, 1979. Album.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam, 1982. Print.

Wiley, Autrey Nell. "Reiterative Devices in Leaves of Grass." American Literature 1.2 (1929). Literary Reference Center. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.



~•~

Anaphoric Mnemonics

English 205
31 March  2010

Anaphoric Mnemonics:
When Words and Sound Become Muscle Memory

    If we were to travel, like Joseph Conrad's famous protagonist, Marlow, up the waterway of human tradition—what Richard Dawkins has called "the river out of Eden" (qtd. in Drout 269)—we would find that all poetry, all stories, originated with the sounds uttered by humans that would formulate basic speech patterns; the first words.  This repetition of sound becomes the basis for pattern-recognition and furthermore, that pattern-recognition becomes the the underlying foundation for anaphora and repeated metrical devices in poetry and storytelling.  Somewhere up that dark river of tradition we find the earliest human narratives were handed down, word-to-ear to be retold again and again through different peoples, different generations.  The earliest stories were repeated patterns told orally.

    When Walt Whitman begins one of his better known poems with the line, "I sing the Body electric" he invokes one of the earliest-known epic poems to have made the leap from oral to written tradition: Homer's The Odyssey ("Sing to me of the man, O Muse" (Homer)).  Whitman is well aware of his place along the river of tradition and displays in the majority of his work, as displayed by his intricate use of cadence; of meter.  As Michael D. C. Drout observes, "One of the major features of any traditional poetic style is meter, however construed (whether by stress, quantity, syllable count, and other tradition-dependent criteria). Meter serves as an important feature of poetic, traditional language" (286-287).  Even though Whitman does not use intentional rhyme scheme, his meter is precise and carefully composed to reflect the traditional referentiality where his work resides.  Drout goes on to say that "if the meter is a marked feature of the poetry, then it is likely to be imitated, and in fact this is exactly what we see across oral traditions: meter is [...] one of the tests of traditionally of poetry" (287).  If Whitman is our Marlow, then he has most certainly found Kurtz's outpost along our river of linguistic tradition.

    Perhaps more so than meter, the use of repetition is integral to oral storytelling.  Repetition certainly aids as a mnemonic, as well as to serve the purpose of iteration.  This can be seen in works from The Iliad's seemingly endless "Catalogue of Ships" (which serves to familiarize the audience with the participants of the conflict) to the Torah's genealogical lists of who begat whom (which acquaints the audience with the ancestral traditions of the protagonists), to the religious refrain that begins each Sura of the Qur'an.  This sort of repetition shows the importance of the information given.  According to Drout, "important elements are more likely to be able to be re-transmitted and thus spread to other individuals. Thus this cultural poetics helps to explain how information gets put into and accessed from what Maurice Halbwachs in 1950 called the 'collective memory'" (283).  A most effective way to illustrate this is in the use of anaphora—a device Whitman excelled at and used often.

    John Miles Foley points out that anaphora can extend "beyond the poetic line into formula, scene, and theme."  Given this observation, we can easily find examples in Whitman's work of anaphoric themes (e.g. death, nature, the body).  But in using anaphora strictly in the verbal sense, it may just as easily be understood as to why it originated in the oral tradition: such repetition reduces the demands on cognitive ability to memorize a poem or story.  Since, according to both Drout and Foley—and indirectly by the research of Dawkins—such examples can be found in most every language and culture, we could look back at Dawkins' citation of the river flowing out of Eden to consider his hypothesis that such repetitions are a result of natural process, and part of the make up of human genetics.  With this in mind, Dr. M. Jimmie Killingsworth's statement that Whitman verse is a "poetry of the body" could be considered critically and metaphorically, as well as scientifically.  "Traditional metrical forms," Amitai Avi-Ram states at the beginning of his notable essay, "The Body and the Simulacrum," "work by invoking in the reader a clear sense of rhythm, might more properly be called 'poetry of the body.'"  He continues, extending this concept to "ballads, hymns, nursery rhymes, and jingles [which] all seem to invite in the reader a sympathetic response to their rhythms in a way that can be and often is directly reflected in movements and feelings in the body" (93-94)  It is Avi-Ram's conclusion that Whitman's verses:

can be understood not as a simple liberation of the body but as a shifting of the body from a realm of direct experience available through palpable and audible musical rhythms in poetry toward an imaginary item which has only a problematic relation to the body itself, a being whose existence can only be inferred by thought. (94)

    This being of thought is akin to the idea of the poetic body's muscle memory; in hearing the anaphoric repetition and the cadence of the verse, the body responds to and remembers that rhythm.  It is that memory that is exercised when repeating or re-reading that poem at a later time.

    The connection between anaphora, cadence, rhythm, and the oral and written traditions of poetic storytelling is intricate and tight.  As these examples have shown, the tradition is as deep and vast as a river that flows from some mythic Eden in our collective distant past to right where we are sitting now.

Works Cited

Avi-Ram, Amitai. "Free Verse in Whitman and Ginsberg: The Body and the Simulacrum." The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life. 93-113. Iowa City: U. of Iowa Press, 1992. NetLibrary. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Drout, Michael D. C. "A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory." Oral Tradition 21.2 (2006): 269-294. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Press. 1996. Print.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina, 1989. Google Books. 23 Mar. 2010.

John Miles Foley. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1988. Web. 27 Mar. 2010.



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The Epistemological Fountain of Pure Meaning

The rewrite of a previous paper for this class. Some schools of critical thought are cited incorrectly, but that's how they were on the original paper; I goofed.

English 205
March 2, 2010

The Epistemological Fountain of Pure Meaning

    Barthes and Freud walk into a bar looking for Meaning. . .  This could be the opening of a curious literary joke which unfolds in any manner of ways depending upon who and how it is told.  Similarly, any given text—be it humor, essay, novel, film, philippic, or cartoon—may or may not have a multitude of possible meanings associated with it depending on elements that can extend beyond what the text itself says.  For my own part, the method and degree of meaning I seek from a text considers such factors not limited to: how much interest I have in the subject matter; who wrote it; when and where I read in both the literal and metaphoric sense; what day of the week it is; and perhaps even which direction the wind is currently blowing.  Each text is approached in subtlety different ways to discover its meaning, but I am always open to the likelihood that there is something I may miss if not paying close attention.  Lately, I have equated this process to understand meaning to be analogous with watching bonus features on a DVD.  The movie is there to view without any background information, but should you wish to—as I often do—the option is available to delve beyond the film, learning details and influences that exist apart from the film, yet still carry influence upon its meaning and creation.  For current purposes, let us check out the bonus features of this process in an attempt to understand how we arrive at meaning.

    Of course, to understand the meaning of any text, one must first approach it using some sort of rubric.  In literary terms, this is done through through theoretical methods that inherently involve some sort of ideology.  These methods are like maps helping the traveler find their way through the wilderness of potential meaning.  The map is not the landscape, just as any meaning we might find is not the only meaning possible for a given work.  For instance, New Criticism is a method which places the rubric for meaning upon only the text itself; nothing of the author's intent nor conditions of their culture and circumstance can be brought forth to define the text's meaning.  Contrasting this would be the maps offered by the Deconstructionist theory, which places great emphasis upon outside influences defining what the text could mean.  Just as there are numerous possible types of maps—topographical for those who would trek by foot; road maps for those traveling by vehicle, satellite maps displayed with Google Earth for the armchair voyager who doesn't wish to leave their familiar environs—there are myriad literary theories which are used to unveil a text.  New Criticism and Deconstructionist theories are by no means the only ones available, but they are convenient because they act well as polarities to one another.

    The web comic XKCD by Randall Munroe comes with its own caveat in the fine print which appears beneath each strip: "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."  Just from this text alone, the reader who ventures forth does so having been given the keys to understand the author is intent on challenging at least some of the conventions and expectations which might be brought along with a reader to the content of this web comic.  The January 13, 2010 edition of XKCD was called "Self Description."  Encountering such title—and wearing my trusty English Major Academic Thinking Cap®—I deduced a self-awareness of post-modernism which might demonstrate a certain incredulity to its own meta-narrative.  Which is an scholarly way of saying that I suspected the comic that day might mean it is deliberately going to play with the conventions of self-awareness and the regressive inversion of knowing its own audience is aware of themselves and the comic's own awareness of them being aware of its awareness, and so on down an infinite hall of mirrors casting reflections upon reflections.  In other words, the strip seemed primed to be examined for meaning via the New Critical method.

    Another trait of this web comic is that a meta-text (also called an alt-text or, ironically, a hyper-text) is displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over the illustration.  This text usually takes the form of a sarcastic comment about the subtext of the strip, or otherwise given meaning or complication to what is shown.  In this particular strip, the alt-text tells us, "The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters" (Monroe).  Here then we have a comic strip that seems to be doing nothing more than making a rather facile comment upon its own contents, and offers little to suggestion anything other than that.  Being an ideological omnivore, I place attributions on it much like a Rorschach ink blot.  These attributions are highly dependent on if I have donned my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, or I have just awakened and taken to the internet before my second cup of coffee in the morning, or how much cognitive dissidence I wish to express (that is, a deliberately contrary opinion akin to taking the role of being the devil's advocation; a literary heretic).  This is a strip which seems to provide no deeper meaning, but that could be precisely why it may offer some because, in life, literature, art, politics, what-have-you, initial appearances are rarely what they seem, and my brain is wired to instinctively wonder what else might be lurking there just below the surface.  It could be considered as its own rubric to how meaning is made via the self-explanatory graphs depicting the black and white nature of itself; to understand what something means, you merely need to read literally what is set on the page.

    But what of texts which all-but-prohibit some forms of critical analysis and seem tailor-made examples to encourage others?  Would a Marxist reading of "Jack and the Beanstalk" be possible?  Whereas the example offered by Randall Monroe's XKCD comic self-consciously strove to refer to nothing beyond the borders of its own frame, lending itself perfectly for a New Criticism analysis, it would only make sense to examine a contrasting text that would by necessity force a readers to look beyond what is given on the page to fully comprehend its subject (and thus the Deconstructionist theory would be far more applicable to analyze it).  Sticking with web comics, Tatsuya Ishida's February 19, 2010 comic strip Sinfest becomes a perfect example.  Each panel—indeed, even the featured quote above the artist's name—forces the reader to sources other than the text itself to glean what the strip itself is attempting to mean.  To my way of thinking, this would start with a panel by panel breakdown of the characters involved, and then an analysis of the signs and signifiers being presented.

    In the first panel, two characters are introduced—both of whom have appeared previously in the comic; one as a minor character and the other as a recurring secondary character.  The Gay Guy appearance a week previous to this challenged the moral attitude of the main character's hyper-heterosexuality.  The puppet is the clouds is the way Ishida represents the Judeo-Christian God (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoist ideologies all have representative characters as well).  God always appears as a hand-puppet in a derivation apropos to the context.  Following this introductory understanding of the characters involved, an examination of the second panel would involve God's hand-puppet wearing a shirt with an inverted triangle.  This symbol represents the pink triangle that was originally used to denote gay male prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.  About thirty years later, the symbol was re-used by the gay pride movement in order to replace the shame involved with being forced to wear it with displaying pride at publicly showing one's sexual orientation.  By the third panel, the reader is treated (or assaulted, depending upon one's musical ideology) with God-the-hand-puppet singing and mime dancing to the Village People's song, "Y.M.C.A."  Of course, the context of this connects to the Village People being a (mostly) open gay band and the consideration that YMCAs were, for a gay man in the 1970s, a place to cruise for other gay men.  The final panel has Gay Guy directly addressing God-as-a-hand-puppet with his question about loving everyone equally, a reference to the on-going struggle over homosexuality and Christianity; religious acceptance and Biblical condemnation.  God-the-hand-puppet replies with what can almost be heard from the written text as a Wildean-lisp as He "strikes a pose" and quotes a Madonna song.  The text above the artist's name quotes a song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which further connects this particular comic to the subculture of non-heterosexuals and, well, the just plain weird.  Without these off-the-page references, this strip could certainly be understood on one level, but the appreciation from such understanding would not go very deep.  Taking into account the sub-referential material involved, a greater understanding—and thus a deeper appreciation is, if not reached, at least offered by the additional information.  But what are we-as-readers to make of a subject without a definitive "text" from which to derive our meaning?

    Sub-references and subjective possibilities are the only things offered in any look for meaning in the case of author Philip K. Dick and his beam of pink light.  For purposes of brevity, this instance will be condensed and told as unadorned as possible.  Phil Dick himself wrote extensively about what happened to him—what he theorized happened to him—through the course of at least three novels and more than eight thousand pages of type-written notes (which Dick called his "Exegesis").  In February and March of 1974 Phil Dick had his impacted wisdom teeth removed and, on a particular afternoon, the pharmacy delivered his pain medication.  The delivery girl who came to his house wore an ichthys necklace.  Dick asked her what it meant and when she told him is was a symbol used by early Christians Dick saw sunlight glint off the pendant and, "In that instant … I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, 'loss of forgetfulness.' I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me."  More than that, "as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome" (Dick).  In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, none of which he ever claimed to completely understand nor objectively define.  He did, however, spend the last eight years of his life writing about those experiences, examining what could possibly produce such events, and, in context to my own personal examination of deciphering what I encounter, what does it all mean?

    On one hand, Dick had been a heavy user of amphetamines in the years previous to his "mystical experience" and that fact alone was not lost upon him when he sought to attribute source and cause to his visions.  Likewise, he often considered the possibilities of a stroke or mental aberration as the cause.  But Dick felt the beam of pink light was ultimately a benevolent event, because he attributed to it the sudden awareness of a inguinal hernia in his five-year-old son (a condition which modern medical techniques had missed).  This layman's diagnosis saved his son's life.  This certainly was a factor in Dick considered as he hypothesized what it was that happened to him.  The most remarkable thing to me is that Dick never amassed the dogma in his own mental quest for meaning to categorically dismiss any possibility he could coherently structure, which included some outlandish theories such as a possible Teslaesque Soviet mind control beam, influence from an extraterrestrial satellite, and divine communication.

    Not that anyone has to take any of Dick's own theories into account in order to attribute their own meaning to the event as it is related through any of the various texts it is described.  This example places heavy emphasis upon the author of the text, and, as Dick himself would be quick to point out, the author is one of the least reliable sources for the information at hand.  This is a man who, upon returning home one night to find the safe in his work room to have been blown open and his papers ransacked, attributed variously the break in to the FBI, the CIA, the Hells Angels, neighborhood drug dealers, or even, as he carefully considered, that he may have do it himself in a fit of schizophrenia (a disorder he was never had).

    Given Phil Dick's wide range of meanings he deciphered from a singular event—from the mundane to the phantastic—who am I to say that the beam of pink light was merely a side effect of pain and prescription medication, or that Dick is a liar, or was residual after-effects to chronic speed usage, or that it never happened at all?  My mind is open to the possibility that something can occur for which I have no framework to define it.

    Meandering into this existential quagmire, we could easily and quickly become lost in subjective possibilities and never find meaning, let alone understand the epistemological fountain from which pure meaning flows.  To compel understanding from any subject, the Oxford English Dictionary is a hefty tome carrying the definitive weigh of clarity and a dozen pounds of etymological concrete meaning.  Under the entry for "meaning" the OED includes: "The action of MEAN v.2; moaning, lamentation," which refers to "a. To complain of or lament (something); to lament for (a dead person). b. To pity or comfort."  But then the most obvious meaning of "meaning" is not the initial—or even secondary—definition at all.

    This alliterative conundrum may seem to be a farcical endeavor, but it is purposefully used here to illustrate the point being made.  The meaning of anything is rarely, if ever, what is encountered on its surface, its face-shown-to-the-world level of intention.  And whatever it was that the author (that is, the creator or creators) of a particular text intends its meaning to be, there are certainly many other—and equally valid—meaning which can be deciphered from that text.  What meaning the (reader/viewer/listener) audience of a work thinks and takes from it is just as valid as what the creator of the work intended, just as the meaning of the same text for the same individual may be different in accordance to when and how they re-encounter or re-examine it at another time.

    All of which, in the case of Phil Dick and his beam of pink light, seemingly leaves us each to forge our own maps to define not only the texts we encounter, but also the world in which those texts exist.  In a scientific sense, we cannot with any degree of reason define and proclaim limestone rock is green jello and hope to convey that as being a valid meaning as to the nature of sedimentary rock.  But what it does reasonably suggest is that one person can read a Phil Dick novel and see his Penfield Mood Organs and Mercer Empathy Boxes as prophetic precursors to the currently ubiquitous small handheld devices with perfectly Phildickian names like "iPod" and "BlackBerry," while someone else reads that same novel and dismisses such notions due to lack of believable plot or emotionally uninvolved characterization.  Both are true subjectively, but the objective veracity—whatever that loaded phrase may be taken to mean—remains unchanged.  And an objective veracity to a subjective experience (which is what reading any text ultimately comes down to) is what Dick strove to discover and, with cognitive dissonance, understood to be an impossible quest.

    On some level, everyone seeks to establish meaning to what they read, see, think, and experience, whether that meaning comes from science, traditional, society, religion, kith, kin, hallucination, or extraterrestrial influence, we amass and attribute our own meaning to everything we encounter.  How we do that—how I do that—is specifically connected to what it is I am attempting to understand and define.  Like Dick's methodology, I formulate meaning based on perception, perspective, and assess its own internal merit.  Regardless of outcome, I then shift my own perception and perspective and formulate what I hope to be an equally valid and alternative meaning based on the same evidence.  Following through in this manner several times, I then conclude which meaning I wish to attribute to the text I'm assessing—dependent upon, as was stated at the beginning of this paper, a number of seemingly unrelated influences.

    A Barthsean scholar and a Freudian scholar are almost certainly not going to decipher the same meaning from Philip K. Dick's account of his anamnesis, nor am I going to take from it the same as what Dick himself intended when he committed his own experiences to the page and had it published.  Meaning exists in so many different ephemeral forms, none of which—according to my currently constructed model of the world—can objectively be declared to be more comprehensively correct than another.  So may be better delineated or be adequately explained than others, but all have the potential to be equally valid.

    So clicking back from our special features to the main menu on our metaphoric DVD, I check the calendar (for what day it is) and the weather charts (to see if it is safe to go outside).  But I need no weatherman to tell me which way the wind blows and, armed with a pen as my primary weapon and a lifetime of signs and signifiers at my behest, I journey forth to continue my mission of discovery: to seek out new texts and new literary theories (to boldly split infinitives anytime it is poetic to do so!), and to compound my attempts in understanding where and how I derive meaning itself.  Which, however it is done, will, undoubtedly, involve subjective sub-references to scores of differing sources, and be flavored with the many spices of wit and sarcasm and include jokes to be groaned at aloud and then repeated at soonest opportunity.

    Barthes and Freud walk into a bar looking for meaning.

    You'd think the second one would have ducked.

Works Cited

Belolo, Henri, Jacques Morali, and Victor Willis. "Y.M.C.A." Rel. Dec. 1978. Village People. Jacques Morali.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday, 1968. Print.

─. "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)."
    In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995. Print.

─. In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 1991. Print.

Ishida, Tatsuya. "Gay Puppet." Sinfest 19 Feb. 2010. Web. 19 Feb. 2010.

Madonna, and Shep Pettibone. "Vogue." Rel. Mar. 1990. Madonna. Madonna, Shep Pettibone.

"Meaning." Def. 2a & 2b. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Print.

Munroe, Randall. "Self-Description." XKCD 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Jan. 2010.

Peck, Abe. "Village People." Rolling Stone #289 19 Apr. 1979. Web. 28 Feb. 2010.

Plant, Richard. The pink triangle: the Nazi war against homosexuals. New York: Macmillan, 1988, Print.


~•~

But What Does It Mean?

(second draft)
This paper was rewritten twice for the same class, expanding its scope each time.

English 205
January 14, 2010

But What Does It Mean?

Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?
―Hobbes

    When looking for meaning in a particular text, what exactly is the process used to discover what meaning might be there?  Like situational ethics, the very method itself varies, not so much in accordance with the text itself, but certainly with the context in which it is encountered.  The reason is as simple as the above quote from the sarcastic philosophy espouted by the fictional feline: ignorance becomes boring to me, and so I spend my commodity of time in order to gain the return on my investment in the form of further thought and—at times—some sort of understanding of a subject or idea.

    To illustrate, let us walk through some of this process while examining two separate texts.  The first will be an incident that had its source in “real life” and was repeatedly examined in fiction by author Philip K. Dick.  The other will be a more straight-forward text, that of an online comic strip called XKCD.

   Jumping into the Phildickian example is going to be necessarily as brief and cursory as possible.  This is a singular subject which produced at least three full-length novels and more than eight thousand pages of type-written notes (which Dick called his “Exegesis”).  In February and March of 1974 Phil Dick had his impacted wisdom teeth removed and, on a particular afternoon, the pharmacy delivered his pain medication.  The delivery girl who came to his house wore an ichthys necklace.  Dick asked her what it meant and when she told him is was a symbol used by early Christians Dick saw sunlight glint off the pendant and, “In that instant … I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘loss of forgetfulness.’ I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me.”  More than that, “as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome” (Dick).  In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, none of which he ever claimed to completely understand nor objectively define.  He did, however, spend the last eight years of his life writing about those experiences, examining what could possibly produce such events, and, in context to my own personal examination of deciphering what I encounter, what does it all mean?

    On one hand, Dick had been a heavy user of amphetamines in the years previous to his “mystical experience” and that fact alone was not lost upon him when he sought to attribute source and cause to his visions.  Likewise, he often considered the possibilities of a stroke or mental aberration as the cause.  But he never amassed the dogma in his own mental quest for meaning to categorically dismiss any possibility he could coherently structure, including some more outlandish theories such as a Teslaesque Soviet mind control beam or influence from an extraterrestrial satellite.

    Given Phil Dick’s wide range of meanings he deciphered from a singular event—from the mundane to the phantastic—who am I to say that the event was merely a side effect of pain and prescription medication, or that Dick is a liar, or that it never happened at all.  My mind is open to the possibility that something can occur for which I have no framework to define it.

    Contrasting this delightful somewhat existential quagmire, is the January 13, 2010 edition of the comic strip XKCD by Randall Munroe titled “Self Description.”  From its title, wearing my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, I can deduce a self-awareness of post-modernism which demonstrates a certain incredulity to its own meta-narrative.  Which might mean that it knows it is going to be playing with the conventions of self-awareness and the regressive inversion of its audience knowing that is aware of itself, or so on down the infinite hall of mirrors casting reflections upon themselves:

    One of the traits this web-comic has, is a meta-text (also called an alt-text or, ironically, a hyper-text) that is displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over the illustration.  This text usually takes the form of a sarcastic comment about the subtext of the strip, or otherwise givens meaning or complication to what is shown.  In this particular strip, the alt-text tells us, “the contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters” (Monroe).  Here then we have a comic strip that seems to be doing nothing more than making a rather facile comment upon its own contents, and offers little to suggestion anything other than that.  Being an ideological omnivore, I can place attributions on it much like a Rorschach ink blot.  These attributions are highly dependent on if I have donned my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, or I have just awakened and taken to the internet before my second cup of coffee in the morning, or how much cognitive dissidence I wish to express.  This is a strip which seems to provide no deeper meaning, but that could be precisely why it may offer some because, in life, literature, art, politics, what-have-you, initial appearances are rarely what they seem, and my brain is wired to instinctively wonder what else might be lurking there just below the surface.

    Not to meander off-topic—nor add filler to this self-aware personal narrative—but like the meaning sought for in any given text, the meaning of “meaning” is not as simple as one might think.  In looking up the word in the OED, the first definition encountered is: “The action of MEAN v.2; moaning, lamentation,” which refers to “a. To complain of or lament (something); to lament for (a dead person).  b. To pity or comfort.”  So the seemingly most obvious meaning of “meaning” is not the initial meaning at all.

   This alliterative conundrum may seem to be a farcical endeavor, but it is purposefully used here to illustrate the point being made.  That is, the meaning is pretty much anything is rarely, if ever, what is encountered on its surface, its face-shown-to-the-world level of intention.  And whatever it was that the author (that is, the creator or creators) of a particular text intending its meaning to be, there are certainly many other—and equally valid—meaning which can be deciphered from that text.  What meaning the (reader/viewer/listener) audience of a work thinks and takes from it is just as valid as what the creator of the work intended, just as the meaning of the same text for the same individual may be different in accordance to when and how they re-encounter or re-examine it at another time.

Works Cited

Philip K. Dick. "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)." In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995, Print.

─. In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 1991. Print.
Munroe, Randall. "Self-Description." XKCD 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Jan. 2010.

Watterson, Bill. Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. Kansas City. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1992. Print.


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