.-__.
.-|…
….Africa’s third longest. ;-_) World’s fifth largest island..
…Eμὲν οὖν οὕτως ἔχειν.–.-`.–.\καὶ δεῖ πιστεύειν: ἃ δὲ lard
stδύνειν τὸν ἥλιον ἐν.–.-` ;-_- –\νίτιδι καὶμετὰ ψόφουilla
oy σίζοντος discharg.–.-` ;-_.–._.( λάγους κατὰ σβέσιν se
barr– .τοῖς πολλο .–.-` ;-_.–.- -. \ μοίως εἴρηκεν, está
iendo las migaja .–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘) a cruzar la acera.
ταῦτα μὲν οὖ.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘-|C i rιν ἐξ ἀκοῆς
ῖς καὶ χυδαίz – ————————-bsairν δεσμὸν ε
….ὶ τὰ σύμπg…………………………………G rτοῦ πελάγους
…ν ὑπάρχονG…………………………………..G i rθαλαττίῳ ἐο
Ποσειδ e……………………………………..zv aσίζοντος

Hippocrates, Aphorisms 22 / English:

νοσημάτων ὁκόσων ἀρχομένων, ἢν χολὴ μέλαινα ἢ ἄνω ἢ κάτω ὑπέλθῃ, θανάσιμον.

What is bile again? According to wikipedia, it is composed of:

(97–98)% water, 0.7% bile salts, 0.2% bilirubin, 0.51% fats (cholesterol, fatty acids, and lecithin), and 200 meq/l inorganic salts. The two main pigments of bile are bilirubin, which is orange–yellow, and its oxidised form biliverdin, which is green. When mixed, they are responsible for the brown color of feces.

(No kidding orange and green do make brown.) Word is from Latin but beyond that obscure.

dévergondage d’esprit:

Dimier pensait que les grandes passions étaient la source du génie ! Je pense que c’est l’imagination seule, ou bien, ce qui revient au même, cette délicatesse d’organes qui fait voir là où les autres ne voient pas, et qui fait voir d’une façon différente. Je disais même que les grandes passions jointes à l’imagination conduisent le plus souvent au dévergondage d’esprit, et Dufresne dit une chose fort juste : que ce qui faisait l’homme extraordinaire était radicalement une manière tout à fait propre à lui de voir les choses. [*]

Genius is a way of seeing, not of passionate feeling, which latter more often leads to “devrondage.” Very interesting, from the same entry: “Je remarque maintenant que mon esprit n’est jamais plus excité à produire que quand il voit une médiocre production sur un sujet qui me convient.”

It’s easier to fix something that’s wrong that to envision, from scratch, something good — or the mediocre as an aid to imagination and seeing.

I did a doubletake on reading this in my Ives biography. Speaking of Yale, which Ives attended, Jan Swafford writes (pp. 105)–

“Tradition ruled college life, from the weird ratcheting Greek Cheer of the football stadium, taken from Aristophanes’ The Frogs (BREK KEK KEK KEK! KOAX! KOAX!), to the structure of student-run activities, to the ceremonies of Ivy Day and graduation.”

Joyce also quotes the Frogs’ cry on first or second page of Finnegans Wake. Could he have been thinking of Yale? (Ostrygods gaggin fishy gods…) From what I can gather from the Yale Daily News, the cheer began in the 1880’s and disappeared in the 1960’s. Ives entered Yale in 1894. Listen to this glowing account of his success there (Swafford pp.104):

Yet Ives blazed through Yale as one of the most visible and popular men on campus, finally to be singled out as one of the ‘geniuses’ of his class. In his grief and emptiness [on the recent death of his father] he directed himself outward rather than inward. The system of achieving campus success was Byzantine, but Charlie mastered it, made his connections, and sailed to glory. As he had before and would time and again in the future, he would, with little overt sign of ambition, percolate to the highest rank of whatever endeavor he involved himself in.

Note, however, that this success did not extend toward academics, and grade-wise Ives was a below-average student.

La pendule, sonnant minuit,
Ironiquement nous engage
À nous rappeler quel usage
Nous fîmes du jour qui s’enfuit:
— Aujourd’hui, date fatidique,
Vendredi, treize, nous avons,
Malgré tout ce que nous savons,
Mené le train d’un hérétique […]

Baudelaire, L’Examen de Minuit

The clock striking midnight
Ironically invites us
To call to mind what use we made
Of the day that is fleeing:
— Today, a fateful date,
Friday the thirteenth we have
In spite of everything we know
Lived the life of a heretic […]

Again, an issue I have with my shapes is that I want them to be like Kalligrams –words which, incapable of normalcy, are magnetized into arrangements– but feel stuck in the world (if not of designs) then of poems brut, which depend on their being, as it were, not their message for their force. Perhaps if I slapped a title on it, like “Receiver.” (Actually, that idea advances my thinking a little bit: because if this were more obviously a phone receiver then the implication is that what is coming out of the ear-end is “limbs of a horse” and what is going into the mouth end is also “limbs of a horse” — someone is saying, and another person repeating, the phrase “limbs of a horse” — which almost is something, evoking the conversation from which that phrase has been excerpted.)

.,…
.,…

…….a…O.,…..v v …………iR
.v v iR
..e a …..,,,,.v a v
hl……………..,,,,,a i
..Limbs. of the. horse
..e. c …………,,,,,.v a
.m h ……….,,,,,.i r
Bis .o. i v airvairBis
ournour. A. a Iournou
swin…ang…ines …………
ging..siron.. sand ……………
Maryof Egypthami ……………….
rrida bashitru Mar ………………..
gUAr dnnelS o-da …………………
ρ θ᾽258 259, (0) ……………….
ὕδ ((1))166(1);t ……………..
ατι 1545462it’s……………
λια (0)awhere Fsi………….
ρῷ 1we are but ………..
ῥέειnow, R but………
, ἀand whe A\ t…….
μw e ha ve b.……
6 φὶbeen fo Zr.
δὲ κfive ye .Aa
swin…ang…ines
..e a …..,,,,.v a v
hl……………..,,,,,a i
..Limbs. of the. horse
..e. c …………,,,,,.v a
.m h ……….,,,,,.i r
.o. i v airvair
.. A. a I

.,…
.,…

“Bear’s ears” “Bears, elks, deer.” Did “deer” sound different when you said “bears, elks, deer” than when you said “bears, elk, deer” sort of thing. Something confusing me (spinning the brain) “polished by ice” (actually planed by ice) — Aveolar: Aveoli were sockets, were the teeth’s sockets, and ‘n’ was (was it an ‘n’ that was?) an aveolar consonant. Tongue against them. “R” I pronounced strangely, an unusual pitch, an unnaturally long duration “r r r r r –” in fact, a falsetto then ‘s’ which he pronounced with such emphasis –“ess”– it sounded much like “hess”, (which, whence the aspiration?) and he repeated it several times in a whisper “hess hess hess” then said (falsetto again) “r r r r r –” Trying to “feel” which parts of his mouth he was using. Or trying not to feel but be aware of what he was feeling? Which, or which? Had he used his vocal chords or not (was the consonant ‘voiced’ or ‘unvoiced’?) Had this tongue touched any part of his mouth to form the sound –and which part? Had his lips met? Kind of shocking what went on with his body to make a vowel a consonant, he thought (that is, to make a vowel sound a consonant sound) though what he was doing was also a little more complex and weirder than that, not just changing the long ‘o’ to ‘r’ but elevating the pitch as he did so — elevating, too, his lips and chin as the pitch went up, so that his head was now in a howling-at-the-moon position (o — oo– or). “Doing things Aristophanes might not have deemed alright,” was how he put it. Idea occurring: that memorizing the poem has given him a “trapdoor to reality.” There could be no true experience of reality without this kind of familiarity and knowledge of some part of it. Idea growing rapidly confusing: “but what one knew was not the poem but was knowing.” One now perceived the world with “the crown of knowing and what it is to know” on one’s head, felt the nobility one needs to see what’s real? What gave a specialist such insight was not that the whole world was contained in the one thing he had made the subject of his study, but because he knew what was demanded in truly knowing something, knew what it was to truly know something, limits of knowledge and all? Anyway, for a brief while, the words of this poem seemed like bricks of a wall he was picking up and beyond which and through which he was seeing the real world. (Though the wall reformed, the bricks snapped back quickly and sternly in space.)

La Rochefoucauld [21] —

Those who are condemned to the scaffold sometimes affect a constancy and contempt of death which is in effect the fear of facing it. So that it might be said this constancy and contempt are to their minds what the bandage is to their eyes.

“Ceux qu’on condamne au supplice affectent quelquefois une constance et un mépris de la mort qui n’est en effet que la crainte de l’envisager. De sorte qu’on peut dire que cette constance et ce mépris sont à leur esprit ce que le bandeau est à leurs yeux.”

Starting to take a close look at this book (translation Michael Roloff). Here is the interesting first paragraph, with observations:

When Joseph Bloch, a construction worker who had been a well-known soccer goalie, reported for work that morning, he was told that he was fired. At least that was how he interpreted the fact that no one except the foreman looked up from his coffee break when he appeared at the door of the construction shack, where the workers happened to be at that moment, and Blck left the building site. Out on the street he raised his arm, but the car that drove past — even though Block hadn’t been hailing a cab– was not a cab. Then he heard the sound of brakes in front of him. Bloch looked around: behind him there was a cab; its driver started swearing. Blach turned around, got in, and told the driver to take him to the Naschmarkt.

First & Second Sentences

(a.) The narrator tells us, first sentence, Bloch “was told” he was fired — doesn’t say “he learned” or “suspected” he was fired, but that he “was told” as a statement of fact.

The narrator tells us, second sentence, this was at least how Bloch had “interpreted” the situation, in which, in fact, no one had “told” him anything.

It appears, then, that what Bloch merely infers he experiences as something actually said.

(b.) The fact that Bloch’s co-workers are taking a break implies they have already been working and that Bloch has arrived late for work.

(c.) For comparison, this is the first sentence of The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”

Final Four Sentences

In the paragraph’s final four sentences a lot happens in short order: (i) Bloch raises his arm as if to hail a cab, but the car moving past is not a cab and he had not been hailing one; (ii) he hears braking in front of him, looks around, and discovers behind him a cab with a swearing driver. (iii) Bloch turns around, gets in the cab, tells the driver to take him to the Naschmarkt.

Q: Why did Bloch raise his arm if he wasn’t hailing a cab?
Q: Why, hearing the sound of brakes in front of him, does Bloch look around behind him? (Is Bloch in the street?)
Q: Who is the cab driver swearing at? At the source of the braking sound? At Bloch?
Q: What are we to make of the fact that Bloch’s raising his arm — not to hail a cab– in the presence of a car that was not a cab — resulted in him stopping and getting into a cab?
Q: Is there any parallel with soccer here?

Inanimate whose:

The inanimate whose refers to the use in English of the relative pronoun whose with non-personal antecedents, as in: “That’s the car whose alarm keeps waking us up at night.” The construction is also known as the whose inanimate, non-personal whose, and neuter whose.

The use of the inanimate whose dates from the 15th century, but since the 18th century has drawn criticism from those who consider whose to be the genitive (possessive) only of the relative pronoun who and therefore believe it should be restricted to personal antecedents. Critics of inanimate whose prefer constructions such as those using of which the, which others find clumsy or overly formal.

Napping. Vaguely thought my feet were getting blown by a fan — it was the cat setting up around my feet. Occurred to me all experience was a variation on sleep, lighter and heavier — one runs in sleep, works in sleep (then suddenly I entered the heavier kind.)

m h …………… ……,,,,,.i r
o.. i ……………..,,,,,.vair
r… p………………… * *
d….. a……………* *
r……. p……….. * *
i………. e…… * *
h…………. r. * *
* * * * * * * *
y t g ……….……. lacia
B ……..…….…………….. ti
g…………….……..……………….G
G…………………….……………….G
e………………….……..……………..z
~……………………….………………!
…a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;pC
.d””; “”; “”; “”; B; “”; “”;bse
..“” type=”hidden” cl=“;
; “”;^bo.clamm O; ““; “”;r
..“geolocation-field”;
..n””; “value=”“> “”; “”;eieie
..t””; ““; “m aI l; “”….;
.o””; “”; “”; “”; G;” “; “”; E i
de””; “”; “; “”; N; “”; “”;da
……………………….la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;um>tombolo (x);
>s””; r”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;C
.la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; .””;
……la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; .””;
………..la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; .””;

What do my Shapes need? I’ve aspired from the beginning to make something like Apollinaire’s calligrams, — poetry with a visual element– but in the event it’s more the opposite — designs that incorporate text…. Not punning here when I say that what I appreciate in the Shape below is its texture, and think the way forward may be in doing more of that: more bold and italicized font, a greater diversity of font styles and sizes and perhaps colors, as well as text that means something along with the text that doesn’t, which also lends dimension, if not poetry.

……………………… ab

……………..usnt iEE bA… E i usnt iEE bA……………*
……………………… ab| B/……. ab
…………………………F e T….. A. a I
…………………………lacia..v v ………iR
…………………………..u h ha ……..,,,,,.v a v
………………………….r a al……………,,,,,a i
………………..,,,,,…..b v ta…………..,,,. A R I
………………………..o i w,e. c ………..,,,,,.v a
……………………d o e,,,…..m h ………….i r…
…………………..ytg.,,,,…o i v airvair\|\|/\\\?
some Factual 9.i v (0||\\\\//// some Factual
As i sertions |)\\\+]}))((/ / / ov Assertions
n recent br18.i v .. “‘””'”””””””””inrecent bri
efs o i v w. 1{)= ?“““`[[[““““ . >“`/efs wo
U o i vOLD /\\/\ \//\\ \– -\ \?? //?/// UOLD
NOTo i v … The See’r “““““tombolo` NOT
PAo iv …Y xhe See’er ““ l“““tombolo`ll PA.
o i v//////\\/\ \//\\ \– -\ \?? //?///
o i v/////{= ?“““[[[““““ . >“`/
o i v/////“‘””'”””””””””
o i v/////|)\\\+]}))((/ / /
o i v/////(0||\\\\////
o i v/////\|\|/\\\?
o i v/////UUm
o i v/////\/

…. B …A …M d..m
…. B …A …M d..o
…. B …A …M d..m
…. B …A …M d..‘
…. O …A …M d..s
J… X …A …M d..f
o… T …A …M d..r
G… R …A …M d..i
G… U …u …M d e
e… C …d …o o n
R… K …i …M g d ..
ar mad os armados The Se e’rThe See’rThe See’rT he See’rThe See’r
…a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;pC B
.d””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;bse
..e””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;eNol
l””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;rie
..a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;Gslm
..n; “”; “”;”crosswalk “”;eieie
..t””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;usnt
.o””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; E i
de””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;da
……………………….la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;um>tombolo (x);
>s””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;C
enfrentamientos armados —

An octopus is an aquatic creature, living in water. The octopus of Marianne Moore’s poem is a glacier, made of frozen water– which exists on top of a mountain.

That contrast –between what lives in, and what is made of, water– makes one especially aware of the poem’s mentions of the water in its various physical states, particularly when those states are juxtaposed or contrasted.

Some direct examples of that include the eleven eagles of the West which “hear the roar of ice and supervise the water…”, the “peculiar ponies” that drink “ice-water”, and the fact that “rain falls in the valleys while snow falls on the peak.” Less directly, a “sea of shifting snow dunes” suggests a beach’s sand dunes, like the pool “starred with anemones ” suggests one starred with anemones (or vice versa) — and so on. Such considerations argued for the creation of this list.

…

Water & Ice in An Octopus

…

… An Octopus/ of ice

… sea of shifting snow dunes

… made of glass that will bend… comprising twenty-eight ice fields…

… of an anemone starred pool

… stained transversely by iron where the water drips down

… merging in irregular patches in the middle of the lake

… eye fixed on a waterfall that never seems to fall

… black feet, eyes, nose, and horns, engraved on dazzling ice fields

… Big Snow Mountain is the home of a diversity of creatures

… the water ouzel / with ‘its passion for rapids and high-pressured falls‘/ building under the arch of some tiny Niagra

…used to the unegositic action of the glaciers/ and ‘several hours of frost every midsummer night.’

… they hear the roar of ice and supervise the water/ winding slowly through the cliffs

… among the boulders sunk in ripples and white water

… brought up on frosty grass and flowers/ and rapid draughts of ice-water.

… magnified in profile on the moss-beds like moonstones in the water;

… upon which moisture works its alchemy

… not practiced in adapting their intelligence to eagle-traps and snow-shoes

… it receives one under winds that ‘tear the snow to bits

… from the hard mountain ‘planed by ice and polished by the wind’

… rain falling in the valleys, and snow falling on the peak/ the glassy octopus symmetrically pointed

… in a curtain of powdered snow launched like a waterfall.

Question on my mind right now is the extent to which Moore differentiates between the glaciers of the mountain and the mountain itself — which of these is the octopus or does it not matter.

Below is a quick list of the animals, plants and rocks that occur in the poem (as well as the human element) –of which there are quite a few. (In fact, only the aside on the Greek’s idea of happiness seems to depart in an extended way from the natural world.)

One observation to make about this list is that the poem for the most part segregates the items of these categories: you don’t see many mentions of plants among mentions of animals, but rather you find here a passage with a focus on plants and here a passage with a focus on minerals. (Yet that can’t be said without qualification: the bear’s dens are “concealed in a confusion” of minerals, the spotted ponies are “hard to discern” among plants, the eagles are “perched upon” lava and pummice.)

Plants, Animals, Minerals

(Kind of interesting: periwinkles and anemones can be considered either terrestrial plants or oceanic animals, which dual meaning fits very well with the context they occur in — though periwinkles, the flower, appear not to be native to the U.S.)

Animals: Octopus [x2], periwinkles, python, spider, anemone, bear (X2), elk, deer, wolf, goat (x2), duck, porcupine, rat, beaver, ant, antelope, nine-striped chimpmunk, water ouzel, white-tailed ptarmigan, eagle, snail, marmot (X2), pony-horse.

Plants: cyclamen, periwinkles, Anemone, Fir (X2), Larch, Spruce, Cypress, heather (x2), berry-bushes, forest (x3), alpine buckwheat, grass, flowers (x3), birch, fern, lily pad, avalanche lily, indian paint brushes, bear’s ears, kittentails, fungi, moss, rhododendron, leaves, unspecified trees (x3), rice, prunes, dates, raisins, tomatoes, twigs, bark, vines, branches (x2).

Rock, mineral, metal: [onyx] (x2), Manganese, iron, gold, silver, calcium, alabaster, topaz, tourmaline, amethyst, marble, jasper, agate, lava, pummice, chimney pot, cleaver, moraine, Moonstone.

Human element: “those who lived in hotels, but now live in the camps –who prefer to”, mountain guides evolved from trappers, businessmen (instructing ponies), The Greeks (x2), ‘those alive to the advantages of invigorating pleasures’, “odd oracles of cool official sarcasm” [really refers to signs not persons], Henry James.

From my Charles Ives biography (A Life with Music, Swafford), of Ives as a teenager: “He was partly ashamed for being an aritst, afraid other boys might call him sissy; he felt alien in an environment that rated almost anything else higher than artistic creativity […] Social dilemmas were not unusual for an American boy groing up an artist, then or later. Some of Ives’s solutions were common ones — lambasting sissies, playing sports, becoming profane and ‘manly’ in personality. This pattern turns up time and again in male American artists — in Hemmingway, Faulkner, Pollock, Carl Ruggles, and many others. At length Ives would arrive at a perverse view of dissonance as a token of manliness in music.”

Ives was skilled enough to be playing organ professionally in local churches at fourteen.

Probably obvious to anyone familiar with nature or Mt. Ranier (or perhaps just to any non-thick casual reader of the poem) but the poem’s mentions of “glass” refer to the glaciers on Mt. Ranier.

…”Composed of glass that bends, a much needed invention”
…”The glassy octopus, symmetrically pointed.”

The word glacier comes from French glace, meaning ice, though interestingly English “glass” does not come from glace but has a root meaning of shine. (The root meaning of French “glace” is cold, freezing.)

The other mention of glass in the poem, of which one may wonder in a broad fashion is “…the spotted ponies with glass eyes, brought up on frosty grass and flowers and rapid draughts of ice water.”

We are told that the spotted ponies can climb the mountain, so (if the mountain can be equated with the poem itself, and climbing the mountain with understanding the poem) one imaginative reading would be that these “glass eyes” are spectacles and that these ponies are readers of a special sort.

What I’m interested in in these Octopus ‘lists’: does Moore gravitate toward the same sounds, is there something about this arrangement of sounds that sound good. Broadly, what patterns of sound can be discovered?

General observation: most of these lists seem composed of at least one more item than is necessary; there’s a feeling of excess at play. If it were just “bears, elks, deer, wolves, and ducks” we’d lose nothing informationally (though, true to say, bears and goats occur elsewhere in the poem.) These lists intentionally go on a bit.

“bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats, and ducks”

At a glance — 6 one-syllable items in list, conjunction. Total syllables: 7. Dominant vowel (as a letter): e. Dominant vowel (as a sound): none, though one side of the line seems weighted toward ‘-air’ type sounds (bear, deer) and the other toward ‘uh’ type sounds (wolves, ducks). Dominant consonant (letter): s, (l, k,r). (dominant consonant sound): “s” toggles between “s” and “z” –z,s,0,z,s,s. Note: “bears” and “deer” seem (roughly) to go together phonetically, as do “elks” and “ducks”, and “elks” and “wolves”, and even “ducks” and “wolves”, while “goats” is a bit of an outlier: there is no ‘g’, no ‘t’, no long ‘o’ anywhere else in the line… (Also, the ‘bear’ and ‘deer’ sounds together recall “bear’s ears” from a later list: “…Indian paint-brushes, bear’s ears and kittentails…”)

Noted: the plural of elk is elks or elk. So Moore perhaps made a choice there. (In fact, ‘elk’ seems the more standard: many elk, many elks; two elk, two elks.) While we’re at it: bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats, ducks. The popularity of bears is about as great in the singular.

Written phonetically: /bɛɹz/ /ɛlks/ /dɪɹ/ /ˈwʊlvz/ /ɡoʊts/ /ənd/ /dʌks/

These links lead to the type of sound for each phoneme, probably some mistakes here (since I don’t know anything about this): bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats, and ducks

Would like to take this list of consonant types and this of vowel types and use them to map these lists from An Octopus. What sort of correspondences might arise? Quite annoying though — can’t seem to get started with anything.