liquidbooks

12. Double Dactyls (2)

A few people have responded to a previous post on Double Dactyls and offered some poems! Here are two sweet ones, by people for whom this is their first “published” poem. (The first is a genuine Higgledy-piggledy as given in the rules laid out previously and describes a real incident with the author’s two-year-old grandson. The second one also describes a real incident (I think) about this other author’s two-year-old grandchild. How wonderfully strange.) In between these are two of my own Higgledy-piggledies. The first one keeps its spacing like that on this blog no matter how many times I try to re-format or re-type or re-paste it. Very strange. The second one is about the actress who played Harry Potter’s mother in the films.

Enjoy.

—-

Pat-a-cake pat-a-cake
Victor Octavius
emptied the rain tank while
playing one day

Incomprehensibly
adults were angry at
life’s sweet wet lesson ex-
plored in that way

          (Kim Bowden-Kirby)

—-

Patty-cake patty-cake

Englebert Humperdinck

Worked his way up as a

Crooner of hearts

Extraordinarily

Keeping the Beatles’ hit

Strawberry Fields from the

Top of the charts.

          (Andrew Singer)

—-

Higgledy-piggledy
Geraldine Somerville
Gave Harry Potter his
Green eyes and all

Playing his mom until
Abracadabara
He disappeared in a
Hole in the wall.

          (Andrew Singer)

—-

Huffing and puffing, the

wolf blows the house down and

two-year-old Lua is

wide-eyed and thrilled.

Slides off the sofa to

run find her mama to

share the excitement with

which she is filled.

Blowing and flailing she

blurts out the story with

“wolf,” “huff” and

“run” the three

 words that are clear –

then scurries back for the

rest of the story from

heart-melted Grandma who

pulls her quite near.

               (Nancy Branham Songer)

I was witness to a most unusual occurrence late last night. A large group of businessmen were going to execute Charles “Chassie” Owens for being an imposter of himself. They were all standing around in dark suits in a large, bare ground-floor apartment, with no furniture or heat, although it had a bit of lighting. They were upset because they felt this imposter had cheated them and learned a lot of their secrets in the process. In the inner room they had rigged the pantry between the kitchen and the hallway (it had doors opening both ways) into an execution chamber, with an improvised box of controls in the kitchen.

The incident had started because the “real” Charles Owens had been spotted somewhere and subsequently confirmed as real. What these businessmen did not know is that Chassie had been inadvertently “split” and that both of them were the real Charles Owens. So when Chassie’s boss (and good friend) heard they were going to execute him he collected the other Chassie and called me over and we sped to the site in his big black car. I was called in because I am regarded as something of an expert in such unusual cases.

When we walked into the apartment Babs Wilcox was in the big front room pacing and smoking a cigarette. He’s a relatively short man and had obviously been sweating in his suit and when he did not stop for the usual pleasantries of greeting I could see he was quite agitated by what was going on. He just kept pacing and smoking, trying to take in that another Charles was crossing the room, aware only that it was a serious challenge to the sense of normal reality among the assembled group.

As we entered near the kitchen and the leaders in the group saw the other Charles, their first impulse was to feel confirmed in their judgment. They led the first Chassie into the execution room and closed the doors on him. One of them was eager to work the controls they’d set up and kill him. But Chassie’s boss opened the pantry door again and stepped right in, taking Chassie by the elbow and leading him out, something for which Chassie was greatly relieved (although he didn’t much show it). “Charles!” exclaimed his boss in a grand friendly tone, “What are they doing with you?” Even at a first glance I could also easily see this was the real Charles.

The leader of the businessmen was perturbed but open to discussing things. “So this is the real Charles?” he said. We explained how the split had occurred but he was still dubious. “Let’s give him a test,” he said.

So they tested the Chassie they’d been holding while the other one and the rest of us stood by. On relevant business matters of course he was flawless. But this did nothing to convince them – in fact they had already come to regard his having this extensive knowledge as part of the problem. After considering Chassie’s classical education they decided to test him also on Greek and Latin.

This is the result of his test on ancient Greek. {Insert small scroll here.} They had him write it with pencil on a strip of paper wrapped around a hard nearly-cylindrical metal cone. You can see he was under pressure and got some of the citations wrong, as well as a couple of declensions. In the Latin test (which I don’t have here) he did much better, failing only to recall verbatim one longer quote from Cicero.

In the end they accepted that this second Chassie was authentic and dropped the whole matter. They let him go.

So let’s get right down to some basic rhythm.

For anyone who wants to try a fun but challenging short poetic exercise there is a form called the Jiggery Pokery or Higgledy-piggledy or Double Dactyl. They are rhyming, making fun or serious commentary based always on someone’s name that is a double dactyl. The form was popularized by Anthony Hecht and John Hollander and they were very good at it. There are few names that are perfect double dactyls so the form is quite limiting even though it seems easy. They are usually very erudite. Here are a few examples:

Higgledy-piggledy,
Ditters von Dittersdorf
Hoped that his symphonies
Really would please;

Caconomasia
Ruined him, though, with a
Name that resembled some
Nervous disease.

         (John Hollander)

—-

Patty-cake, patty-cake,
Marcus Antonius
What do you think of the
African Queen?

Gubernatorial
Duties require my
Presence in Egypt. Ya
Know what I mean?

         (Paul Pascal)

—-


Patty-cake, patty-cake
Jupiter Pluvius
Antediluvian
Rain-making chap,

Showered his masculine
Potentialities
All over Danae’s
Succulent lap.

         (Anthony Hecht)

—-

Higgledy-piggledy
Judas Iscariot,
Cloven of palate, of
Voice insecure,

Mumbler and lisper, was
Hypocoristically
Known to his buddies as
“Jude, the Obscure.”

         (Anthony Hecht)

—-

Higgledy-piggledy
Pico Mirandola
In the Academy
Works with a will,

With what a verve he gets
Neoplatonical
Since a philanthropist’s
Footing the bill!

         (Christopher Wallace-Crabbe)

—-

Higgledy-piggledy
Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Asked “How does Washington
Do without you?”

Answered, “It suffers from
Counterintelligence,
High on consensus, but
Low on I.Q.”

         (F. William Seaman)

—-

Higgledy-piggledy
Richard Plantagenet
Sailed off for France, full of
Oedipal scorn:

“Erotogenesis
Can’t be all mythic, if
Mother still makes it with
Bertrand de Born.”

         (John Hollander)

——

Auden worked a Double Dactyl into the chorus of a commissioned song he once made called “Moralities” based on a text from Aesop:

Jiggery-Pokery,
Jove, you’ve insulted the
Feelings of every
Sensitive frog:
What we demand is a
Plenipotentiary
Sovereign, not an in-
-animate log.

Hecht and Hollander made a rule that no one can ever repeat a name a second time in a different Double Dactyl; once someone writes one about someone that name becomes off limits to all future writers. Technically therefore the form has been declared “closed” since it is very hard to find historical figures with double-dactylic names. However it is possible to play a bit e.g. by using someone’s title and name, or a company name etc. Notice on this basis that Auden cheated in his. Plus of course I’m not telling you which names have all been used so you can’t reasonably be bound not to repeat them. Remarkably for a seemingly easy and comic form some very informed and intelligent commentary has typically been packed into these little poems – very different from the purely “low” comic effect of the limerick. If you try one remember the point is to stay faithful to the dactyl rhythm as demonstrated in the examples above. It’s a great way to focus on rhythm in language.

Oh there’s one more rule: In addition to the first stanza rhyming with the second one, the first or second line of the second stanza must be composed entirely of one single double-dactylic word! If anyone tries one do please post it to me!

The previous post discussed the obvious, that the Internet enables tremendous cultural growth, change, and transformation. Among the questions I received about this, one friend wondered whether this represents an advance toward a new culture, or if it just enables people to strengthen their existing cultural patterns and behavior. The Internet is directed toward sharing among cultures – giving them great resources and models for overcoming some traditional difficulties – and yes at some point along this process a new culture will be seen to emerge. We can look at a comparable paradigm in the bricks-and-mortar world of cultures to see the shape of the challenge more clearly. Let’s examine briefly the possible emergence of a shared culture in the European Union.

In Europe, culture is most prized, and bureaucrats are always trying to push this process along. 2008 was designated as the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, and 2010 is the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures. From a socio-political viewpoint, the European Union certainly takes culture seriously: the EU’s Culture programme (2007-2013) has a budget of €400 million for projects and initiatives “to celebrate Europe’s diverse cultures and enhance appreciation of our shared cultural heritage.” We must begrudge the EU its bureaucratic double-speak when it comes to such a noble endeavour: the EU Culture programme “will help construct a shared European cultural space by developing cross-border co-operation between cultural creators, players and institutions across Europe… For the achievement of these objectives, the programme supports three strands of activities: cultural actions; European-level cultural bodies; and analysis and dissemination activities.”

Buried somewhere in those hundreds of millions of euros are two strategic recognitions. Firstly, the EU acknowledges an idea – persuasively and elegantly supported by such scholars as Joseph Campbell, James Frazer and Robert Graves – that Europe has something that smacks of a shared Ur-culture in its distant past. So certain EU cultural initiatives are gently striving to strengthen conditions for this echo of unity – real or imagined – to be fleshed out again, while strongly protecting the great cultural diversity present across today’s European map, as a basis for a future European identity. Secondly, the EU is banking on culture to foster stronger mutual regard, via cross-border exploration and celebration, to bring closer in spirit formerly antagonistic neighbors, minority populations and labor immigrants. 

As we’ve already mentioned, we can trace back the origin of the concept of culture to the Latin cultura pp. of colere, to tend, guard, and till – i.e. to cultivate. In the case of the EU, as we remove the artificial borders between European countries and unify the agriculture, it again becomes natural to regard these lands as contiguous – i.e. as belonging together, in rhythm and fate, in a single shared “cultivation.” 

Now just as no one – or almost no one – is suggesting a return to a Europe of migrating tribes, nor is it practicable or desirable to hearken back to medieval superstition in our methods of cultivation. Progress is forward – and the European-level of organization to which we have arrived is the culmination of great advances toward harmonizing our often at-best fragmented paradigms of previous times, i.e. building on the partial fiction, thus validating it, that Europeans belong together culturally. Just as it is a step forward to loosen and uproot the increasingly unnecessary boundary fences of our nation-states, so too can Europeans look forward to the essentially healing role which culture holds in unifying lands and lives. It is not just the soil which becomes contiguous rather than fragmented in the new Europe, but now too ourselves.

This is all to the good of course. What is missing from this is any spark of vision which might make this emotionally important and beautiful to an average citizen. One can argue that such vision is unnecessary, that people needn’t know how they are being nudged together by shrewd continental cultural policy. And perhaps this is politically expedient as well, given certain nations’ traditionally strong sensitivity to cultural uniqueness and autonomy. Yet at some stage in its progress, this process will give way in the face of a brilliant cultural figure or movement, some new narrative which galvanizes Europe and forges identity anew at the continental level.

Such was the state of the US in the early 1800s, barely out of its loosely confederated stage, when Alexis de Tocqueville brilliantly observed that the US did not yet have a culture of its own  – that its output of arts and literature was as yet derivative of European culture merely – and that it would only really take off when a narrative voice came along able to express its new and unique grandeur. This prediction was fulfilled soon after when Walt Whitman created a uniquely American poetry, liberating the constricted line to a length and vigor that matched the untrammeled landscape and promise of the New World, a tradition followed ever since in the improvisational jazz line, the long unbroken breath-line of beat and spoken-word poets, and so on.

If we follow this line of reasoning we can gain clues and speculate about a galvanizing cultural narrative for Europe that may come in future based on the above. (I personally believe the poet W. H. Auden, who lived in England, Italy and Austria, was a great leap in this direction – but it’s a discussion for another day.)

So there is a process that is angling to make of the EU a single shared culture by using incentives to attract matters along toward harmonization. And we can see a comparable process just starting to unfold globally of which the Internet is laying down the lines and making the emergence of a shared culture possible.

There are two ways that cultures can be induced to change, i.e. two dimensions on which to influence people: that of their desires and that of their values. Note that desire as I’m using it here is not in itself either good or bad; it can be a desire for self-improvement, for safety of one’s family, for winning in a healthy competition. And even when the initial personal desire is “bad”, in the sense of servicing a negative impulse, the aggregate change that manipulating it brings about may not be. Thus one strong technique of cultural change – and one that we see succeeding massively in these years – comes from innovation. Give people something new that they want en masse and you effect cultural change.

The example sine qua non of this in our age is that of the Internet. The advent of the world wide web is the key enabler of cultural change of our lifetimes. It has achieved this by channeling people’s desires, and hence their strategies for fulfilling them, into new directions that make for a more stable new structure of interaction at a higher level. There are concomitant risks; the situation remains dynamic, and yet it has succeeded at its primary task. This new idea of interconnecting and interacting freely without some of the old imposed societal limits, and without national, ethnic or political borders, has satisfied people’s great needs for expanding their energies outward, something that the age was ripe for. The key concept here is that of updating the social contract. A new social contract that forms the basis of a healthy society has been enabled by a technological advancement, we all saw it as desirable, and we have flocked to it and co-created this new shared culture nearly overnight.

The very conversation we are having now is thanks to this. Many bloggers may feel intellectually or socially isolated in their local communities or cultures. Yet the innovation of the internet has enabled us to bypass our old barriers to this and meet here. It is simply astonishing.

Note that in this case even “bad” impulses – desire for anonymity to let off steam, lusting after porn, etc. – regardless of their negative effects on the individuals involved (and I don’t mean to minimize this, only to make a different point), these impulses have allowed a tremendous release outward of energies that as individuals had previously kept us isolated within our cultures. This has done more to cleave the way, laying down new channels of globalized interaction that form the real core of our future world, than anything else that has ever happened. I believe owing to millennial tensions and our noble path of evolution as a species that we were on the brink of exploding in our cultures when this happened.

There’s all sorts of things people can argue about here; I’m oversimplifying to make a point. The point is that cultural change can occur in a positive and, in the aggregate, a rational manner by innovating outside of the old cultural models to meet people’s actual needs and sleeve people toward a new social contract that is a better fit all around. The needs that are met may be new needs. They may be needs we didn’t know we had. It may be a consequence of our advancement that we have these new needs, and this is why the old boxes of culture, even relatively healthy cultures, may not be adequately recognizing and meeting them.

The example of the Internet shows that such cultural change can and does happen – is happening – on a staggering scale without coercion and without rhetoric – and even sometimes, dare I say it, without suffering. It is the resplendent result of right ideas rightly implemented.

What else is Lawrence doing with his descriptive passages?

One more thing to notice in the passage quoted in the previous post is how essential poetry is in Lawrence’s description. I mean here firstly the length of the phrases and how they accumulate and resolve rhythmically (say it out loud), and the repetition (“down” is there five times in that second sentence, emphasizing the movement), and the internal rhyming and off-rhyming. See how he plays the Ls and long Is in shallow-valley-wide-bowl-sky, then later adds the /ed/ sound of thread – and then reprises and condenses these sounds more precisely all together in the phrase “the wide, shallow bed of the valley”. In fact, he is doing the same thing poetically with these vowel and consonant sounds that he sometimes does prosaically with the rambling out of descriptive words such as “rocked” and “hoarse” as noted in the previous post: first he blurts them out as fast as it occurs to him in a spontaneous stream of creativity, later refining them and saying them again so we can understand them. In other words, his repetition of the vowel and consonant sounds – first wildly in the rhythm of the jazz phrase, then repeating them in a refined form, mirrors this same technique in the form itself.

And that particular long sentence of his with all that poetry doesn’t even end there. Look at where his relentlessly creative compositional mind goes from there: Lawrence ends the sentence by referencing Romantic poetry DIRECTLY – to a literate early-century audience who will get the joke: where he says “with rocks and stones innumerable, and not a tree” it is a direct reference to Wordsworth’s poem, “A slumber did my spirit seal” (1799), which ends with the line, “With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

What is so surprising and useful in the passage I quoted – and which is more apparent from the larger context of his novellas – is how Lawrence is thinking deeply into the situation of the intercultural dilemma and how his descriptive prose carries this work. World War I is ending in this story, and his characters are a British soldier and a German woman. So it is perfectly apropos when he quotes Wordsworth, an English poet writing in Germany, about the death of a woman. And behind Lawrence’s reference to the Wordsworth elegy (and the further applicability of the reference since there is in fact a woman in the story who had just died – the soldier’s wife) one also has the impression, as these characters are now trekking in Austria, where they both feel somewhat strangely displaced, that when Lawrence references this elegy it is drawing a poetic parallel from Wordsworth’s romantic death of a woman to now the “death” of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that is weighing on Lawrence’s mind, as an empire about to be torn apart by the treaty ending WWI – and a consideration of the first glimmers of the contours of the post-War world.

Many, perhaps most, of the great Anglo-American writers from Lawrence’s generation and the next, who lived through the two World Wars, were exiles and expatriates themselves. And I think the exile writer has more of relevance to tell us than almost anyone, for they faced and considered issues deeply, personally, in their prose that now today form much of the problem set confronting us in our rapidly inter-connecting world. My point here is that it is not just the descriptive power that astonishes in Lawrence here, it is the wisdom that it is in service to.

This kind of thinking-out in literature is a potential vein of great richness for us if we are to consider deeply the current process of cultural transformation to a globally-interconnected world. This is one of the authentically whole tasks we can adopt as creative writers of various cultures imbued with the knowledge that we are all now growing together. By carrying on our already authentically-existing cultures, we can not only purify and replenish them and realize them anew – a task of great writers of any age – but also now to be aware of the new task of moving forward our various cultures in increasing harmony as we progress towards each other.

This is something perhaps Lawrence and the inter-war generation was not quite ready for. Perhaps now we are advancing this story within our individual cultures. As we grow together it becomes the story of the world.

Whatever else you may think of him, D. H. Lawrence was inspired at describing landscape. And as I’d like to show in this and the next post, his particular choices of descriptive terms do an amazing amount of additional work besides in furthering the action of his stories and exploring their cultural context.

Following are two paragraphs from his novella, The Captain’s Doll. The scene comes after a long unpleasant climb when the couple comes at last to the foot of a glacier in the Austrian alps. Here he uses repetition of words and accumulation of detail to reproduce the overwhelming feeling of the landscape and the rhythm of the water. Notice especially the second sentence.

“So they trudged on round the bluff, and then in front of them saw what is always, always wonderful, one of those shallow, upper valleys, naked, where the first waters are rocked. A flat, shallow, utterly desolate valley, wide as a wide bowl under the sky, with rock slopes and grey stone-slides and precipices all round, and the zig-zag of snow-stripes and ice-roots descending, and then rivers, streams and rivers rushing from many points downwards, down out of the ice-roots and the snow dagger-points, waters rushing in newly-liberated frenzy downwards, down in waterfalls and cascades and threads, down into the wide, shallow bed of the valley, strewn with rocks and stones innumerable, and not a tree, not a visible bush.

“Only, of course, two hotels or restaurant places. But these no more than low, sprawling, peasant-looking places lost among the stones, with stones on their roofs so that they seemed just a part of the valley bed. There was the valley, dotted with rock and rolled-down stone, and these two house-places, and woven with innumerable new waters, and one hoarse stone-tracked river in the desert, and the thin road-track winding along the desolate flat, past first one house, then the other, over one stream, then another, on to the far rock-face above which the glacier seemed to loll like some awful great tongue put out.”

Oddly enough, of all things, it’s the word “or” after the start of the second paragraph that seals the deal for me. Here Lawrence gives us the undeniably authentic observation that the observer, on arriving up from a strenuous climb onto this scene, weighs mentally at first sight whether the two buildings he finds there, these two “house-places” as he calls them later, are hotels or restaurants.  Magnificent.

Lawrence is great at landscapes it’s true – but not perfect. He doesn’t refine his rambling passages with total precision. Rather, he lays down first, then refines later, but keeps both versions for us to read. For example, in the passage I quoted, who can understand what he means by “…where the first waters are rocked”? He explains it a page later, when he re-describes the upper valley more clearly as “the first rocking cradle of early water”. And who can process “one hoarse, stone-tracked river” on a first reading without vaguely glitching over the word “hoarse” as some kind of half-processed mistake.

The image is precise: notice that the character is scanning at that moment first the valley they’ve arrived to, then continuing his gaze sweeping upward to the glacier at last. But the fact that “hoarse” is therefore a perceived sound of the distant valley river is hard to catch, until again in a later page he repeats the sound for the water still distant above him, as “the hoarse water crying its birth cry, rushing down.”

It seems Lawrence is himself just discovering his descriptive ideas the first time they appear in the passage, then explaining them better to us later on, in one continuous breathless rapid composition – setting down and then refining. In the next post we can look at some surprising things he is doing with this passage culturally.