About my work

John Bjarne Grover

I here sum up the contents of my literary work ('Collected works' vols.1-4) - and show whereto it points. See the end of the article for links to other articles on this website with further information on my work

The four volumes of my collected works are now available in PDF format.

I wrote my first poem in 1981 when I was in Rome and had acquired a 'tessera' (season-ticket) like the other romans. I continued writing poetry now and then but only occasional poems while studying and working-for-money. The main work I started in 1992 and have been continueing since then - untill I can consider at least one major part of it as completed with the book 'Rosens triangel' in 2018 (and the following theoretic 'Fatima and the fundamental theorem in linguistics'). The series of works looks like this:

1994-1995         'The Dreamer' - prose diary novel, (appr 600 p.)
1995-1997         'A waist of time' - PhD dissertation (including a historic study from 1992) (appr.600 p.)
1998-1999         'Time and the sonnet' - prose book on poetic matters (appr. 120 p.)
1997-2008         'The Endmorgan Quartet' - non-metric poetry, 16 books (appr. 1900 p.)
2008-2010         'POLAKK English Bloggi' - poetry, the blue metre (appr 400 p.)
2010-2012         'My mention e Anna' - poetry, the red metre (appr 300 p.)
2010-2012         'Poetic semiosis' - prose studies on my own poetry (appr. 600 p.)
2010-2015         'Der Dornenstrauch' - poetry, the yellow metre (appr. 500 p.)
2016-2016         'Stillhetens åndedrag' - poetry, the white metre (appr.100 p.)
2014-2018         'SNEEFT COEIL' - poetry in german language (168 p.) - see below
2018-2018         'Rosens triangel' - poetry in norwegian language (147 p.) - see below

In addition I could mention the following work, although less interesting
1987-1988         A critical edition of Geirr Tveitt's 5th piano concerto
1987-1989         A computer-oriented description of music notation (appr. 300 p.)
1990-1992         A model for a non-discrete grammar (MA thesis) (appr. 100 p.)

The works (published here since 24 october 2022) are collected in the four volumes of my 'collected works' as follows:


Volume 1 = 1266 pages
1. The Dreamer (1994-1995) - a novel
2. POLAKK English Bloggi (2008-2010) - poetry in english language
3. My mention e Anna (2010-2012) - poetry/prose in english language

Volume 2 = 1881 pages
4. The Endmorgan Quartet (1997-2008) - 16 books of poetry in english language

Volume 3 = 1264 pages
5. A waist of time (1992-1997) - scientific prose
6. Poetic semiosis (2012-2013) - scientific prose

Volume 4 = 1311 pages
7. Der Dornenstrauch (2009-2015) - poetry in german language
8. SNEEFT COEIL (2014-2018) - poetry in german language
9. Stillhetens åndedrag (2016) - poetry in norwegian language with literal english translation
10. Rosens triangel (2018) - poetry in norwegian language with literal english translation
11. Fatima and the fundamental theorem of linguistics (2014-2019) - scientific prose

These four volumes are (2019) published in about 30 copies which are donated to mainly libraries. It is quite a lot of handwork to make these nearly 10 metres of books in the bookshelf - and I cannot continue producing them in this form for donating gratis to libraries - but hope that a publisher can take over the production on basis of a simple contract form described below.

I discuss the works in more detail:


1. The Dreamer

I conceive the diary novel to be about an envoy from Heaven who has been sent to Earth to write a report on the state of the art here - he stays for a few months in the region between two 'haunted spots' at Tåsen and Kringsjå in Oslo before he returns with his report - which is the book. In 'Poetic semiosis' I use a chapter (#15) for showing how the structure of the book relates to some fragments of the jewish Talmud Erubin (which also are used for The Endmorgan Quartet) in such a way that the antisemitic lid of culture that was put out by Hitler can be opened up again. The novel is 'not competitive' - it is a meta-form wherein the structure takes place in the interface of the reader and the text. The envoy arrives in the opening lines of the book:

26.6.94: Today's events: I was on my way back from town with the train, to go off at Kringsjå. Before we reached the station just before this, a young boy and his father stand close to me, the boy presses up against me in a sort of communicative way. He points out of the train window and says something to his father, who responds something (which I didn't notice), and who finally adds: "I wouldn't go to the other side of the rails if I were you". Then they both step out of the train... [etc]

The novel opens up in this way, and when it closes in the last lines (quoted in the following), it is in the interface to the reader - who cannot first decide whether the references copied from a book was in the author's home (in heaven?) before he left or in the library before he returns - the distance between these two alternatives are narrowed down untill the envoy disappears as a tiny black spot in heaven:

27.5.95: I went to the library, but copied a few references from a book before I left. I understood the mechanics now: Copying is to stretch the copy-right a little, since one pays to the wrong institution (the machine owner, not the author). Similarly, in libraries, there is an abundance of what-you-know, because they let people read the books without paying for it - that is, without giving credit to the authors. This is why this thobbing feeling may accompany copying, and why the same feeling may arise in libraries.
    I went to the woods again. I met somebody on the tram. I may write about it later.

The novel moves its history in this way and may perhaps be difficult to follow unless one takes it to be a meta story in the text. The narrator (report writer) soon after his arrival starts being haunted by strange car numbers and hears voices speaking to him - as if an alien intelligence (!) tried to get in contact with the human society. This narrative tension is Schlegel's 'arabesque' program in his 'Brief über den Roman' - suggesting that a theoretic element is essential: "Eine solche Theorie des Romans würde selbst ein Roman sein müssen, der jeden ewigen Ton der Fantasie fantastisch wiedergäbe, und das Chaos der Ritterwelt noch einmal verwirrte". Voices, visions, car numbers... There are some 1200 car numbers in the novel - the same number of cars as the number of ships in Homer's catalogue of ships in Iliad 2.


2. The Endmorgan Quartet = TEQ

The work consists of 16 books of poetry - a total of 1719 enumerated poems - written on the philosophical borderline to a metaphysical reality wherein each line - each inner poetic articulation, that is - is considered one step further from the subjective into a collective or rather universal knowledge-space. (For a more extensive account, see under the section "What is the poetics of 'The Endmorgan Quartet'?" approximately half way through the article Anomalism in a new esthetic space). Each such line is the writing down of a poetic articulation in the inner mind of the poet - who has postponed the writing untill it has been articulated by itself internally. If the poet had the choice of this or that, it would still have been too early to write it - it would have been historically dependent and conditioned - it is only when there is no choice left that the line comes by itself as an inner articulation which cannot be otherwise. In this way, the poet moves from the beginning of book 1 to the end of book 16 in a long dantean walk up towards the peak of the mountain of transfiguration, so to speak. It took 11 years to write it - from february 1997 to july 2008. The lines are (with very few exceptions) written in succession and each line is annotated with the date of writing. Only the titles in the work are not 'internal articulations' - they are generally seen in an inner view or vision.

The 16 books of poetry are considered the 16 poetic functions of time - that means that time is complex and composed of at least 16 sub-functions - and when each function exists in one local (book-internal) and one global (interrelating with the other 15 functions), there is a total of 32 such temporal functions. Function 14 is a good example - it concerns the temporality of distributional word semantics: If you take a word, say, 'guitar', and study its distribution in time across the 16 books, the 11 years, you will find that there are 4 occurrences - there is one on 3 november 1998, one on 1 january 1999, one on 14 january 2001 and one on 19 january 2002 - and the intervals between these occurrences are thereby 59, 744 and 370 days - which means 1173 days in total. It is the first interval which is most significant - take this 59 and divide it with the total of 1173 and multiply it with the number of poems in book 14, which is 207, and you get 59/1173 * 207 = 10.41. If you take this to mean poem #10, a poem of 4 lines in total, it turns out that each of the occurrences relate in their separate environments in ways which correspond to each corresponding line of poem 10:

Living

We know we [...].
It's a half an hour ago with discussion.    

                Civiliz
occurrence 1 (03.11.98) = pulpit in guitar, wolfseat in Canaan

occurrence 2 (01.01.99) = and his exquisite guitar is unbanishing.
occurrence 3 (14.01.01) = Giving him a guitar reading.

occurrence 4 (19.01.02) = triumphed guitar - cause I have won

This being the temporal web of distributional semantics, the corresponding distributional phonology is found in the other end of the book, in the mirror-symmetric point on the 'rainbow' - here the phonology to the word is found as poem #10 counted from the end, that is #198:

It's love

Die Verwendung has es um du.
Hotel
mit Fromm,
the life after [the Fall] will be microscoped.          
Das ist auch bis heute zugewesen.

                    Netto/Tuxin
G
(u)
I
T
A
A
(r)


Clearly this is an enormously strong linguistic theory on the form of language in historic time - it can be empirically tested on this closed corpus. (This is mentioned in this article on Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus' as a possible solution to a problem of his). It can be made even stronger by postulating that every interval satisfies the theory - that means also (59+744)/1173 * 207 = 141.7 - and although of course not every occurrence in the closed corpus can meet the theory with full exactitude (the theory will suggest that each use of a word in natural language updates its meaning from the corpus of use in historic time), the conclusion from the 50 or more words I have studied tells that the correlation is very good indeed. What is the local function? That is the rainbow form itself that arises from the redundancies in the human semiotic constitution under such complex circumstances - which can be shown to exist as parallel in many central works of poetry - in 'Poetic semiosis' chapter 23 I discuss in detail 5 examples from this 'rainbow' form in works by Celan, Ritsos, Mandelstam, Michelangelo and Weöres - who all of them had such works with that form - and now I notice the relevance of the poem of example 2, at point 166/207 = 4/5, for the second white stone I found, in 2016, for the 'white metre'. Clearly if all the 16 functions have such interweaving global functions, the result is a complex web which constitutes a complex historic time which even physicalist parametres will conform to. I have not studied many of the functions from my dantean walk in such detail - although there are some discussions in 'Poetic semiosis' - but have guessed that functions 1-4 concern the blue metre, 5-8 the red metre, 9-12 the yellow metre and 13-16 the white metre. For example, function 1 probably concerns etymologies, function 4 concerns political governance, function 6 concerns the constraints on knowledge in genetic relatedness among people, function 12 is the socalled 'revelation function', while function 14 has a 'referential semantic' function on gravitationally or ontologically real things - such as a 'guitar'. Function 16 is the socalled 'linebreak function' (see e.g. 'I Ching') which controls the duration in working memory (or the phonological loop) of one internal articulation in the step from subjective to universal knowledge-space - to be counted as one or two seconds, one or two heartbeats, depending on a linebreak function. This again has to do with the socalled fundamental theorem of linguistics as defined by me.

Added 12/3-2023: There are more detailed studies of these functions in this article. The discussion of Rembrandt outlines a theory on the global function 7. Search the same Rembrandt file for "the summer 2012" - the section mentioning four mirror symmetries with an example - another theory will suggest that the phenomenon of four mirror poems correspond to four types of function 12 - that is 12a, 12b, 12c, 12d. The article discusses Andrea del Sarto as a function 12a artist and Mathias Grünewald as a function 12d artist. Compare, for example, this del Sarto as function 12a with this screenshot excerpt from this Grünewald as function 12d in corresponding mirror poems (mentioned in this and that file). A good speculation (!) is that these four variants of function 12 (a,b,c,d) with corresponding mirror poems globally distributed also correspond to the four 'magic image' rotations discussed in the beginning of the article. It is noteworthy that the Grünewald excerpt is from only appr. one quadrant of the full artwork.

I made one premature edition of the 15 first books of the work in 2007 - before book 16 was completed. In 2007 I believed that I had started on a new work with book 16 - and used a 'linebreak' variant of book 5 which thereby runs in parallel with the sonnets of Rilke and Shakepeare (vol.3 'Poetic semiosis' chapter 19). After I had completed book 16 (and found the acoustic verification of it in the parallel with a recording of Bach and Bartok sonatas by Midori Goto and Robert McDonald), this linebreak version of book 5 was lifted over into the red metre book 'My mention e Anna'.

For samples from TEQ see the front page of this website where there also is a link to this article.

The 16 books of poetry in the completed 2008 version of 'The Endmorgan Quartet' (1881 pages) are thereby the following, in four parts:

Part 1: The Endmorgan Quartet
1. Hammerfest
2. The slades with the only turn
3. Cat-Rufus' earth
4. Cardiff/Harding

Part 2: Birds to Saladin
5. Yes, there is no need for any such attraction
6. Orphan and the angels
7. A sister of Toukhraud
8. Diplomadary and descendature

Part 3: A saga Hume
9. ...to be an emperor...
10. A deep ratch
11. Winter Princess
12. Lead lushions in a bowl

Part 4: Wine 2*
13. Has the next millenium praxis?
14. If you're going to København
15. Gentlemen
16. I tell you, Estunates



3. POLAKK English Bloggi = PEB

This 'blue metre' work consists of 365 'sonnets' (poems of 14 lines with sonnet-structure end rhymes) and a 366th leapyear poem was written in the immediate continuation of TEQ. This is also the only sensible explanation I can find to the highly interesting properties it has - that it was written from the outlook of that mountain of transfiguration which the 11 years of dantean walk had taken me - looking out over the landscape of historic time - which I thereby could describe as a 'reduced formalism' of the more general or abstract temporal qualities of TEQ. It seems to be the case that historic temporality on a larger scale can be read from the lines of the 365 sonnets - line 1 of PEB (that is, line 1 of poems 1,2,3...365) interprets TEQ function 1, line 2 interprets function 2... line 14 interprets function 14 (and if the blue metre in addition corresponds to functions 1-4, that tells of how the overall structure telescopes in and out in quarters). This means that line 4 should interpret the function of political governance - indeed that seems to be the case, with amazing precision. The most striking property of PEB is that this web of complex temporality makes it possible to date any integer text down to a precision of plus/minus 1 year - on basis of its semantic structure only. Although most people probably would be inclined to protest immediately - "that is not possible! how can the year of writing control the contents of a text?" - this nevertheless seems to be the case. I refer to the article on 'The blue metre' for details. (One could make the theory that the day of writing could control the contents of the prose text in my diary novel 'The Dreamer' - as suggested by the introductory "26.6.94: Today's events" - for the two horizontal and two vertical dots and the following coordinate system as the semiotic or 'logical' space attains form in the opening pages).

Clearly the semiotic and philosophical implications of this discovery will be immense and I believe that there is not any field of academic study that will not be dramatically revolutionized by it. Of course this can make the blue PEB (some 400 pages) a seller indeed - since it will not be enough with only knowing about the general principle - you must have the book at hand and look up the details every now and then to understand these mechanisms of time.

There is more about the blue metre in this article.


4. My mention e Anna

This 'red metre' has four parts: 1) TEQ book 5 in linebreak version (in the 2007 edition of TEQ it took the place of book 16 in the 2008 edition), 2) Caruso (poetry), 3) And hang under the Justcan keys (prose), 4) Labyrinth 101 (poetry). The three last are about the classic archetypes 2) man-on-wagon, 3) dog's paradox, and 4) the female archetype - which means that the linebreak version of TEQ book 5 = the fourth archetype. In 'Poetic semiosis' I have discussed in a few chapters how this is to be understood - the small man with the zigzag legs swirls around in the air like a disco globe or rather like the wheels of Ezekiel. The published form of the book should have the relevant archetype described in the beginning of the relevant part. In 'Poetic semiosis' chapter 19 there is a parallel exposition of the sonnets of Rilke (Orpheus) and of Shakespeare - which I think is very interesting indeed for understanding this fourth archetype of modernism since about 1923.


5. Der Dornenstrauch - DDS

The work is in four parts and contains 440 poems in german language. The relation between Moses and Rigveda can be seen to be a constituting factor. The composition of the work resembles the brass of a tuba or 'waldhorn':

Part 1 = 'Kinderhilfe' = the 'catalogue of mysteries' in 294 poems enumerated 1-187. It seems that many of the deepest mysteries of human existence can be traced to structural properties in the main heaven-pointing tract of this part. See e.g. this file for an example.

Part 2 = 'Unter Gesellschaft', 66 poems enumerated 1-64 plus pre- and post-word. This is the 'transcendent loop/coil'

Part 3 = 'Linien die prägen die Sterne über uns' - 'Aufgestellt in tiefem Staube' - 64 poems in the 'immanent loop/coil'

Part 4 = 'Die Schönheit der Welt', 16 poems that serve to insert the mysteries that have gone through the double coil into the historic reality of the society through this 'mouthpiece'

It was in the course of the work with the 2nd part that a wave of matter ex nihilo started, and the work with the 3rd part led to the formation of a white stone - a 'lapis philosophorum'. I went through a series of quite strange states of mind in this period and suffered from a general condition of 'total exhaustion'. The salt in my kitchen behaved very strangely - and seemed to produce water that rose even above the top level of a heap of salt I kept in a container - I fancied that this is how Noah must have felt in his ark. Did small flies encircle even his head - like planets around a sun in the universe? The classic 'lapis philosophorum' is allegedly composed of salt, mercury and incombustible sulphur, according to old alchemical tradition. Very strange it was, this period - as when the metaphysical mysteries took shape in the coil of physical reality.

Even if the 4 parts are very different types and have strong internal symmetries (in particular part 3 is a 'crystal' that led to the formation of the 'lapis'), there is nevertheless a mirror symmetry that branches the whole work through the first 214 poems in the lefthand side and the following 214 poems in the righthand side - with 12 poems at the end without part in this symmetry. I notice that these 214 elements seem to follow the classic chinese list of 214 radicals while the enumeration of part 1 into 187 elements rather follow the new radical list of 188 that has been developed since Mao or before. The first compilation of chinese radicals ran allegedly to 360, some centuries ago that was, and expectedly follow the 294+66 poems of part 1+2. There seem to be many such 'structural' mysteries of the work. The most impressive of these is the compilation of 'shifted loops' relative to Rigveda - see this article - which makes it possible to prove the relevance by checking a poem against 4 rigvedaen verses studied in sanskrit and then, on basis of this, guess the lexical contents of the verse in the 5th loop: This is what tells that the loops have relevance.

The work contains errors on all levels, orthographic, grammatical, lexical, narrative. See this file for examples. I did of course in the beginning feel uncomfortable with so many errors and 'blunders' and made one edition wherein I removed many or most of the errors - but this was a sad edition indeed and reminded me of the sculptor who had made his best exhibition ever but for fear of the society's envy he went around with cold feet and mutilated the noses of the marble busts in the night before the exhibition opened - but what an error that was! It seems that those aspects of the work which shed an explanatory light on the parallelisms of Moses and Rigveda are contained in precisely the errors (the 'thorns') that can be traced to a collocational occurrence with those parallels - and which thereby contain the entire political history of Europe throughout the last millenium. Could be this is a part of a 'revelational function' in the work.

It is a work on religious mysticism, and the mystically oriented reader can probably feel the invocation of the mystic sources beyond the catalogue of mysteries - and even the heat from the burning bush can be felt. I was reading part 3 while listening to chamber string and piano music of Schumann - if you are in the right mood you can hear how that piano sound attains ontological reality like a 'lapis philosophorum' stepping down from a spiritual reality in the other side of the universe.

I have associated the four parts of the work with music: Part 1: Bach's ultra-mystic 'Kunst der Fuge'. Part 2: Brahm's chamber music with clarinet - string quartet and particularly the quintet - with wooden 'ex nihilo' sound. Part 3: Schumann's chamber music, trios, quartet, quintet with strings and piano - I listened to the recording of the Beaux Arts Trio. Part 4: Händel's opus 1 violin + harpsichord sonatas - available in the cheap presentation box of Händel's music that has been around for a while (is the box a way of smuggling these sonatas out to the public?) - it is otherwise difficult to find recordings of these 'happy' sonatas (it was a bird who recommended the title to this part 4 for me) - he probably wrote just another one of them before supper.

There are also very interesting art-theoretic aspects of this part 3 relative to the work of Caravaggio - see the end of this file on that matter. See also the second of his Emmaus paintings - for the two titles to part 3 - the furrows in the woman's forehead and the pattern in the shadows at the table (cloth) edge underneath - like that shroud of Turin.

See also this file.

There seem to have been some problems of plagiarisms of this Dornenstrauch work of mine - see this file on this matter.


6. SNEEFT COEIL

is poems in german language written in the years 2014-2018. There are 8 chapters held in different styles - could be 'Acht Genres' could have been an undertitle. There are 142 poems and 168 pages in the book. Where 'Der Dornenstrauch' is diachronic, 'SNEEFT COEIL' is synchronic. My fundamental theorem tells that 'two and only two items can be the same across two different realities", which means that if one wants to reconstruct the original binarity (like quantum mechanics), one could think of the bifurcation dividing the 8 chapters in two between chapters 4 and 5, interpreting the four parts of the diachronic DDS. The book is otherwise just poetry, a good book one could perhaps call it. It has less grammatical errors than DDS and those errors which there are tend to be the very theme of the poem itself - in which case the error is a case of necessary poetic licence. See e.g. 'Halb offen stand die Tür' from chapter 4: "...entkam es ihre junge Kehle" should normally by rules of grammar be "...entkam es ihrer jungen Kehle", but clearly the odd form is precisely what the poem is about and can be considered a case of poetic licence - the error is the real theme of the poem, the detachment of the 'absolute' or 'arbitrary' signification.


7. Stillhetens åndedrag - Og lønn vi fikk avstanden fra

After the success with the formation of the lapis philosophorum in part 3 of 'Der Dornenstrauch' in german language, I wanted to find out if the 'experiment' could be repeated in another language and decided to try norwegian language on a comparable project which I started on 11 january 2016 and completed on 20 september 2016. See the file My new poetry book 2016 on the structure. Indeed the lapis took shape even this time - but now before the work was completed in contrast to the german version when it was after - and the resulting stone, this time of a pumice-stone substance or skeleton-bone-type matter, took on a form which could be recognized in the resulting poem #5. As for DDS part 3, there are two titles to this book: 'Stillhetens åndedrag' = 'The breathing of silence' and the subtitle 'Og lønn vi fikk avstanden fra' = 'And wages we got the distance from'. Part 3 of DDS has 64 poems reduced from a basis of originally 78 or 77,3 poems, and 'Stillhetens åndedrag' likewise has 64 poems but now reduced or 'collapsed' from an original 105 poems. I have concluded that it is the collapse which is the secret in the collapse of a 'theory' into a piece of matter. Just as the 64 poems of DDS part 3 had high relevance for the understanding of Caravaggio, so the 64 poems of 'Stillhetens åndedrag' has high relevance for the understanding of Vermeer by way of '6 features'. The norwegian book does not have the mystic feel of the german book - it has rather more 'gravity' where the german is 'levitating' on its electromagnetic pillow - but it has a high relevance in structural aspects of it - and with an altered enumeration by binary notation, the 64 poems in my white metre can be brought in very interesting harmony with the chinese 'I Ching' - the oldest known chinese work of literature - which perhaps even can be seen to contain the innermost secret of the chinese language, the graphic form of the signs - such as the blue metre PEB can be seen to contain the secret of the graphic form of the hebrew alphabet. There are even quite interesting aspects relative to the 'alphabet' of egyptian hieroglyphs such as listed by Gardiner in his grammar on page 27 - so there can be much to harvest of semiotic interest even from this work of mine. See the extended discussion in the article "Stillhetens åndedrag" - a few technical comments also on these matters of chinese and egyptian evidence for the high relevance of the poems with these structures and their origins in the 'inspired faith' of the writing.

The original 105 poems were written under the guidance of inspirational faith - the poem got a cue from nature, from the particularly 'inspired' light in a corona of a tree or in a passing bird or whatever - and I wrote out a poem of 3 stanzas on basis of this inspiration. Then the poet put the work aside untill the historic reality responded with a new cue of inspiration - a certain warm light in the horizon, a moon that called for description, whatever 'spoke' with poetic meaningfulness and was felt to be a response from nature and history to the work in progress. When 105 poems of 3 stanzas were completed in this manner - 3 of them had already 5 stanzas and the final 102 poems of 3 stanzas each were then collapsed into 61 poems of 5 stanzas each (plus the 3 = 64) by a certain mechanical procedure which I had discovered (by 'inspiration') just before I made the reduction - and it is the resulting structure which has high theoretic relevance also in parallel with ancient chinese and egyptian script. This tells of the work in the interface between subjective faith and collective 'theory' and how the ontological reality - as a collection of 'lapis philosophorums' with a certain 'gravity' - takes shape on that border between the subject and the collective reality. The book contributes to an understanding of the idea that the human consciousness arises in a meetingplace of many different realities - humans are specific in being able to combine them (hence logic and language) but are correspondingly limited in the understanding of each of them. Birds probably understand much more than we do of their reality - and humans cannot understand how a little bird can eat a few breadcrumbs and thereafter fly some hundreds or even thousands of kilometres across the ocean without putting foot on ground. Where do they get the energy from? In a human explanation, they probably receive their nourishment 'ex nihilo' while they are flying - but for a bird's ear this probably sounds like a clumsy and could be even amusing explanation. Could be this is why birds are associated with angels - and even can be taken to serve as winged proof that angels exist beyond the grasp of human reasoning. It can be the element of subjective faith in the composition of the book which opens for an understanding of these mysteries. The clue to the formation of the white stone is, as I see it, that the 105 poems were written totally without 'peeping' at the desired structure of the final 64 poems - they were written solely and exclusively in extension from the cues given by the inspirational suggestions from history and nature.

One of the most striking aspects of the book is what I call 'the fundamental theorem of linguistics' which emerges here in relation to the list of words that occur twice and only twice in the four last books (books 13-16) of 'The Endmorgan Quartet': If you take the list of such words and sort them alphabetically, you will find that there are 1344 and that these, when sorted per book, constitute references to the 1344 (!) lines of 'Stillhetens åndedrag' in such a way that each line can be seen to be a definition of the corresponding word. See e.g. poem #1 called #solens pike - including the title there are 21 lines and these can be seen to define the first 21 such alphabetized pair-words from TEQ book 13: above, absolutely, accused, afghan, age, ahead, airport, alcohol, allright, almost, america, american, animal, anne, answers, anyone, aoughh, år, aren, atsudi, attack. For poem #35 'Savonarolas tanke' the corresponding 21 words from book 14 are the following: starts, step, store, stupid, substance, suggesting, sum, survive, sweet, sword, symbol, taking, talking, tape, teacher, temperature, ten, therefore, third, thirty, though. The correlation is very good throughout the book - and must probably be considered an integral part of the socalled 'white metre'.

The essential observation is that the words which occur twice and only twice are alphabetically ordered for this fundamental theorem of linguistics - that is a principle of ordering = logic which gives structure to the human language and reality - that is, to consciousness. The word pairs straddle the different realities - two spoken words can be 'the same' but not three. The conclusion is that a white stone can slide across the border to ontological human reality from a location outside it in one singular reality - beyond the complex human reality - and exist outside this without being ontologically real for humans.

This also means that there are existences beyond the grasp pf human reason - and these play together in a metaphysical orchestra that make up for the religious and poetic mysteries of humans - those which come into the big tract of the tuba and go through the two coils of recognition before they reach articulation in historic time and reality at the mouthpiece of the yellow metre. Generally, it seems that ontological existence arises when a metaphysical theory collapses - that is when Judas loses his faith and slips out the door - and Jesus defines his Last Supper communion which some theorists say is the same as the formation of a white stone. Ontological being is the white metre of gravity and light arises from the collapse of the metaphysical theory.

In the summer 2017 I also worked out an alignment of 'Stillhetens åndedrag' with Luigi Nono's "Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima", a string quartet from 1979-80 in a recording of 1983 published in 1986. This relates also in a very interesting way to the alignment of Midori Goto's (and Robert McDonald's) recording of sonatas by Bach and Bartok relative to the 155 first poems of my TEQ book 16. See the article 'Luigi Nono and the syrian crisis' for details.

On 5 september 2018 I published another two works - 'SNEEFT COEIL' and 'Rosens triangel':


8. 'Rosens triangel' ('The rose's triangle')

is a book of 64 poems in norwegian language - with a postscript. The book contains also maximally literal english translations to the norwegian original. Where 'Stillhetens åndedrag' is about musical harmony in its most principled sense of it (via Nono's string quartet), this new book is about musical counterpoint in its most principled sense (via Schoenberg's 12-tone series). The book is divided into four parts for four catholic orders - Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite and Benedictine. The mystical marriage of St.Catherine of Siena is also an important theme. Where 'Stillhetens åndedrag' went in parallel with the words that occur twice and only twice (in alphabetic order) in the last four books of my 'The Endmorgan Quartet' (1997-2008), this new book with 768 lines goes in corresponding parallel with the 754 words that occur twice and only twice (in alphabetic order) in my 'POLAKK English Bloggi' - and thereby harmony and counterpoint meet in a sense which can be recognized perhaps even in the Fatima revelations of 1917. In vol.4 there is an enumeration that assigns each poem in backwards order to the poems of 'Stillhetens åndedrag', of much explanatory value. The 'harmony' of 'Stillhetens åndedrag' is collapse from 105 to 64 poems, while the 'counterpoint' of 'Rosens triangel' is expanded from 48 to 64 poems - the original 48 can be reconstructed by distributing the last quarter, poems 49-64, on the 48 first. In this way one reaches a series of poems that can be correlated also with the 48 verses in Acts chapter 10 - discussed in 'Fatima and the fundamental theorem of linguistics'. I wrote 'Rosens triangel' in Venice in july 2018. There are 147 pages in the book.


9. Fatima and the fundamental theorem of linguistics

I have now also completed volume 4 of my collected works. It contains the four poetry books mentioned above plus a theoretic part "Fatima and the fundamental theorem of linguistics" of 400 pages, wherein I tell how the books were written, how the lapis philosophorums developed and how the first relate to hieroglyphic and other scripts (as well as the oral space of articulation), an explication of the fundamental theorem which implies that in the 'act of creation', the spirit recognizes two metaphysical items from two different realities as one and the same, and since they are not the same, this makes the human realities distorted and redundant for which reason they have developed language in order to retain a 'computable' link to the original 'logical space'. Corollaries (and I do not discuss whether these apply to empirical or logical space) are 1) that logical order and semantic assignment are one and the same, and 2) that diachrony and synchrony (cp. the german works) are one and the same. Which of course they are not, but human language incorporates this in the channel of computation. However, even if the two are not the same, much can nevertheless be gained from studying the effects of the phenomenon of two and only two occurrences in a diachronic text: That is not the same as the two synchronic metaphysical items reduced to one, but it is something of relevance if the diachronic text is independent of any such interests. Vol.4 in its chapter 4 contains a study of such 'double-words' in all the 16 books of TEQ plus the blue PEB - and there is very much empirical data therein for studies of the metaphysical realm that will undergo a formalization towards a metaphysical logic - on basis of the postulated original properties of the two metaphysical items before they were reduced to one. The theme of the book is really the question whether the 1719 poems of TEQ can serve as a basis for such highly ethereal studies - and it is concluded that it probably can. It is this metaphysical logic - and there is probably still a long way to go before it is reached, considering the extreme difficulties in its construction - that can provide the basis for a communication with remote intelligences - without any involvement of terror-and-monkey-business. Chapter 5 contains a study of the most important literary forms that developed about a millenium ago - compared also with the structure of divine revelation in Acts chapter 10 - for an understanding of the principles of formal cognition in the collective historic consciousness in the 2nd millenium. Chapter 6 contains some 'evidence', among them s method for verifying the phonological form of standard cuneiform sumerian and a brief study of a computer glitsch that is quite impressive in its 'human semiotics'. It is like the second 'lapis philosophorum' which attained a material shape in conformity with the meanings of the words in a verse from the book 'Stillhetens åndedrag'. The extreme difficulties in the construction of the metaphysical logic consists in the phenomenon that the units of this logic will have to be in the form of postulated theoretic units which cannot in themselves be checked - but via postulated logical connections between these unknown but postulated metaphysical original logical items further postulated logical conclusions leading onto postulated reductions to new material items (for example 'ex nihilo') can be checked thereby, and the degree to which this new logic can be brought under control, the metaphysical reality can be constructed for a new 'transcendent' information technology. The examples I discuss and the large amount of empirical material which can be used for the construction of this logic are probably valuable for this work. The technical term for the property needed for a text to be of any value as empirical material for these studies will be that it' contains a divine revelation'. The cover text to my vol.4 is this: "This book discusses the theory that the author's poetic work 'The Endmorgan Quartet' contains a divine revelation - on background of the four books of poetry in the present volume and the author's own 'fundamental theorem of linguistics' - and hence that it can form the basis for the development of a logic over metaphysical constituents". This of course would mean a very substantial leap forwards for such logical studies.

After the completion of the volume and the handmaking of some 30 copies, I wrote three articles on Wittgenstein . The first and parts of the following two could perhaps be added to vol.4 if a publisher wants to publish it beyond these 30 copies, but it is doubtful whether the article adds much to the empirical evidence for my theory and data in vol.4.


The non-metric and the metric work

'The Endmorgan Quartet' is non-metric poetry going the long way up to the top of the mountain of transfiguration, or the mount of poetic enlightenment, and the four works of metric poetry, the four metres blue, red, yellow and white, are the long walk down again - through already known nature and with a certain gait. Somebody said that Plotinus came as high up on the mount of enlightenment as one can come - only the greatest wisdom he did not reach - that is to go down again. Petrarca has also written an 'Ascension of Mont Ventoux' which could explain what this meant, by the fresh evening air when arriving home again.

There are four metres in the collected works:

Blue metre = 'POLAKK English Bloggi', english language
Red metre = 'My mention e Anna', english language
Yellow metre = 'Der Dornenstrauch' + 'SNEEFT COEIL', in german language
White metre = 'Stillhetens åndedrag' + 'Rosens triangel', in norwegian language

The blue + red metre seem to play together in the concept of LABOUR (for creation of economic value) which then is taken to be in the sense of an approximation to a logical space. The question is where the authority to naming (word-formation) comes from - from humans-in-history or from a (quasi-)divine source. My own fundamental theorem postulates not an arbitrary signification but two different realities - otherwise it also entails the idea of a close affinity or even identity between diachrony and synchrony. My own linguistic theory postulates rather a historic guiding of signification while a semiotic quasi arbitrarity arises via the rainbow function - and this can be abstracted and lifted or 'compared' into a logical space. The global function 14 (with data from the entire TEQ) provides the distributional semantics on basis of distribution in historic time (diachrony), while the local function 14 (the structure of book 14 without relating to the rest of the books in TEQ) can be recognized in a 'logical space' (synchrony - cp. vol.3 chapter 23) - and the identity of these is what makes for the rational abstraction which it can be the aim of LABOUR to approximate in the interaction of blue and red metre. The blue metre measures language in historic time, in cycles of 1000 years, the scope of the collective historic consciousness, while the red measures it in cycles of 2 seconds, the subjective consciousness - and the interaction of these is what makes for the LABOUR - a contribution from the individual to the updating of the state of the collective.

If blue + red metres = labour for economic growth, what is yellow + white? The yellow is the synchrony with bifurcation into two different realities being the same as the diachrony with the bifurcation into two different languages (here hebrew plus sanskrit) in the historic origins. The white as harmony is the same bifurcation in the wrapover at poem #50 with the 'calibration' - when it comes around the globe which is the same as the counterpoint going the opposite way: Counterpoint means that one can think also backwards and upside down while writing the music, otherwise it is not possible to make it - like poetic rhyme is not really possible: If you want to say something, it is an amazing coincidence if it comes to rhyme. That is - unless there is a phonological logic guiding what you want to say.

The conclusion is that the yellow and white meet in the phenomenon of linebreak like blue and red in labour. Linebreak is the characteristic of TEQ book 5 and 16 (see above). In 'Stillhetens åndedrag' there is mention (poem 37 stanza 4) of 'vertsekolltiden' which could mean 'verse-koll-tiden' for 'stanza-break' - which here comes just on the spot of change from double-words to TEQ book 14 and 15. It is this place which seems to be the 'Otterthal' in the biography of Wittgenstein.

I have suggested that the four poetic metres correlate with the four fundamental physical forces:

Gravity
Electromagnetism
Strong nuclear force        
Weak nuclear force
= the white metre
= the yellow metre
= the red metre
= the blue metre

It is the weak nuclear force which controls the nuclear core in such a way that it erodes in radioactive decay with constant pace - making C-14 dating of organic matter possible - and my blue metre likewise provides for a method of dating a text with precision down to plus/minus 1 year - be the text 5 or 2500 years old.

By the comparison of blue, red, yellow and white metres above, if LABOUR can be defined in the interaction of strong and weak nuclear forces, it follows that the linebreak phenomenon could be in the gap between gravity and electromagnetism. But that could be just in the difference between geographic and magnetic poles. According to my fundamental theorem of linguistics, the material body takes shape in an act of creation by the spirit when this reduces two metaphysical items to one and the difference constitutes the soul or meaning. One can think of the weak nuclear force as collapsing inwards in nuclear decay of constant rate, measured by the blue metre, while the strong nuclear force measured by the red metre rather would be the expansion outwards in bodily strength - in extension from the act of creation. Labour could then be about the controlled bifurcation of reversed creation (cp. quantum mechanics) for updating the state of the collective consciousness, and fatigue of the body and soul develops as the result of labour. If it is the collective historic consciousness which allows for one integer inner poetic articulation, the linebreak which breaks this integrity up in two symbolizes the controlled reverse bifurcation - which eventually leads to a change and updating of the collective historic consciousness by this contribution of labour from the individual. Clearly these could be parametres of an empirical space from which a new metaphysical logic could be derived.

I was in a state of total exhaustion (fatigue) when the first 'lapis philosophorum' took shape. The fatigue was less but notable when the second 'lapis philosophorum' took shape.

If you use any ideas derived from my work, please do credit me as the source - do not listen to those who could want to keep my work and person classified as secret and as 'unmentionable' as underwear used to be - they could hope to make a 'power revolution' out of it (for unconstitutional power, that would be) and that is just precisely what I do not want.


Volume 3 is the theoretic prose and contains the following two works:


10. A waist of time

This was my PhD dissertation to the university of Bergen in 1997 - at that time it may have been difficult to understand it since it is only now that one can see how it constituted the theoretic basis for the continued poetic work which can lead to a knowledge-revolution in most academic fields. The book consists of 5 parts:

Book 1 - 'Submorphemic signification'
Book 2 - 'Epistemes, language and information technology' (including the history of logical paradoxes and the cuneiform episteme)
Book 3 - 'The theatre of the heart' - on one of Rilke's elegies present in an exhibition of sculpture
Book 4 - 'A pilot study for a poetic science'
Book 5 - 'A waist of time'

The Endmorgan Quartet can probably find a theoretic basis in book 1, the blue metre (PEB) in book 2, the art-theoretic matters on Caravaggio of the yellow metre (DDS) in book 3, the white metre (SAa) in book 5 - and hence the red metre (Anna) is in book 4?

How can 'Submorphemic signification' be the theoretic basis for TEQ? On page 84 in vol.3 I write - on the development of early syntax: "When, however, the interdependency between social and perceptual features is dissolved (or attenuated) as the space falls apart, the result is that 1) social features are relegated to dialogue, while 2) sensorially perceptual features are relegated to reference". ('Social' here means 'significationally universal', while 'sensorially perceptual' here means signals that can be associated with the subjective consciousness). That means the dialogue between the poetic subject and the universal knowledge of the 'mountain of transfiguration' that he is ascending onto. 'Submorphemic signification' studies the formation of subjective language relative to the language of the universal knowledge-space.

For the theory for a blue metre PEB, book 2 is a study of the history of linguistics, information technology, logical paradoxes - and it concludes that there is a reason to see these as developing in steps of 1000 years. This is the scope of the cycle of the PEB and the basis for the dating of texts. I wrote the main part (p.195-267) at the 'Centre for technology and human values' in Oslo in the autumn 1992.

Book 3 concerns the theoretic basis for the yellow metre: That means the Caravaggio correlations with part 3 of DDS. >This simply means the poetic guidance of the structure of sensorially perceptible artifacts - ontologically real. It is likely that it is this poetic or 'divine' guidance which escapes the creation in the form of light when the yellow metre reduces to the white - and that light is what art is after.

Book 4 is a paper which contains an application for economic support to my poetic project - on background of 3-4 sonnets I wrote on immediate 'inspiration' among the audiences in London while waiting for a reading with Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes to start. The principle of 'inspired writing' for an application to which history and nature responds can be recognized in the way that 'Stillhetens åndedrag' took form.

Book 5 is the title part - only 40 and some pages - it starts with summing up all the evidence in the first four books and assumes that this can give the empirical basis for articulating a model of acoustic analysis which is based on making records in speech data where they threshold just between sound and silence, so to speak, in the binary acoustic features: "The key is to be found in the cases where the differences between the binary oppositions are levelled out and approach zero. The conjecture is that the pattern of such PIVOTAL observations should exhibit MIRROR STRUCTURES in the (conjecturally arbitrarily signifying) segments in the acoustic signals of utterances" (vol.3 p.594). This is the acoustic interpretation of the act of creation in my fundamental theorem of linguistics - just where two metaphysical items (or 'observations') collapse into one ontologically real: Whether these metaphysical items or 'observations' are subject to mirror symmetries remains to be shown. How can this relate to the red metre? It is a little premature to discuss this here, but the solution can probably be found via a study of the 23 photos from the Danube island. It is likely that a theoretic definition of the archetypes contained in the red metre can be derived from a study of these thresholded graphic forms.

The dissertation leads to the threshold to a new knowledge-space.

I have earlier discussed the parts of the PhD dissertation relative to the blue, red, yellow and white metres - where 4 and 5 are in the opposite order. That is for other aspects of the same works - both of which led to a 'lapis philosophorum'. See vol.4 p.1276. Is the formation of the 'lapis' triggered by interchange of metres? That would be no minor discovery.

In the last analysis, the theoretic formulation is probably going to look like this, corresponding to the order of writing of the poetic works:

Book 1 - The Endmorgan Quartet (TEQ)
Book 2 - The blue metre (PEB)
Book 3 - The red metre (Anna)
Book 4 - The yellow metre (DDS)
Book 5 - The white metre (SA, RT)

In sum, there are good reasons to see the PhD dissertation from 1997 as the theoretic basis for the poetic work 1997-2016. It is probably fair to say that I could embark on the project of the blue metre not the least since I had found empirical historic evidence for the 1000-year cycle in the study which I wrote at the 'Centre for studies in technology and human values' in Oslo in 1992-93. I would guess that there can be valuable impulses for a closer study of the poetic works in the theoretic basis for them which can be found in 'A waist of time'.


11. Poetic semiosis

Most of this book was written in the summer 2012. It serves as a collection of examples and discussions of how to read and understand the poetic work so far. It has 27 chapters on various topics - the first four on general aspects of the blue metre, the red metre, the socalled redaction and revelation functions of an overall semiotic model - which today I could be inclined to compare with blue, red, white and yellow metres respectively. Next there are a number of chapters with detailed studies of aspects of the blue metre, functions 11, 12, 14, 16 from TEQ in detail, archetype variation for the red metre, the novel 'The Dreamer', plus various other materials, such as the 23 photos from the Danube island, a series of five-finger exercise poems I wrote in 1995 and the collection of all the 1200 car numbers I collected while writing the novel. My own linebreak version of TEQ book 5 for the sonnets of the red metre is found aligned with Rilke and Shakespeare in chapter 19, the alignment of TEQ book 16 with the recording of Bach and Bartok sonatas by Midori Goto and Robert McDonald is in chapter 20, etc. The book can be added to the dissertation material in such a 3rd volume of the collection of my works which the book discusses, but is perhaps not so ideal for independent publication.


12. Time and the sonnet

This book I wrote in 1999 is now incorporated in a slightly altered form as chapter 5 in vol.4. It presents the discovery - which I have not seen elsewhere and believe was my own, but one should believe that it could have been made earlier - that all the major poetic forms that arose in the high middle ages - the sonnet, the terza rima, the ballade and the sestina - all follow one and the same underlying distributional pattern - which eventually can be seen as the same as the modern Fast Fourier Transform of signal processing that arose 1000 years later. (The blue metre tells that these are 'the same' but on different levels of cultural knowledge). See also the article on the 'keys to heaven' based on a similar permutation principle. It is a pity indeed to see how my ballade analysis seems to have been abused for political propaganda rather than the book being published. It should have been a handy little book for many students of literary theory.



Publication problems and solutions

There are only very few titles I have published in a normal way - that is, not as a self-publication:

1) In 1988 or 1989 a critical edition of Geirr Tveitt's 5th piano concerto was published on Norsk Musikforlag - on basis of my critical work and with my critical commentary.

2) In late 1989 I completed the 300-page 'A computer-oriented description of music notation' written for the MUSIKUS program of the institutes of musicology and informatics at the university of Oslo - this description was published as three research reports at the institute of informatics and that counts as a normal publication.

3) In 1992-1993 I wrote a study on the history of linguistics and information technology at the TMV research centre at the university of Oslo - this was likewise published as a research report at the centre. It is now included as pages 195-267 in Vol.3 ('A waist of time').

But these are the only works published in normal ways - since then all my publications have been self-published in a very humble format and size - normally about 30 copies handbound and copy-machine reproduced or laser-printed at home. My 'career' has apparently been torpedoed by political interests throughout my life, and clearly my personal history also means that abuse of my person and work can be all too tempting and many could want to buy the works out of the market - and therefore the only sensible contract form for me is the one which resembles paying internet per byte rather than per second - this also tends to increase information transmission speed. To buy the rights to my work for a period of time is therefore not a good idea - if the new Rudolf Pitler Verlag offers 50 million dollars for the contract, there is no publisher who can resist the offer. But, alas, this was too much even for Pitler and they go bankrupt just before the new edition is to be launched after 6 months and the contract goes under the hammer to Adolf Ditler, another new publisher in this interesting field. And so forth. It would not help that the contract guarantees availability. Then it is much better to buy the rights for a certain number of copies and to have a contract which grants the publisher the right to renew it on a time-unlimited basis as long as the publisher behaves decently - in which case exclusive rights can also be considered, as long as both parts have the right also to terminate the contract immediately. This contract cannot be sold, and it is more difficult to abuse the poet by way of terror-supported publishing. The contract will therefore be very simple - something like this:

The Publisher buys the right to produce and sell _____ number of copies of John Grover's book "[...]" against 1/3 - one third - of the bookshop sales price to the author. The money are paid at the time of printing, before the books go for sale. The Author has the right to inspect and veto the form of the book (graphics, cover, presentation text etc) before it is printed. The contract can be renewed an indefinite number of times untill it is terminated - with zero time of notice - by any of the parts, in which case the Publisher has the right to sell out the books already printed or paid for. The Publisher can have an exclusive right for the language of the present book as long as the contract lasts and can serve as liaison (???) with percentage for translations published by other publishers - the percentage will be the difference between 1/3 and 1/4 (???) of the sales price, which means that the Author gets 1/4 of the sales price of the translated books and the liaison gets 33 % - 25 % = 8 %. [etc] - something like this.

My view is that the most important thing is to have the poetry published - the prose is less important - this can be done in one volume for the 'non-metric' TEQ = appr. 1900 pages and one for the 'metric' poetry (blue, red, yellow and white) - appr 1800 pages or so. However, for those who are interested in using my work as an empirical basis for the development of new 'metaphysical' logic and science, the four-volume edition is certainly the best.

It is probably fair to say that the work I have told of here constitutes one coherent unit which I have worked out in the course of 25 years.




Articles about the work - most of them with links in the above text


On aspects of The Endmorgan Quartet

1. TEQ book 16 - the local function
On the local poetic function 16 in TEQ

2. Some considerations on etymological form
Some discussions of material in TEQ

3. TEQ and the arts - perhaps more interesting in this later article


On aspects of the blue metre

4. The blue metre once again
The most important aspects of the blue metre

5. The coordinate system
On a certain aspect of line 4 on 'governance' in the blue metre

6. PEB line 6
A tentative interpretation of PEB line 6

7. The dating of 'Heimskringla'
The evidence by the blue metre that 'Heimskringla' probably is several centuries younger than its official year of writing


On aspects of the red metre

8. Modernism and the fourth archetype
Concerning the red metre


On aspects of the yellow metre

9. More on the yellow metre
On the yellow metre

10. The rainbow - with the yellow metre
On the yellow metre

11. Anomalism in a new esthetic space
Some early considerations of the yellow metre relative to Varro - and TEQ

12. Leonardo's 'Last supper'
Example from 'the catalogue of mysteries' in DDS part 1 = 'Kinderhilfe'


On aspects of the white metre

13. My new poetry book 2016

14. The fundamental theorem of linguistics
On the white metre and related matters

15. 'Stillhetens åndedrag' and some related political issues

16. "Stillhetens åndedrag" - a few technical comments


On the theme of 'matter ex nihilo'

17. Examples of recursive matter
Examples of matter 'ex nihilo'

18. Is generativism about recursive matter?
Chomsky's concept of grammatical structure for the formula FORM = MATTER

19. Film-scroll and wickerwork
On the graphics ex nihilo, such as the cover to 'Der Dornenstrauch'





© John Bjarne Grover
On the web 25 april 2017
Last updated 12 march 2023