Anomalism in a new esthetic space
John Bjarne Grover
In this article I discuss my own book 'Kinderhilfe' (2014) from the historic viewpoint of a new esthetic space - and I discuss also a few other examples, including some comments on the phenomenon of recursive language and matter.
It is commonplace to take the history of linguistic theory in the century or so before Christ to be concerned with the question of anomaly vs analogy in language. This question was about the issue whether language is governed by rules or not. Even Caesar, it is said, wrote a book called 'De analogia'. Modern pendants see parallels in the debate on generativism and structuralism. The interesting question is how anomaly vs analogy could come to be any interesting at all: There are rules in language, one rule, two rules, one hand, two hands, but not all words follow all rules. What is so interesting about that?
It seems that whenever this matter comes up, it is easy to reduce it to a simple matrix of oppositions which makes the debate look ridiculous. That is because true anomalism escapes logical definition.
I go by example - and one good example is perhaps better than two. The example is my book 'Kinderhilfe' which to a good extent is written 'am Tafelrand' in viennese coffee houses - that means, I used to go out to take my lunch in some normally bakers shop, a coffee and a piece of pastry, and wrote a poem or two at the table, surrounded by other people (customers, lunchers) who had different historic backgrounds. Where does your ideas come from? No rule could rule this matter.
The book was written in two parts: Part 1 = 'Kinderhilfe' proper - it contains appr. 294 poems but many of these are enumerated 1a, 1b etc - in quite anomalistic counting, for example, there exist 74, 74f, 75g... 74r, but not 74a-e, in such a way that the poems are enumerated from #1 to #187. This part was written from late 2009 to the autumn 2011 - and I had lost a notebook in the summer 2011 which contained also some poems which in the finished book is repesented by first line only (I had transcribed the first lines only and lost the notebook before the rest had been added). Part 2 = 'Unter Gesellschaft', written as a sudden spurt of 64 'sonnets' around christmas 2013-2014. I completed the book with these two parts in the spring 2014 - when I had reached a level which allowed for a number of interesting conclusions:
1) The book contains a lot of 'errors' (deviations from rule) on all or most linguistic levels - morphologic, syntactic etc - which my poetic intuition called for in spite of the recommendations of the grammar book, and if I corrected these errors the poetic quality of the work fell markedly. The reader must accept this strange phenomenon relative to my poetic intuituion - it is not, for example, due to potential plagiarisms there could have been in other works (in case a copy of the manuscript had been stolen and abused) that could have put emphasis on errors of mine. However, it is important to notice that the errors are not to be read as errors - they are to be read as what it really says. For example, at the end of poem 113f, the last poem in the part called 'Grenze' (this part contains some 114 poems), the form 'Sommerhaute' should normally have been 'Sommerhäute' but in this poem it tells of something 'ausgehaut', such as e.g. something resembling a sculpture in white marble:
Über schwarze Meere fahren wir,
endlos wiegende Wellen
hin und her der schwarze Stier
unter hohen Sternenstellen.
Als stünden wir noch bei den Stühlen
und wartete auf unser Brot:
Der Herr war ein langsamer Schüler.
Er lernte von Leben und Not.
So vertrieben wir der Tage
schwarz-rot dunkelblauer Kreis
unter angesammelte Tier-Fragen,
unter Sommerhaute weiß.
The 'odd form' can often be of type 'wrong' gender or number, in which case it must be understood as what it says. A feminine case ending on a masculine noun will lend to it a feminine aspect. This creates a web of unspoken associations which accumulate through the work and constitute an esthetic object in addition to the overt meaning. Clearly this can be esthetically valuable if the 'errors' are of the right sort - but not any error will do, of course.
2) It turned out to be a fact that most or all of the poems in the first part (2009-2011) had remarkable parallels in terms of selection of themes and topics with the sections of subdivison in Varro's "De lingua latina" from 45 BC which is a work about precisely the issue of anomalism in language - Varro is an opponent to the theme contained in the book title of Caesar. Varro tries in his extant books to argue in favour of the view of anomalism in language and he presents his ideas in terms of examples discussed in reasonably short sections - there are some 674 such sections in the extant books V-X, plus some 38 fragments from other of his books = 712 sections - each section discussing typically a handful words or concepts. Now the interesting fact is that apparently each poem (I have not tested all) in the first part (2009-2011) of my book (typically a poem could be over a handful 'concepts' or themes) seem to be susceptible to a comparison with one section in Varro's work. The Loeb series edition I have used contains at the end a convenient index of words discussed by Varro - which makes it easier to find the relevant section. An example will do - it is more transparent and less 'interesting' than most of the correlations, but it is short and tells the principle easily. My poem 111b is the following 3-liner:
Ich sitze nieder bei einem Tische
als tragn Männer zwei Tische ein.
Ein Kerl spricht Wahnsinn im Telephon.
This corresponds to Varro's section 43 in his book vii, which goes as follows
Book vii,43: "Apud Ennium: Mensas constituit idemque ancilia [primus, Ancilia] dicta ab ambecisu, quod ea arma ab utraque parte ut Thracum incisa".
In the translation by Roland G.Kent, Loeb edition:
Book vii,43: "In Ennius this verse is found: 'Banquets ['Mensas' = 'tables'; my addition] he first did establish, and likewise the shields that are holy'. The ancilia 'shields' were named from their ambecisus 'incision on both sides' because these arms were incised at right and left like those of the Thracians".
The example of Varro serves to tell that there is an anomalistic (non-rule-governed) relation between 'ancilia' and 'ambecisus'. My poem could be seen to be about precisely something like that.
It is true that one good example often is better than two, but I bring another one nevertheless - a poem which in itself can be seen to be less interesting but which can be considered in the light of Varro. It is my 'Kinderhilfe 114c':
Die Dame redet neben mir.
Sie gibt zu diesem Konditorie
Farbe durch die Fenster.
It has a potential interpretation in Varro ix,61:
"E quibus
"When any of these things happened to females as well, they derived the first names of women regularly in this manner - that is, in former times - and called them by them, for example: Mania, Lucia, Postuma: for we see that the mother of the Lares is called Mania, that Lucia Volumnia is addressed by the Hymns of the Salians, and that even now many give the name Postuma to a daugher born after the death of her father".
It is easy to see how the names can apply to the three lines in the order Lucia, Postuma, Mania. Why this correlation between a poem of mine (one of the 294) and one section of Varro (one of the 674 or 712)? I had not peeped at Varro when I wrote my poems (I discovered the correlation well after the book was finished). The correlation is anomalistic and has no logical explanation. It means that it is something - but it is hard to explain. It sheds interesting light also on Varro's work. Is there a limited number of interesting 'examples of anomalism'? Or are there degrees of anomalism - some more optimal than others? I add the observation of the poem 'Neben mir' written in London 1972 by the israeli poet Natan Zach - this poem seems to contain the same elements as my 'Kinderhilfe 114c' - except that an element of apparent anomalism seems to be added to each of them:
Man spricht neben mir im Café
über Autos. Das Wort ungefähr
wiederholt sich. Wär
ich ungefähr neben dir,
würd ich dir leise, mit leichten
Enttäuschungen ausweichender Hand
einen Schlummertrunk reichen, das heißt
nicht hier und fern
dieses warmen Abendhimmels,
der weich und flüssig macht
und durch das Fenster dampfend alles
mahlt zu grauer Asche.
Interestingly, there is in this collection of Zach's poems also a three-liner about the 'romantische'.
As far as the above 113f is concerned, it could be that Varro's Fragment 18 could do - and this would support the theory of 'ausgehaut' in the last line.
3) The reader who has read through the book 'Kinderhilfe' - and who is not all too durchgeprügelt by grammar school teaching in mother tongue - will notice that the reader at the end will be subjected to a condition of what can be called mystic rapture, a poetic ecstasy which is hard to explain - a unification with a larger and freer esthetic space. This is most notably in spite of a certain touch of humility in the formal aspects of some of the poems. Isn't it really a little too humble when the rhyme LUFT-DUFT comes up for the third time? Or what about "zu gehn um die Welt, / zu zahlen mit Geld" (UG #30)?
The answer to this phenomenon of humble surface combined with anomalistic reasoning leading to a state of mystic ecstacy seems to be found in the idea of a new esthetic space opening up: Traditionally the esthetic assessment would go primarily on the internal form of the artwork (poem) itself, while the esthetic assessment of this new esthetic space will be found in the gap between the internal form of the artwork in relation to the form of a larger esthetic space which is characterized by anomalistic reasoning - and therefore is hard to define. This in relation to then means that the esthetic space is a sort of 'magnetic field' or something like that. It means that the esthetic object is not in the poem itself - you cannot with relevance take out one poem and discuss whether it is 'interesting' or not - the esthetic object is in the relation between the poem and the new anomalistic-esthetic space constituted by the 294 poems. This space is constituted by the mystery of correlation with Varro and his 674 (or 712).
This means that the artwork itself in this new esthetic space will look a little like the flying coffin I saw travelling slowly through the air over Simmering in Vienna around 15:00 UTC on 17 september 2005 - it looked like a boy's hut in a tree made from planks found here and there, and now it had lifted its anchor and sailed out on the seven heavens. (Can you understand monetary value in such a light?) The plank-ends jutted anomalistically out from the sides and it was hard to find an explanation which could do for the flying phenomenon.
Unter Gesellschaft #30
Das Fenster stand dunkel.
Der Staub sich erklärt.
Es stand die Ranunkel
heiter, unbeschert.
Die Straße war leicht.
Der Morgen war froh.
Das Licht war ein Streich
durch Blumen und Stroh.
Die glückliche Zeit
erwartet uns jetzt -
die Sonne befreit,
die Erde ist fest
zu gehn um die Welt,
zu zahlen mit Geld.
The artwork resides in the gap between inner formal structure and outer anomalistic definition of space dimensionality. I have - to bring one good example also from another esthetic field - recommended listening to Dora Deliyska's recording of Schubert 4 Impromptus (as an analogistic 4-dimensional space) followed by Chopin Ballade #4 op.52 (as the anomalistic example) - having heard these five pieces through in this order the listener should be able to understand what I mean with 'mystic rapture' and 'esthetic anomalism'. Political abusive power defines itself in (abusive!) opposition to this esthetic logic - and it is possible that some listeners will feel that they have to choose between serving the Satan of abusive political power or the truth of esthetic fact.
For my own 'Kinderhilfe', there are two sorts of anomalism - 1) of the first part (2009-11) which carries the main title, and 2) of 'Unter Gesellschaft' (2013-14) - these are different sorts of anomalism but interlock in a mystic fashion in a third esthetic space or level, which then naturally likewise escapes definition. Part 1 and part 2 can be seen to be constituted by two different forms of möbius strips, as could be a suggested associative explanation. Part 1 has four parts (Hunde, Grenze, Baum, ROP) which thematically provides for a twisted feedback = möbius form with correlates in Varro, while part 2 was written originally as 75 poems of 12 lines each before the last 11 poems were subdivided into 64 couplets attached to the first 64 and hence 'Shakespeare-sonnetistic' poems, but in a displaced order, providing for another form of recursive quasi 'möbius' - in fact these two 'visible' lines appended to the 12-liners means that the resulting 14-liners attain the quality of containing two 'invisible' lines at the end of a virtual 16-line structure, and the möbius can even in this sense of it be seen to alternate infinitely on visible-invisible ('matter'). It makes for two different sorts of anomalism. The 'mystic ecstacy' is then constituted by the way these two forms of anomalism interlock in a third. It is naturally 'unspeakable' but a good attempt to define it is nevertheless given in Plotinus' Ennead VI,9 ('Peri t'agathou a tou henos') - which ends with his famous definition of mystic ecstacy: "It is the lonely seeking [fleeing to] the lonely" ('phuge monou pros monon'). This is also why it is an interesting artwork: It rejects abusive, exploitative and suppressive power for creating a space for free thought. Could be the reason for the title.
It is possible that this is the nature of a new esthetic space in formation in these days - a correlate to the times around the birth of Christ.
TEQ ('The Endmorgan Quartet') book 6 ('Orphan and the angels') can be seen to be an attempt to find an angelological rationality relevant for this third anomalistic (ecstatic) space of 'Kinderhilfe' - bridging from the first 'lonely' space in the beginning of book 6 to the second 'lonely' space in the end of book 6 - corresponding to a bridge from part 1 to part 2 in 'Kinderhilfe'. The beginning and end of book 6 share the formula "Then she tears off her tears / with the lonesome" which finds an echo in these famous last words of Plotinus' article.
Antonio Machado's 'Soledades'
This work ('Lonelinesses') exhibits a peculiar similarity in form with my 'Kinderhilfe'. (I had not read it before I wrote my book - I think it was after the release of Chodorkowsky in Russia that I was pulled as by a magnetic force to the public library bookshelf and my finger landed on this book). It was first published with poems 1-60 in 1902-03, and then again in 1907 with two new sections added to it: 'Galerias' ('Corridors') of 31 poems which here corresponds to the 64 sonnets of 'Unter Gesellschaft' and the shorter 'Varia' of 5 poems which corresponds to the difference between 75 and 64 poems. In 'Galerias' there are 448 or 444 lines (including or not the titles etc), which means exactly 7 lines Machado per my 14 lines, and it is easy to compare. UG #30 has these lines of Machado, from LXXIII-LXXIV (Vogelgsang's translation to the right), each line is 2 lines my poem:
|
flota, vellón disperso, una nube quimérica de plata. Tarde tranquila, casi con placidez de alma, para ser joven, para haberlo sido cuando Dios quiso, para tener angunas alegrías... lejos |
treibt als zerrupftes Vlies eine chimärenhafte Silberwolke. Ruhiger Abend, fast mit so gelassener Seele, um jung zu sein, es gewesen zu sein, wann Gott wollte, um einige Freuden zu haben... ferne |
There is a strange formal parallelism which proves that this is not only about coindicental ideas of mine, and indeed it seems that most poems follow in comparable 7-14 parallelism. I mention the last poem of 'Kinderhilfe' proper, #187, last poem in the section 'ROP', written a couple of years before 'Unter Gesellschaft' was written:
Zu früh ists noch zu schlafen,
zu spät zu fangen an
einen neuen Brief zu schreiben,
Gedichte an der Wand,
zu spüren wie der Daumen
sich um des Wassers Glas
sich schließt wie Bark dem Baume,
wie nackte Fuß im Gras.
Der schwarze Rabe wartet
in seiner Ewigkeit
am Tür, am Fenster startet
die neue Wirklichkeit.
This poem has some notable anomalisms in the grammar and a closer study of these can indicate the presence of the name of Tomas Tranströmer. I really should have listened to my intuition and written 'ein neuen Brief', however ungrammatical that may be. The second half of Machado's last poem (LX) in the 1902 edition of 'Soledades' corresponds to this poem and goes:
|
No, mi corazón no duerme, está despierto, despierto. Ni duerme ni suena, mira, los claros ojos abiertos, senas lejanas y escucha a orillas del gran silencio. |
Nein, mein Herz liegt nicht im Schlaf. Es ist wach, ist hell erwacht. Weder schläft's noch träumt's. Es schaut mit klaren, offenen Augen ferne Zeichen, und es horcht am Ufer des großen Schweigen. |
The 'grammatical anomaly' of my #187 is here recognized in the line 'No, mi corazón no duerme'. Machado was much read by the spanish people. My work is not for the abuse of security or political business.
I add - to the concept of 'möbius' and perhaps even 'Varro' - the motto which Machado has to the first of the five poems in 'Varia' - it is a line of Verlaine: "Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois".
The PEB = 'POLAKK English Bloggi'
When the PEB (2008-2010) was finished in 2010 and could be presented as a blue metre of 1000 years time span, to an extent that made it possible to date apparently any text, the spontaneous response among readers (or, say, a librarian looking for the failing ISBN) could have been this: "But this is not possible!" When I show the correlation with the Odyssey which makes it possible not only to date it with high precision but also to conclude that the Odyssey in itself constitutes a blue metre while the Iliad is the red, the typical response could be: "You must have cheated and looked in the Odyssey before you wrote your book". Which of course I had not. If people have difficulties with accepting the blue metre, that probably means that they will have difficulties with understanding the new anomalistic space - it is the same sort of phenomenon. The editions I have made of the PEB had no ISBN, but a Gutenberg Bible hasnt either.
I bring an example of the strong explanatory force in the blue metre. It is possible to check the value of etymological data along the following lines: Consider Tiepolo's painting "Apparizione della Madonna col bambino a San Filippo Neri". The word 'apparizione' is (according to the Garzanti dictionary) recorded for the first time in an extant italian-language document in 1336, which means that it can be checked by the blue metre of PEB (assuming that this was written in 2009) by (2009-1336) * 0.366 = 246.3 which means PEB #247:
And here I'm stripping off
pants, underpants and socks
in one long sweeping rough
wholehearted move en-bloc
with hands running along
the thighs, the knees and shins
and tip it off among
the toes of outer brim.
Two travellers with old
spectacles at the gate
of San Leonardo's fold
are dressed in brown-gray coats:
One traveller and one mate
exploring Egypt's boats.
The relevance of this poem to the painting is obvious - and one notices particularly the two travellers dressed in brown-gray coats. As to the boats of Egypt, I think a faint naked navel can be spotted in the apparition of the artwork.
The word 'apparition' occurred for the first time in english language - according to the Oxford dictionary - in 1481, which means PEB #194:
There is the world of voices
speaking in the air
with or without my choices,
with or without my cheer.
They are myself accustomed
like riding in the air
with or without the dust-broomed
traveller for the fair.
They're giving me advice:
Embark upon the novel,
only mine tuned twice!
If you could understand it?
You're travelling on a shovel
unless you underland it.
Clearly the italian record is more interesting, but the english one can do as well. It seems that the principle in principle applies to any language. Hungarian 'kísértet' is - by the etymological dictionary of Akademiai Kiado of 1986 - first attested in 1372, which means PEB #234, which likewise applies with relevance.
But clearly the word had been in use in oral speech in italian, english and hungarian language before these dates - probably even in written documents - and what we know is only that these dates meet the theory on etymological structure of the blue metre relative to art history according to the documents which history has preserved.
What this means is that the new anomalistic knowledge-space applies not to the normal concepts of History but to the phenomenon of longterm cultural memory in the sense of what the historic consciousness of Culture has decided to preserve for History. My translation of Heraclitus is a good example - it makes for 4 groups of fragments that naturally (today) constitute one poetic unit - on basis of the fragments which History has decided to preserve.
The PEB shows that the hebrew alphabet (politically the role of Israel, see end of this article) is at the foundations of the blue metre.
What is the poetics of 'The Endmorgan Quartet' ?
The poetics of 'The Endmorgan Quartet' = TEQ (16 books, 1997-2008) is the internal articulations in the mind of the poet. They appear and are written down in chronological order and constitute a poetic structure in such a larger space. They are sufficiently independent and articulate to count as 'inner revelations' - but clearly one could also call them poetic thoughts. When they started in late 1996 and early 1997, they were very distinct and clear - but if I did not grasp a pen and paper immediately they would vanish and disappear in the course of very few seconds. One could say that they had a duration of perhaps a couple of seconds - and the peculiar phenomenon was that they could perhaps be refreshed for a very few seconds by conscious internal repeats but could not be transferred into longterm memory. Even if I were sitting repeating the words externally they would disappear in the course of a few seconds unless I wrote them down. Today this is less acute - if I make for such an inner articulation today I can manage to keep it in memory for somewhat longer time but not without keeping my attention at it constantly. It means that the articulations have a distinct 'otherness' which is the essential aspect of them: They take form in the moment when I step from my subjective consciousness into a bigger and more universal consciousness, and the exact contents of them is dependent on the place and time of the particular poet - for which reason they have a maximally global historic scope. I fancy that if I had been somewhere else or at another time or been another poet, they would have been different. The chronology in the progress of the inner articulations in this sense of gradual merge of subjective with universal knowledge-space can perhaps be compared with a gradual progress in a dantean divine comedy. It is natural to believe that they are about the relation of the red metre (of 2 seconds duration) with the blue metre (of 1000 years duration). If one prefers, it is of course also possible to claim that they are articulations from my deeper subconsciousness into my surface consciousness and that I had planned the work through decades before I started writing it - otherwise it is difficult to understand the high complexity which spans the work of 1719 poems from beginning to end. In any case it is relevant to say that the inner articulations are a variant of thoughts, although their marked feature is that they appear as distinctly different from the poet's own surface-subjective thoughts and cannot by any means be guessed by the poet in advance - any more than they can be remembered afterwards without pen and paper. As such, it is fair to say that they have a maximal information value and that they relate somehow to the phenomenon of information technology, furthermore and thereby also to the phenomenon of a collective historic consciousness - also in symbolic format.
Taking the most obvious interpretation as the basis, assuming that the chronological progress of the inner articulations go through the interface of the red with the blue metre, the tentative conclusion can also be reached that this is how the collective historic consciousness receives its form (in addition to the form which it gets through the work of the poet) when it decides which written documents to preserve for later retrieval.
The Endmorgan Quartet contains 1719 poems in its 16 books. When each book constitutes one global and one local poetic function, it has a very complex structure (32 functions). The global function spans the whole work and relates in all details to all the other 15 books or functions - for example, the global function 14 assigns semantics to all the words in the work by their temporal distribution in the full work over 11 years of writing, while the local function is defined internally within the borders of the particular book itself - one of the 16 books. The choice of a word in a poem will therefore affect not only the poem it enters into but also the other 15 global functions that are at interplay. In principle, this applies to all the functions in the work - which is a very complex web of interacting poetic functions. When, therefore, it is found that a poem can be tested empirically against external historic data, this can serve as proof of the appropriateness of the overall structure in the 16 books - as a model of the transhistoric poetic reality. The example I can bring is my poem TEQ #361 "There is Mary Magdalene" which has a precise and relevant interpretation in Caravaggio's "Rest on the flight to Egypt" (in http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/bar_cvggo_flight.html). One can say that to the extent that the poem interprets the artwork in a relevant way, that is, applies to the essential aspects of it, the poem also serves as a proof of the relevance of TEQ for interpreting the form of time in relation to a transhistoric reality. It is not that I have seen Caravaggio and years thereafter copied elements of it subconsciously - it is rather that the transhistoric reality exists and Caravaggio has also been concerned with these important aspects of this reality. As another example, Caravaggio's "San Francesco receives the stigmata" (in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Francis_of_Assisi_in_Ecstasy_(Caravaggio)) can be seen to have a correlate in the last half of my TEQ #342 and first half of #343 - in fact these two halves of mine following a diagonal on his painting from low left to high right cormer - and the existence of this shared structure can be attested via Yang Lian's "Another decade, Hudson River" (from his 'Lee Valley Poems') which can be seen to parallel my TEQ #343-346, that is, also half of #343 (with Caravaggio). (In fact TEQ #344 is on this website - the poem It was on earlier Chalk Farm). It means that a transhistoric poetic reality exists. (See also my vol.3 of the 3-volume edition of 2013 on function 11 relative to the wanderer's bag and the barely visible X-cross in the darkness on the lefthand side of Caravaggio's artwork).
It can be added that ideas in the 'services' that the inner articulations are only propaganda foam created from redundancies in the media are not interesting - and certainly do not entitle the 'services' to claim any sort of 'copyright' to the work (or the manuscript!) on basis of the idea that they themselves had created the redundancies in public media on basis of historic material in the secret governmental archives. Such ideas are at best a brute misunderstanding of what the new esthetic space is. Intrigue never created any interesting poetry.
Some corollaries
For those who want to see these matters in the gap between structuralism and generativism, the first thing to say about it is that generativism repeatedly lost interest because it remained speculative and without empirical basis. The chomskyan idea that colourless green ideas sleep furiously is no proof - they do so structuralistically as well. The opening lines to Wolfgang Hildesheimer's 1986 book "Mitteilungen an Max über den Stand der Dinge" goes:
"Wieder ist, wie Du, lieber Max, wahrscheinlich bereits festgestellt hast, ein Jahr vergangen, und ich weiß nicht, ob es Dir so geht wie mir: allmählich wird mir dieser ewigwährende Zyklus ein wenig leid, wozu verschiedene Faktoren, deren Urheber ich in diesem Zusammenhang, um mich keinen Unannehmlichkeiten, deren Folgen, die in Kauf zu nehmen ich, der ich gern Frieden halte, gezwungen wäre, nicht absehbar wären, auszusetzen, nicht nennen möchte, beitragen"
which likewise is no proof. What is empirical proof of a difference, though, is the fact that the etymological dating by artworks and the blue metre applies to extant historic documents and not to speculative first occurrence in oral language. The relevance of artworks for this form of time can also be observed in TEQ.
The corollary should be that the collective historic consciousness has a formal symbolic representation in its archives (libraries) but thinks in terms of a poetic reality which also by and large is equivalent with or at least applies to the innate linguistic competence. This establishes a theoretic connection between the innate linguistic competence and the material form of the world. It is then of importance to observe that the issue of priority of order of language and matter can constitute a political field. Could be some would define 'politics' in just such terms.
The blue metre can therefore be seen as empirical data for generativism - if that is the right term. One should have believed that generativism would have to remain speculative and without empirical proof, but the blue metre tells that this is not necessarily so.
The jokes about empirical evidence in the sense of infinite symbolic languages lead to the nazi diagonals of Mengele type.
The distinction generativism vs structuralism is perhaps not so interesting any longer. What is interesting is the new anomalistic knowledge-space. It would remain hypothetical that this should have anything to do with innate competence. Could be it does.
The four levels
One can postulate four levels of poetic semiotics - possibly corresponding to the four chomskyan grammar types:
Level 1: Analogies, 4 dimensions, Schubert = regular (finite state) gammar
Level 2: Anomalies, 3 levels, Chopin = CFPSG (context-free phrase structure grammar)
Level 3: Recursive matter, Iran = CSPSG (context-sensitive phrase structure grammar)
Level 4: Recursive language, Israel = unrestricted grammar
The data from 'Kinderhilfe' suggest that part 1 and part 2 constitute the two first sorts of anomaly while their mutual 'mystic-ecstatic' interlocking constitutes the third. This mystic interlocking will then be what makes a context-free phrase structure grammar something essentially different from a trivial and finite pushdown automaton, such as a practical and material computer is. It is the CFPSG which can reach infinite language in a way that only the human mind can do and which makes the idea of innate linguistic competence interesting.
The three levels of anomalism can also be compared with the three movements of Bartok in Midori/MacDonald's recording which I parallel with my TEQ book 16, after Midori's four Bach movements which then can be considered a way of setting a four-dimensional analogistic space.
TEQ book 16 has four parts which can be seen to follow these four levels. It is a theory which says that the third level is concerned with what can be called 'recursive matter'. It is recursive language which frees humans from the feeling of 'doom' or dangerous witchcraft in recursive matter, the serious study of which is the topic of Goethe's 'Dr.Faustus' which was written at a time when german cultural development was about to come to a temporary halt that now has lasted for a couple of centuries - and they have since 1945 been punished by the whip of recursive british language. The cartoon character Superman has a big 'S' on his chest - that could be for the morphological equipment of english language - covering third person, genitive and plural, all in one big muscle - in contrast to the rich expressionistic potentiality in the german morphologic complexities (which some perhaps would compare with german fisherman's wellingtons). Could be this is a part of the reason why 'Kinderhilfe' could not be written in english language but had to be written in german.
There is the theory that the role of Iran which has been allowed by the angloamericans to carry through an islamic revolution has something to do with the role of recursive matter. This theory can perhaps find support from a study of the names of the iranian state leaders since 1980 - apparently installing ideas which thereby are hard to erase from the archives - on the assumption that this could be of vital importance for the country. It is obvious that the study of recursive matter can be of critical importance as far as the role of nazism is concerned: If the theory is right that Adolf Hitler was an austrian who was more interested in arts than in marts but who some time between 1914 and 1918 was replaced with an angloamerican (could be british) secret agent called (tentatively) 'Paul Marshall', whose interests were far more martial than Hitler's were, and if this critically important piece of historic truth (the holocaust could have been a british and not a german enterprize, that means!) cannot be released to the public but on the contrary the states of the world are planning a second 'möbius strip' of a similar kind (a new Marshall on a new austrian Hitler) in order to prevent outbreak of research and development of knowledge in recursive matter a la Dr.Faustus, then it could be that a political role of Iran in the sense of research in or knowledge about recursive matter is of quite critical importance in order to rescue the world from falling into a third millenium of pure power, that is, pure darkness. It is recursive language which rescues us from the doom of recursive matter, but clearly if the new space of technological advance is in precisely this field of recursive matter, then the political fallacy of Hitler-Marshall is explained by the need for developing just this. Therefore perhaps it is sometimes said that Iran could be an enemy of Israel - while clearly the opposite would be the case if the role of Iran is that it can become possible to dismantle the new Hitler-Marshall century project and replace the angst of doom with a sensible intellectual understanding of what all this is about.
I notice also the current situation in Ukraine: Why did the revolution throw the president after only a few years when EU membership (western orientation) was the alleged reason for the riots? Why could they not wait just some 3-4 years to the next election and then elect a more western-orientated new president? The answer to the outbreak of the destructive riots could be that they had arrested the christmas presents - the name of Julia Tymoshenko - which could mean that the research in recursive matter had been stopped or hampered on basis of the same angst of doom which is the reason why a british Marshall hiding behind the official Hitler is still an essential piece of knowledge which is kept secret for the public. This would mean that the riots in Ukraine is a call for the publication of the truth of Hitler-Marshall and the historic facts on the holocaust must come on the table instead of another century with yet another giant fraud of a similar kind. It could be added that if my workspace is secretly surveyed and the material spread to the media and networks via secret channels, that is precisely the same sort of new Hitler program. I start working on something and soon 'everybody else' does - that would be for making a new Hitler, not only for reducing the apparent value of my work to commonplace.
The feeling of total panic which seems to emerge in the gap of this tension (such as in Ukraine) must be understood in the simple sense that swapping levels 3 and 4 - taking rational and context-free studies of recursive matter as the top level and the recursive language itself as only level 3 (or e.g. reducing the value or level of my work in progress by circulating it illegally in the networks) - is equivalent with subscribing to a new world of pure power = pure darkness in the sense of signing a Dr.Faustus contract with Satan. But this is oldfashioned panic which is all too easy to abuse for westernworld political propaganda purposes - "we need a new Hitler to stop this madness" etc. It seems that the western strategy is very simple - and in the light of my studies of Varro, it means that the aim of the western political strategy is to replace Plotinus with Muhammed. If Plotinus is the mirror image of Varro in the anomalistic space, it means that Christ is the mystic mirror itself. But if Muhammed is taken to be the mirror image, it means that the Dirty Beast from the collapse of stoic philosophy (into the early centuries AD) - such as the collapse of the lekton theory - is the new quasi-divine being - recognized as the Satan who has contracts to offer. It is noteworthy that the poem by Zach quoted above seems to contain the same elements as mine, but since (as is a guess here) Zach is not a christian but a jew, he does not rely on Varro but introduces his own 'anomalies'.
It is this problem (of Satan instead of Christ) which my 'Kinderhilfe' attempts to solve. At the end of the book there is a 'concordia' of the 187 poems of part 1 with the 187 lines of the last fourth of TEQ book 4. For example, the poem 113 (and hence also 113f quoted above) has the corresponding line 'Fish Glabbock', which is rather perfect for that poem. When TEQ book 6 interprets the highest level of anomaly, the essential hook of context-free phrase structure grammar that lifts humans to the infinite language, it means that TEQ book 5 is the reference of Kinderhilfe part 2. Indeed TEQ book 5 had originally two versions in the 2007 edition - one Book 9 of the integral inner articulations of recursive language and one Book 5 of linebreak form dividing these same lines into 48 quasi 'sonnets'. That made for a total of 16 books even in the 2007 edition - including the 'linebreak function' of the later book 16 - including the Midori/MacDonald recording - of the 2008 version. When I had found this recording in Athens in march 2008, I had just completed part 3 of book 16 - and concluded that this book 16 was finished. There was a total inner silence for weeks. I completed the correlation with the recording and made the edition of the book up to part 3 (but without the later part 4 of 16 poems) and sent it to several libraries. It could have been on the day when it reached China that the country was struck with the tragic Wenchuan earthquake that claimed some 70.000 lives - around the time when a cyclone also devastated Myanmar. I dont know if there could have been an angloamerican bomb (?) under Wenchuan - could be it was natural. I later sent the book with 3 (without the last 16 poems of part 4 - I had at that time not understood these mechanisms) parts to Aung San Suu Kyi - who not long thereafter suffered years in house arrest - I dont know if even that could have been angloamerican (?) soup - I hope it was not because of my book. I gave book 16 parts 1-3 to the jewish library in Athens - something which thereafter temporarily sort of changed my view somewhat on the role of judaism (I have later regained my original views). I sent my three volumes plus Kinderhilfe to Iran - and the recent iraeli-palestinian crisis broke out. The conclusion - seen from my viewpoint - is that book 16 without the last part 4 - the 16 final poems which can be seen to sum up the whole work of books 1-16 - 'means' for the global society that top priority is given to recursive matter instead of recursive language - and that is like signing a contract offered by Satan.
But this is oldfashioned superstition which the global society must learn to cope with and to understand. It is a mistake to arrest Aung San Suu Kyi in order to get the problem of panic under control - if that were the reason. I must also add that if the Wenchuan quake was not an underearth bomb, it could be telling of the giant powers which political strategists hope to be able to release via their Hitler-Marshalls - but clearly that is an even more dangerous illusion and superstition: A new Hitler-Marshall cannot serve to facilitate research in and development of recursive matter - it can only hamper the development (which 'pure power' perhaps thinks of as 'getting it under control') - or, in ukrainian, that is to arrest the christmas presents. I sent my books to Iran because I believe that there are sensible people there who nourish genuine spiritual interests and who can be able to understand (and preserve) my work - and superstition and power games should not be allowed to misunderstand this. It must be possible to send these books to Iran without thereby believing that recursive matter and the darkness of pure power is given priority before the salvation of recursive language. That is not hostile towards Israel - on the very contrary, it should be in their interests. This is a general view - I do not know the local conflicts and problems which there could be.
There are also signs of a political project which could seem to try and swap a finite state grammar structure in Italy ('analogistic', that would mean) with what could be a theologically somewhat dubiously tainted CFPSG structure ('anomalistic' would be the misinterpretation) from Austria - across the border between Villach and Tarvisio, that would be - which could find its quasi rationale in the need for developing knowledge of recursive matter - but it is doubtful whether this could be much more than an attempt to fold angloamerican interests diagonally into China.
The oldfashioned panic about these things is that one cannot swap level 3 and 4 without serious damage to level 4 - like permitting blasphemy for scientific reasons before one goes to church on sunday - and then the religious passion is perhaps not as genuine as before. Or slapping a friend in the face 'for testing things' and then believing that everything is as before. But this panic is not solved by political means - it is solved by scholarly integrity. It is fully possible to study recursive matter and its semiotics without stepping on any toes or religious values - what is required is a 'revelational poetic language' such as TEQ is supposed to be. And a political foldover into China - e.g. via Pol Pot's one quarter of a genocide - is not the same as 'mystic ecstacy'.
In particular, it is important to notice that 'anomaly' does not mean 'crime' in any sense of it. Linguistic rules are not laws. And a linguistic möbius strip invoking 'infinity' cannot be understood in a political sense of it - e.g. that the publication of the historic truth of Marshall as Hitler is given a 'möbius' form as the very opposite - instead of the publication of the truth of a historic fraud it is repeated once over again! That would be a very serious mistake! Linguistic grammars cannot be understood in such a 'political' sense of it.
The 64 quasi sonnets of 'Kinderhilfe' part 2 (with the particular 'möbius' form) apply to the 48 sonnets of TEQ book 5 (sonnet version, which now is in Volume 3 chapter 19 of the 3-volume edition). That leaves 16 sonnets free - one quarter a la the last quarter of TEQ book 4 for part 1 - like the 16 last poems of TEQ comprising the full work of 16 books.
This means that even if the language of 'Kinderhilfe' is not recursive, there is nevertheless a connection between this solution with Christ (rather than Satan) in the mirror point between Varro and Plotinus and the recursive language of TEQ.
Proof of this is given in the 'wigwam' piece of recursive language - which can be compared with the philosophical foundations of Plotinus in his Ennead VI,9 on mystic ecstacy. That is not a minor observation.
Hence there is no reason to panic, and research in recursive matter should not be taken to constitute a threat against human spirituality and salvation in the sense of recursive language. Political interests should not be allowed to replace human spirituality with the darkness of pure power - and in particular political power must learn to withdraw from the occupied territories of poetic cognition.
It could be an angloamerican strategy on the german speakers (e.g. relative to China) that they can have difficulties with regaining self-respect after WWII and the holocaust - im particular if Hitler were british and worked on order from the british government - but are offered a remedy in terms of the political (mis)interpretation of mystic ecstacy. This could have been a part of the reason why I wrote 'Kinderhilfe' - and if native germans should have difficulties with understanding the aspects of 'mystic ecstacy' therein, and go for a political variant instead, it could be due to geprügelt fears of outbreak of war if they straighten their backs up again. Speculative ideas that John F.Kennedy could have had a french background could have a similar origin in the grammatical fisherman's wellington trousers that could have been used for making unspoken claims that german language cannot really reach level 4 - as the holocaust could be indicative of. A new century with a new angloamerican Hitler of alleged austro-german background could of course come to find unfortunate popular support if it turns out that german culture takes recourse to a political instead of a linguistic-esthetic understanding of level 4 - for the understanding of 'mystic ecstacy'. In general, western 'mystic intrigue' could be concerned with creating divide-and-conquer boundaries between individuals in order to make the 'flight from the lonely to the lonely' be a political thing - lowering level 4 to level 3 or 3,5.
Austria has a (partly unofficial) eastern orientation - but is perhaps a little special in the powidlgoulatsche sense of it that the dream of getting the truth of Hitler up in daylight could come to be replaced with the opposite - yet another round of the same on the other side of the millenium shift. Which of course would be very unfortunate. Austria is also a catholic country.
Much current politics and terror could also be concerned with creating 'scarlet marks' as alternative to stigmata, in which case the plan could be to hail the arrival of a later Messiah sort of character. It seems to be normal to associate stigmata with mystic ecstacy - such as in the political history relating to Maria von Mörl. Some political events on the international stage could even have been for creating oedema (not 'Ödema'!) running its water from scarlet marks instead of blood from stigmata. But politics should not compete with esthetics in a 'möbius' sense of it.
I am convinced that secret surveillance - the very essential name of the darkness of pure power - one day will come to be totally abandoned. (I had typed the title of my book manuscript 'And hang under the Justcan keys' into my home computer some days or weeks before the Costa Concordia went aground on the tuscan coast - and long before the recent film 'Dawn of the planet of apes' was released). Some levels of poetic creation cannot be reached if the progress of the manuscript is under surveillance.
Added on 8 august 2014:
There is a sort of crisis in my situation - in the sense that I seem to have been the target of abuse in political administration throughout most of my life, almost since my birth, and now the 'old pedos' in the relevant administrations do not want to let the wonderboy go. Whether this applies to only a few restricted administrations or if it is the phenomenon of the 'international secret administrations' (the 'intelligences' and things like that, variants of 'security' which hope to take over the control with all democratic institutions since they are the ones who control the 'historic truth'), I dont know. It seems that there - for just such reasons - could be a general wish to keep me and my work below the surface of public recognition. But clearly such dirty reasons should not be allowed to restrict the spread of the important literary and scientific data which the work could be, and I hope people will understand that the 'old pedos' are not the future for their country. There was a disastrous earthquake in China in the immediate context of my publication of this article, and newspapers had comments a la the article on a man with a 'Luftdruckgewehr' ('kind of rifle'?) etc. This phenomenon seems to be partly very widespread in media. Austria won the 'Eurovision Song Contest' 2014 with an apparent 'trans' performer - but the question is whether the plan is to sacrifice Tirol. Pol Pot's one quarter of the population, Austria one quarter of the land? For such Esau-Jacob ideas? Pelzgasse... It is not fur, it is only red blood cells that turn black when they coagulate on the surface layer of the skin on the legs. It would not help to sacrifice my authorship - the birthright to it - instead. I am not involved in such ridiculous intrigues. If this somewhat old-looking plot is the reason why my work is not published, it is high time to limit the authorities of the 'Geheimdienste' and similar services who seem to be the origin of this sort of logic for controlling democratic power. See this article for understanding why I myself cannot submit my work to publishers review. I have made quite a number of copies of my books by hand and donated to libraries where publishers reviewers can read them for contacting me about the rights. I send them generally in the post but the response can be only a record in the electronic archives - and those can be hacked by the 'services'. I therefore don't know how many copies there are available for the public - I hope they arrived in the post - and I hope there exist at least some in some libraries, and that they are on the library shelf and not only in the electronic catalogue. There were quite a number of my books in Zürich Zentralbibilothek - and then suddenly they were all gone and removed from the catalogue. Was it the 'services' who did not want the wonderboy to leave the club and therefore 'informed' the library on behalf of the international services? Then it could have been a lie - I am not an agent, not involved in intrigues or politics, I am the authentic author of the books. The literary and scientific value of the work is of course totally uninteresting for those who think power and the chance to cheat the people and the media opinion workers with intrigues. It could be the plan among the 'services' to keep my work under the surface of public recognition in order to reserve it for intrigue only - in order to 'take China' and things like that. That would of course be a tragedy for my work and it is a little difficult to continue the work under such conditions. It is probably not only my view that political intrigue must withdraw from the occupied territories of esthetic and poetic logic, from art and philosophy - and to do that by withdrawing from the interests of these fields and the control of them and not by giving Tirol ('dirty beast'?) away. To give Tirol away could be a very unfortunate 'möbius turn' of a most catastrophic kind. It is the history of Paul Marshall which must be published - and a new angloamerican Hitler must not be permitted. That would be to withdraw from the occupied territories of esthetic logic. The intrigues are secret and cannot possibly be permitted by democratic constitution.
References
Caravaggio: "Rest on the flight to Egypt".
Caravaggio: "St.Francesco receives the stigmata"
Deliyska, Dora: Franz Schubert: Klavierwerke. 4 Impromptus, op.90 D 899. Gramola 98969
Deliyska, Dora: Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt: Balladen und Walzer. Chopin Ballade No.4 in F minor, op.52. Gramola 98899
Goto, Midori & McDonald, Robert: Bach, Johann Sebastian: Sonata No.2 for unaccompanied Violin in A Minor, BWV 1003, Midori solo violin. Bartok, Bela: Sonata No.1 for Violin and Piano Sz. 75, BB 74, Midori violin, Robert McDonald piano. 2007. Sony Classical 82796977452
Hildesheimer, Wolfgang: "Mitteilungen an Max über den Stand der Dinge", Suhrkamp 1986.
Machado, Antonio: "Soledades". 'Einsamkeiten'. 1899-1907. Spanisch und Deutsch. Herausgegeben und übertagen von Fritz Vogelgsang. Amman Verlag 1996.
Plotinus: Enneade VI,9: Das Gute (das Eine) = "peri t'agathou e tou henos". Translated by Richard Harder. Schriften, Band 1. MCMLVI Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg.
Tiepolo: "Apparizione della Madonna col bambino a San Filippo Neri".
Varro: On the latin language, Books V-X. With an english translation by Roland G.Kent. Loeb series Vols. 333-334, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, England 1993.
Yang Lian: Lee Valley Poems. Bloodaxe 2009.
Zach, Natan: 'Verlorener Kontinent'. Aus dem Hebräischen von Ehud Alexander Avner. Jüdischer Verlag 2013. (Page 55: 'Neben mir').
© John Bjarne Grover
On the web 3 august 2014
Last updated 19 august 2014
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