Natural language and poetic reality
John Bjarne Grover
This is a scholarly paper which should be printed in some journal with sufficient spread to land in enough institutes and private bokshelves to survive the deluge. The article presents literary discoveries in the form of poetic universals on work level and on universals of authorship in terms of historic time of writing. This evidence seems to suggest that it is possible to construct an information technology for sending information through the transhistoric poetic reality. The linguistic sign seems to be explained by this account. An addition to the article was made later, see below, and at the end are some comments I made here at the beginning in the first publication, which was on 2 May 2011. Some of the contents of this article appears also under this home page article of mine. (It may be noticed that the article could mean the solution to the technological problem which corresponds to the rejection of transubstantiation by Henry VIII). It is probable that the present article, if one concludes that there is a basis for the main ideas, will be the beginning of a vast revolution in most fields of study.
Introduction
In the years 1997-2008, I wrote my poetry work "The Endmorgan Quartet" (TEQ) on the form of time. In 1994-95, I had written my novel "The Dreamer" on the form of place, while the years 1995-97 were occupied with theoretic work on the linguistic basis for such poetic logic - summed up in the work "A waist of time". Finally, in the years 2008-2010, I completed the work of poetry "POLAKK English Bloggi" (PEB) on the form of authorship, and recently in 2011 I have added a booklet "Caruso" on the form of arbitrarity in natural language. I emphasize that the literary works were written independently and without any control against other works. I here sum up some main results of particular relevance for linguistic theory.
The theoretic basis for the works is in the relation between the historic reality of natural language and a postulated transhistoric poetic reality which borders onto a concept of eternity. Basically, if it were possible to describe how the historic reality relates to the poetic with some exactitude, it would be possible to send information through the quasi-eternal poetic reality - ideally or at least hypothetically faster than the speed of light, for a possible communication with remote parts of the universe.
1. The lexical function
My TEQ consists of 16 books of poetry for 16 postulated poetic functions in the relation between poetic and historic reality. If one prints one poem per page, it takes it to 1830 and some pages. The lines of the work are written in chronological order, the one line added after the other, with only minor exceptions (there are a few pages where the lines are 'zipped' by various principles). This means that it is possible to date nearly every of the about 100.000 words in the work. I here discuss the word-semantic poetic function of book 14 called "If you're going to København" (written 01.01.03-25.11.04) relative to the distribution of words in books 1-15 (1997-2005).
If one studies the temporal distribution of a certain word in the total TEQ (or the first 15 books) one finds that it distributes over a certain interval of days and normally will have a notable interval somewhere in the distribution which assigns to it a certain ratio. The word 'considerable' occurs three times in the full work, here quoted with the lines on which it occurs:
02.11.97: considerable consequences to all the
01.02.99: Two hundred and seventyseven: / This would be a considerable trait for me to know
16.07.99: A considerable curb, in the concedation
which means two intervals 456 days + 165 days = 621 days. There are 207 poems in book 14 - or 208.71 or even more, depending on how one counts - there is a short 174a added to poem #174 and there is a motto poem to book 14, even with a small poem embedded inside the motto poem, plus several other unnumbered mottos in later setions of the book - but the numbered poems are 207 plus that 174a. Computing 456/621 x 207 = 152 then selects poem #152 - which is a three-liner (written on 8-9.12.03) wherein each of the three lines corresponds to each of the three occurrences in their contexts:
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One of the [greatest] British politicians Fi-net is another dog or similar referendum. Zhym |
= occurrence on 02.11.97 = occurrence on 01.02.99 = occurrence on 16.07.99 |
This correlation is no coincidence - it seems to be a regularity in the distribution of the words in this work on the form of time and it is indeed easily verifiable by simply counting occurrences and computing intervals - I have tested some dozen occurrences which all confirm this hypothesis with only minor deviations, and I have ventured the hypothesis that it in fact applies to all the 100.000 or thereabout words in the work - all the 'heros' of the golden age, so to speak, the warriors to Troy - which thereby receive a work-internal updating of their semantics for a revitalized poetic language: It is the semantic principle of book 14 which thereby assigns a formal semantics - a work-internal semantics - to each word in the total work. For example, the word 'referendum' (line 3) will have its semantics updated by the context-sensitive 'a considerable curb' (the third occurrence) - plus of course many other occurrences in triplets which distribute over corresponding temporal ratios.
Book 14 also seems to relate to a 'rainbow' phenomenon in many canonical works from the history of poetry. The present example of #152 out of 207 (= 0.7343) can be checked against for example the corresponding poem in Celan's 'Fadensonnen' with its 105 poems: To find the parallel to my TEQ 14 #152 - which corresponds linewise to the three occurrences of the word 'considerable' - the rainbow principle selects 152/207 x 105 = 'Fadensonnen' poem #78 which is his "Kleide die Worthöhlen aus", which indeed is a good parallel (including the last word/line 'Ton' = 'Zhym'). Celan was concerned with similar poetic structures as I am in my TEQ, but the phenomenon is in principle universal and not particular for Celan - the reader can test other canonical works from the history of poetry for the same ratio. I pick somewhat at random Mandelstam's "Stone" of 81 poems - and find 152/207 x 81 = 59.5 = poem #60, which makes for a nice parallel, one stanza for each line of mine, even with last word 'throng' = russian 'teleg'. Or Petrarca's 366 poems give 152/207 x 366 = 268.75 = poem #269 ('Rotta è l'alta colonna') which is an interesting parallel to the four lines of mine (signature included) in the four parts of the sonnet. There seems to be a certain rainbow 'typology' which can be established, and of course one can guess that there are some 'types' or 'colours' of poetic logic on work level. This interesting phenomenon - and I have not heard about this discovery before - is what I call 'the rainbow' - it situates poetry and poetic logic in a highly universal knowledge-space and removes it from the realm of administrative logic. It is only free poetic thought which gives rise to such universal 'rainbow' forms when the poetic logic projects into history - and of course such parallel texts are totally uninteresting if they are constructed bottom-up with administrative logic from data analyses of corpora of poetry. Heaven sometimes projects into life on earth for a divine interaction with the humans - it is not really so much the other way round. My hypothesis is that the more a poetic work tends to be considered 'canonical', the more it approximates (if the type) this standard of the 'rainbow' - which only means that there is a correspondence between the universal and the 'canonical'.
The third phenomenon which applies to book 14 is the phonological form. The semantics is established by the temporal distribution as explained above, while the phonological form seems to be constrained in the mirror-symmetric point on this 'rainbow'. This constraining or determination seems to be of a kind which can be exemplified with the mirror poem to #152 which is 208-152 = #56, where I try to read the segments of the word out of the lines:
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Lo stesso capit Shalali, coo baboo: Bemann aeroplace forty-nine. Oh dear! Oh! Oh! Eliassen |
= k = a = (closing the vowel) = n = co-baboo nasalized = s = fricative, turbulence = i = drib = el |
Nothing is easier than to attack this theory for its lack of consistency and precision. It is not that sort of theory. One must take it that a language user learns the phonological form of an item by playing with associations like these against the temporal distribution of phonological forms which thereby conspire on a semantic definition in the 'rainbow' - and the 'semiotic glue' which keeps the 'signifier' to the 'signified' is quite simply the mirror principle in the rainbow. This could even be recognized as akin to Lacan's mirror phase in early child development, for those who like that sort of ideas.
These three principles make for a very testable theory against a poetic work such as mine. It is the role of the poetic 'rainbow' which situates it beyond the reach of the computer. I mention a couple of other examples.
The word 'swiss' occurs four times in this corpus of the TEQ:
10.11.99: ...and then the clocks would open for the documentation on Swiss.
18.09.01: as a Swiss annual kind
13.10.01: To a Swiss gentleman who had Cern -
31.03.02: swisstalking on the eve of Sunday.
Intervals are 678, 25 and 169 days, a total of 872 days. 678/872 = 0.7775 x 207 = 160.9 = poem #161:
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That either would be Is there anybody aufzuwaken/aufzuwuken [here]? To Jungen: As I said in the beginning: I just can, hasn't got a chance in his memory back. Nottingham |
= 10.11.99 = 18.09.01 = 13.10.01 = 31.03.02 |
To search for a phonological representation of 'swiss' in the mirror point, the optimal poem I find is #49, which can be reached by rounding off and counting 208.71 poems:
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Mozart Le monijeur Walto sexual struggling inside: C'est pas. |
= s = w = i = is = s# |
The word 'port':
10.10.97: You can collect it / and study the port in the part, / generally
12.12.97: in studying the port.
24.12.97: They've told me, / on the port,
06.06.98: She had been acquired / not to use the [...] every day, / because it is the port of teenage.
13.12.98: This is a port, / a sometimes 'O':
08.03.99: gives a port or a blankhole,
28.11.00: "Didn't you see the port? / It was full of human beings"
01.10.03: [Sub]linguistically port
Intervals are 63, 12, 164, 190, 85, 631, 1037 - a total of 2182 days. Significant interval seems to be the last: 1037/2182 = 0.475 x 207 = 98.38 = #99, which is a 9-liner plus headline and signature. It seems that #98 is better, rounding off downwards:
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Have the dog 'Show me the way' means 'brace jacket through the far names' or 'hass the reporting'. We're in temperature and the way of the initiative. Yes, I know, but that isn'[t] - chargely. There are Strandie and there's Football. Resignation |
= 10.10.97 = 12.12.97 = 24.12.97 = 06.06.98 = 13.12.98 = 08.03.99 = 28.11.00 = 01.10.03 |
Phonology to this in the other end of the rainbow would have to be #111 which could be turned into a quite detailed description of the word:
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The bar Over the long long long tid, postbox-Szemedy Samos was eight, this afternoon in an attach-Arms atrocity. "Mr.Gallon", said the walkman, "many felt much about him but they didn't care to enter into any of his problems" said Saident. Drunken A.Science |
= p = ...p... = aspiration = turning into = vowel o or å = turning a, starting closing = closing = semi-closure alveolar = t = aspiration |
The word 'dill' has only three occurrences:
28.03.99: All the [...] came still. / I should dill the young man
17.09.01: Of course it deals with dill-package
16.06.03: I have a dill [in the pocket] if it can lead to any
Intervals are 904 and 637 days = 1541
904 / 1541 = 0.586632 * 208 = 122.02 = #123:
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The walkin - Can't do it! - Really? Schulze |
= 28.03.99 still = not walking = 17.09.01 deals reals to dills = 16.06.03 pocket dills |
There is also one occurrence 25.05.98 = 'If I use park, Dillon Park' which would disturb these intervals, and it is not really a 'dill' either - but it could be recognized in the title as walk = park. To check if there is phonology in the mirror point, one tries 208-123 = #85:
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You understand Because he plays in the role, the fate of emergency police, the next door, if you like un café: So, what they wanted, as they was doing mid day achievement. Diana, Princess of Wales |
= tongue on alveolars = pressing on with voice = explosive mood = i = ie = w = l (rather indistinct in meaning and form) = towards a siesta, a pause |
Clearly the optimal words for testing are those of a few occurrences. When the words get frequent, then it is easy to find an interval which can be used. The theory can also be made stronger by postulating a role to all intervals, not only the most salient. A few poems are quite long - such as e.g. #112 which is 36 lines plus signature. In addition, some words could occasionally have to map onto more than one line or vice versa. I suppose one can find words which do not meet the hypothesis in a strict sense of it, but that doesn't matter - the theory is good anyhow. Natural language isn't that rigid, and I have not found any good examples contradicting the hypothesis in a clear way so far, and hence the general tendency seems to be good enough. It must, though, be emphasized that this is only book 14 as the 14th out of the 16 books or poetic functions in the work - and each function has a local and a global definition. The local in book 14 is this rainbow scope of book 14 and the global is the distribution of the words in the total work (1997-2005/2008). Which means that every function is thought of as intertwining and interacting with every other function. Book 14 with its word semantics is easy to check in the sense that the words easily can be counted and dated. This means that the total work is a piece of art and not of computations, which of course is essential for its empirical value. It cannot be constructed bottom-up.
2. The grammatical function
While TEQ is a poetic study of the lexical function in natural language, my "POLAKK English Bloggi" = PEB is a study of the grammatical function. The book consists of 365 sonnets plus a leapyear poem #366. The poetry is about the form of authorship in the relation between poetic and historic reality. The result is easily summed up as follows: There seems to exist a phenomenon of 1000 year cycles in authorship. If one takes a work from literary history and computes the temporal interval between the year of writing of this work and my PEB (normally dated to 2009), the interval can be multiplied with 0.366 for finding the offset relative to my PEB. If the work is written in e.g. 1509, one multiplies 2009-1509 = 500 with 0.366 and finds offset 183. The work from 1509 can then be subdivided into 366 equal segments, and these will roughly and averagely map onto the poems in my PEB from #183 (or #184) to #366, wrapping over onto #1 and running up again to #182 (or #183). This is a theory which easily can be tested empirically against my poetic work - and if it turns out to find a basis in literary history, then it tells something very magnificent about the relationship between poetic and historic reality. The surprise finding is that there seems to exist this 1000 year cycle which repeats itself. The offset relative to my PEB would be the same for 1509 AD, 509 AD, 491 BC etc. If this is found to be the case, then one can conclude that a transhistoric poetic reality exists and that information can be sent through it.
I tried to date the Odyssey in this way and found that it was written between 833 and 780 BC. The mapping was quite impressive and rested on the need for moving the last 665 lines forwards to land between songs 18 and 19 - that allowed for a rather perfect correlation (and meaningful epic story) and it meant that the year of creation (in this transform) was 833 BC. (It was a horse in downtown Vienna who told me about this in terms of a joke on the difference between 'the cowlip' = 'kulepen' = 'the ballpoint pen' and 'the horselip' = 'hesteleppen' = 'he's telephone' when only these are considered sufficiently 'groß-zügig'). It also suggests that when the epic was given a final form in writing in 780 BC after having taken form through half a century as oral poetry, it would have been felt as appropriate to have these 665 lines in the end (or rather they had gradually been slipping over there in the course of the five oral decades) since that was the form of authorship in that year when it was written down. As an example of a good correlation, Odysseus builds his raft for leaving Calypso in what corresponds to my sonnet 132 at Od.5:227-259. Here is sonnet #132 as an example which the reader also can use for computing relative to other works:
It was a mythological role
in the public sphere, a
girl in a jacket of gold
high-jacking to Commonlehre.
It was soon after Halloween.
The town was under the high dome
minus eight hundred and eighteen
die andrechs anbetrieben kom.
I'm willow on the strand
which I try to reach
when I stand.
Engel der Staub,
cliff on the beach,
bräche den Raub.
The first lines of the Odyssey start at sonnet 58 and it ends (666 lines before the end of the 780 BC version) at sonnet 57. If the theory contained in my PEB turns out to be confirmed by enough data, then one can also use it for reconstructing the formation of the homeric (and comparable) epics even through their period of oral format.
As an example of prose, Flaubert in his late short story 'Un coeur simple' seems to be concerned with the two realities - the poetic and the historic - and the relation between them. On the one hand, the short story segmented into 366 equal units can run in parallel from 1 to 366 with mine without displacement, on the other hand it can interpret the 134 years between the year when he wrote his in 1875 and the year when I wrote mine in 2009 in terms of the corresponding 49 sonnets gap. Which means that his text starts on my #50 (and on #1) and it ends on my #49 (and #366). That is Flaubert's transcendental parrot - in particular in the last line of his text which finds its interpretation in my own line 'Library Zhikorsky Mourner' in sonnet #49 (see also Od.22:460-493):
A bulky barge, a ferry
glides in mystery out
the harbour basin, very
red, black, white and stout.
This the movement dodgic
that sympathize the fall.
I says: Here's the logic.
He's the marine call.
Hidden at the corner
there's a stainless ring:
Library Zhikorsky Mourner.
I write on poetic Mecca.
I will write something
for the bridges of Giudecca.
When Felicité for a brief moment believes that she can see horses in the sky, it corresponds to my sonnets 156 and 205 interpreting the two realities in Flaubert's gap. There could be many ways to segment prose for such purposes, and a mechanical count on word level takes it to my sonnets 157 and 206, which suggests that the count should perhaps not be too mechanical, since there is no doubt about these correlations. It helps a little to count 365 days instead of 366, or to move a leapyear day, but to count alphabetic letters instead of words makes the mapping a little worse. Could be one should count phonemes - and that is what a phoneme is? Or syllables?
Gogol's 'Nose' starts on #63, suggesting 2008 and not 2009 as reference for my authorship. I looked a little at Sophocles' 'Oedipus Rex' (approximately 430 BC) and Strindberg's 'Miss Julie' (1888) which seemed to confirm the theory relative to the PEB. A good status of my PEB as far as dating is concerned could settle the issue as to the year when Sophocles wrote his work. The status and authenticity of the old norse sagas could be questioned. I tested the Ynglinge Saga against my PEB and found that it was written in 1223 - the official date is 1225, which means that one can safely assume that the saga is authentic and not a later fabrication from e.g. the Scriblerus Club of Pope or similars. [Added later, no reply so far: However, more recently I have compared the Heimskringla in more details relative to my PEB and arrived at possibly quite alarming results].
I found that even the Bhagavadgita could be dated with my book in hand - and I landed on the traditional year of writing 3102 BC. Some would claim that the work is much younger, such as e.g. 102 BC, but the number is interesting anyhow. There must be some deep religious intuition in this phenomenon.
My conclusion is that the theory makes good sense and that there is such a 1000 year cycle in the form of authorship, at least relative to my work written around the turn of the millenium. Could be other studies could find other cycles - I have no opinion on that. The theory has been supported by the literary works I have tested, which could suffice for the idea that the theory is interesting anyhow, even if one should find counterexamples.
This seems to mean that an independent transhistoric reality exists and if only one can find the mapping from the historic reality with some exactitude, information can be sent through it. The one who receives the information should be able to say something about the format of the information in the poetic reality.
3. A waist of time
This theme was the main interest of my linguistics PhD dissertation 'A waist of time' from 1997. I don't know if the title could have been a part of the reason why it was rejected for the doctorate degree by the University of Bergen - the rejection anyhow gave me the chance to concentrate more on poetic than on academic matters, which perhaps is necessary for this kind of work. In my dissertation, I suggest on basis of developmental and historic evidence that a grammatical and lexical function is at play independently in the human language faculty. This sounds perhaps trivial but it is not when considered in light of the above. It means that the grammatical function works in the same manner on any level of signification - acoustic, word level, literary level or whatever, and that these levels telescope through the millenia. Which is something. It also means that these grammars will leave traces on the linguistic surface reminiscent of ordinary historic processes, but that the historic reality of language will be due also to a poetic etymology which is not like the standard version.
Not surprisingly, this sort of work which can open up for a new information technology bordering onto a transhistoric poetic reality - thereby risking contact with other intelligences and hence an unbiased and uncontrolled assessment of human performance on earth - is met with a wall of rejection, or even with that acute misunderstanding which believes that the task of 'avant-garde' administration (mistaking e.g. 'offspring' for authorship 'offset', or misunderstanding the relationship of 'shoulder lines' 7:123 and 17:309 in the Iliad) is to turn poetic manuscripts of this kind into a sort of template for a monarchic historic reality with a supreme demiurge on the throne for thinking the poetic reality, and so my works are still waiting for a serious publisher. In the mean time, they are threatened by burglary - even in manuscript format - organized by the 'avant-garde' for making the historic reality 'poetic' by way of terror and swindle. I have self-published the works in their order of appearance in a humble number of copies to some libraries, and so they should be available for the public, but they could deserve a better publication. Serious scholarship would of course look apart from the interests of administration and contact a serious publisher with a tip, but it may be that those days are over.
4. The Dreamer
This is the novel I wrote in true time in 1994-95. It consists of 203 date entries over some 11 months. The author is convinced that the language of car numbers in the streets of Oslo (in a magnitude comparable to the catalogue of ships in the Iliad) tries to tell him something important and he is conducting a scientific experiment which can serve to prove the reality of the language. On a couple of occasions he even succeeds in predicting them. The novel thereby explores the border to fiction, including many inner voices and visions of the author. It is interesting to consider the novel a parallel text to the Pentateuch, in particular after I in 2008 discovered that it constituted a parallel to some fragments from the Erubin tractate of the Talmud, which in itself can be considered a theory on the Pentateuch. When the 692 fragments are distributed over the 203 date entries, it is probably possible to analyze these in the sense that the date entry of the novel can be considered as generated by the hebrew fragment. By which one could say that the novel is a parallel text to both the Pentateuch and its theory - the Talmud - and thereby the book meets Schlegel's definition in his 'Brief über den Roman': "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". The feeling of the abstract poetic reality represented by this hebrew substrate seems to surface only some 2-3 days after one has read the book through - which could be about a resurrection of the hebrew 'elysium' (it could be this which Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan referred to in their correspondence as 'das goldene Licht über dem Wasser') conceived as a poetic reality being the basis of the alphabetic culture. The novel thereby contains something of a basis for the three other works - theory, lexical and grammatical functions - for a modelling of the transform from the poetic to the historic reality.
Vienna, April 2011
John Bjarne Grover is a poet living in Vienna, Austria.
He has a masters degree in linguistics from the university of Oslo.
John Bjarne Grover
Pf.15
1152 Vienna
Austria
www.johnbjarnegrover.com
[my email adress]
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ADDED LATER, on 17 May 2011
I published the above on internet here under my home page on 2 may 2011 at 07:15 UTC. If the reader should nourish healthy doubts about the conclusions I have made above, on basis of the meagre empirical data, I add some further observations for helping the reader to find those data on his/her own. First 1) some data on the reality of the 'rainbow', thereafter 2) some further comments on the character of the 'grammatical' book.
5. Comment on the 'rainbow'
Of rather essential importance in the derivation above is the assumption that there exists a universal 'rainbow' through canonical works of poetry which correlates with my TEQ book 14. This rainbow is, as far as I know, not described earlier, and my book constitutes a conjecture also on the existence of this universal phenomenon. Dylan Thomas' "The map of love" (1939) can in many ways can be seen as related to my TEQ 14 "If you're going to København" in this respect. For quick references, I refer to the first (#1), the last (#207) and the mid poems (#104-105 - including #173a for a total of 208 poems) of my book with his work. My book contains 207 enumerated poems and his contains 427 lines. This means that the top mid point of my rainbow, where it turns for going down again on the other side, will be his line 213.5 = line 214 counted either way. It says: "and a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark", which contains my #104 sprinter (from the top of the rainbow!) in the first half and #105 marathon runner in the second. Thomas' book seems to go backwards compared with mine (forwards and backwards are so to speak the same in these lofty regions where my phonology is your semantics and vice versa). My last poem is the short #207:
Imperialist moment
The two cousins leaving each other on the deed:
Who do you represent?
which corresponds to Thomas' two first lines:
Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires
shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
which can be compared as follows, telling of strong phonological relevance:
The |
Be two |
cause cousins |
the pl leaving |
eas each |
ure- other |
| b-ird Im |
whistles perialist |
after the moment |
| ho who |
t w ires SHALL do you |
| the re |
blind pre s |
horse ent |
sing sweeter on the deed |
Only the SHALL is superfluous here. It can be recognized as a CONCH shell (of the cochlea, for example, or 'corner of cell' - if not simply a book marker for 'THE END') by the signature ('Cash') of the first poem, #1:
In the corner and losing my direction
- Will you definitely join me?
- Yes, that is right from a point of view..
- We have a queen.
- It may well be that you would not have bbeen had I not been.
Cash
which corresponds - with much semantic relevance - to the last two lines of Thomas' book:
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance for as long as forever is.
Could be the philosophy in the last half (before signature) of my poem is 'the elementary town' of Thomas. I emphasize, though, that I had not read Thomas' book before 2008. I had the collection "Dylan Thomas - The poems" edited by Daniel Jones, which I think I bought in the 1990's, wherein the order of poems is scrambled.
The reader can easily check the other examples from my TEQ 14 given here - computing with a pocket calculator on Thomas' book by 427/207 = 2.063 lines per poem. It should be convincing for the assumption that a universal 'rainbow' exists.
This means that Thomas' book can be taken as strong support for my theory on the rainbow. One can spot a move from a semantic parallelism in the beginning of my book to a phonological parallelism in the end, turning over with a lightning and darkness in the middle.
But, says perhaps the sceptic, one such eminent example does not help my case - it only adds suspicion that I could have constructed my book on the template of e.g. Thomas? I have not, but one could perhaps in theory have created such suspicion if it were an isolated case (although this book 14 is only one among the 16 books in the work, and further studies can probably exclude the possibility of me having used Thomas' book as template on that basis). The rainbow of book 14 should be found in many other works, although often less transparent. I refer to Vergil's Georgics I-IV, which contains 2188 lines and hence about 10 lines per poem. Beginning and end are simple enough. Mid point (my #104-105) is III:38, around which it looks as follows: "Here in parian marble shall stand statues breathing life, the lineage of Assaracus and the glorious names of Jupiter's race, Tros, our ancestor, and Cynthian Apollo, architect of Troy. Wretched Envy shall cower before the Furies and Hell's stern stream, before the snaky bonds and ghastly wheel of Ixion, and the stone beyond the trickster's mastering" (Fairclough's translation, Loeb edition). However, it may be that the alignment is not so easy: Check e.g. my poem #98 against the correlate to my poem #99 which is Georgics II:521.8-532.4, which is very good, but applies to the neighbouring poem, which could be telling of other ways of alignment. See also #111 (III:106.7-117.3) and #123 (III:233.5-244.1) for good correlations. For #123 (253.7 lines counted from the end), Thomas has "...cranes. Its statue is an aviary, / from the stone nest it does not let the feathery / carved birds blunt...".
6. An example of the 'grammar' of 'POLAKK English Bloggi'
I include another three sonnets from PEB for exemplifying:
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#100 The letter reads: "...so I'm ending this music from these ancient lyres. With love from one of thy standing longstanding true admirors". And as I reach my hand out for this bottle of indistinct script with label washed, there's on this shore another bottle next to it! These bottles form a girdlefield on nickle where we're stretching out to race over this hurdlefield. The fluid has been re-installed by measures far beyond our doubt of lockings. Or it's preinstalled. |
#200 The sun is bright. Three young men sit in dazzling light by table-fit. One at the end, two at the side. Three are these men that here abide. One of them has a tartan shirt. He shades his eyes. With tangled legs and stares that hurt at me - they're eggs. |
#300 I see her far away: A woman in a brown- red coat, if so I may describe her overgown. It is this distant view I recognize as mine: Cylindrical and new, and spherical and fine. Well that is what it is. What is it more than mine, if I may emphasize? It is what's known to us untill the african tells it with a blush. |
2009-1811 = 198 years interval, while 198 x 0.366 = 72.47 offset, hence the correlation starts at sonnet #73, runs up to #366, wraps over to #1 and continues up to #72. The short story contains 6008 words: 6008/366 = 16.4153 words per poem. The following correlation is based on word count, without linebreaks:
Sonnet #49 (text see above) will be between 72-49 = 23 and 24 sonnets counted from the end, hence it starts on 24 x 16.4153 = 393.97 words from the end, which means that it starts on 6008-394 = word #5614, and it ends on 5614+16.4 = word #5631: "...er den Nicolo zwischen den Knien hielt, und ihm das Dekret in den Mund stopfte. Dies abgemacht...". I notice 'earth and the colours' as well as 'ihm das Dekret in den Mund stopfte' for 'Library Zhikorsky Mourner'.
Sonnet #132 (text see above) will end on 132-72 = 60 sonnets x 16.4153 words = 984.92 words from the beginning, and start on 984.92 - 16.42 = word #968.5: "...Jahre, war er, bei Gelegenheit dieser Mönchsbesuche, die Beute der Verführung einer gewissen Xaviera Tartini, Beischläferin ihres...". Could be there is '-818' in '-wissen Xaviera Tartini' etc.
Sonnet #100 (text see above) will end on 100-72 = 28 x 16.42 = 459.6, and start on 443.2: "...von Schmerz bewegt, den Wagen und nahm, bei dem Anblick des Platzes, der neben ihm leer blieb...". Herz-Schmerz, Wogen-Wagen, Plötz-Platz etc.
Sonnet #200 (text see above) will end on 200-72 = 128 x 16.42 = 2101.2 and start on 2101.2-16.42 = 2084.7: "...konnte, so blieb der Zusammenhang der Sache in ein ewiges Geheimnis gehüllt; man trug Elviren, die an...". The shirt and the shading of the eyes could perhaps be about 'in ein ewiges Geheimnis gehüllt'.
Sonnet #300 (text see above) will end on 300-72 = 228 x 16.42 = 3742.7 and start on 3742.7-16.42 = 3726.3: "...ihn ergriffen hatte, als die bestimmte Erinnerung, daß Elvire das Bild, vor dem sie auf Knieen lag...". Concept formation etc.
Every text is trivially a parallel to every other text - it is not there. It must be more than just an associative connection of some kind for being significant. If the parallelisms in these five examples should be not significant, then one must assume that the text to sonnet #49 should be equally relevant to the other four sonnets, and the same for those relative to the others. The reader can easily check that. One concludes probably - although it is easy to see that there are relevant correlations with some of the others as well - that there is a significant correlation. However, even if one can make detailed studies like these, my view is that the decisive test is in the feeling of getting into a groove when finding the right offset - a feeling which is not in other displacements. The procedure used here, with these 5 sonnets, can be used to check any literary text in a similar manner.
Dating of literary texts can probably be determined to some extent with this work of mine. I looked at another short story - Christine Lavant's "Der Knabe" from her collection 'Nell' of 1969: The four stories in this book should reportedly have been written in the fifties, but one can guess on basis of the material in my book that this particular story (at least two of the others seem to be from the fifties) probably was written - or rewritten - in late 1968 or early 1969.
It should be noticed, as is my view, that it is likely that poetic logic will be able to take it much further than any exact sciences of logic and mathematics has done it so far. Which means that it should not really be permitted to run political intrigues against this work of mine.
7. The arbitrarity function
PEB is 'the cold metre' - chilly poetic logic which perhaps could leave some readers out of shape for some time - to which I have added 'Caruso', a booklet of some 70 pages for 'the warm metre', bringing humans back in shape and on good terms with fellow beings again - 19 (or rather 20) poems for which a parallel text can be found in the jewish 'Amidah'. Or in the 19-20 first lines of poems 156-157 in TEQ 16, leaving 366 lines which correspond to the PEB and its 'sonettas'. These 19+366 lines at the end of TEQ 16 follow after the correlation with Midori's recording of Bach and Bartok sonatas in the first 155 poems - a correlation which allowed me to conclude on an apparent universal constant of 2 seconds music per line of poetry - which also seems to be the duration of an acoustic trace in the socalled 'phonological loop', if I got it right. In linguistic terms, 'Caruso' can be seen to be about the form of arbitrarity in natural language.
8. Some final remarks
Let me add humbly that it also means that my book is a good book which should be published. But could somebody please help me find a publisher? It is enough that I get just a little close to a place where people congregate and some 'politician' pops up with threats in the media, perhaps for declaring my work as a challenge on a personal level. This is unfortunately often what seems to be the strategy on academic progress: Some young person comes around with a new conceptualization which looks promising - and the establishment responds with a challenge which sends the source in the ditch. The winner takes the half, the rest is lost, and so the rest of the life of the once young aspiring one is filled with slow zenonian halvings untill the position is regained where s/he was in youth. At the end of his life, he stands there on the brink of the grave and finds that he has come exactly as far as he had when he started in his youth - although perhaps a little has sifted over onto his fellow beings, in invisible format, though. And that was the life of this original thinker. Although this probably is an institutionalized strategy for regulating and controlling the progress of knowledge, quite simply because humans are too evil to be able to handle too much knowledge (for example, if one could learn how to tap and control human thoughts, a small british mafia would probably immediately try and gain control with every individual on earth instead of working for making out of it a useful tool for the freedom and progress of everybody) - which only means that Evil could be an invention made for the purposes of such social regulation of thought. I am not interested in that sort of 'clinch', for which reason I hope that somebody else can help me find a publisher. If I should send a manuscript to a publisher, a wave of terror would follow - and massive progress for the Klipra connection. One day it will hopefully be possible - even in the Free World - to pronounce what the story really is.
I thought of sending the above paper to 'Language', who has that sort of global spread, and took a closer look some of the current US linguistics periodicals. I found that PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) seems - at least to my subjective look - to be devoted to the memory of the following short story: It may have been in the early eighties if not the seventies that Knut Stene Johansen and I were driving in a car to the archipelago Hvaler outside Fredrikstad and passed - could be he slowed down the car or even stopped for some reason at this place - a bridgehead (was it at a border point - the first bridge or something?) where there was a sign telling "SNUPLASS FOR BUSS" = 'turning point/place for bus'. I pointed to the sign and wondered if it were about a "SPYPLASS FOR RUSS" = 'vomiting place for sixth-formers' (celebrating high school or A level exams with much drink in the spring). I am not insinuating that he had planned this remark of mine in advance or that this was the reason why he stopped. It seems like this short story is the basis for the contents of the PMLA. Could be this example is typical for the academic life of the USA. What is it for? Is it for telling that my intellectual achievements are assessed and rejected (like the vomit) at the very bridgehead - even before it has entered the archive-lago? I looked up 'Language' to see if the editor's name really was 'Warren Darrel Andrews', and, indeed, it wasn't. If your name should happen to be Gertrud Lolbak-Fitz or Holem Gopper or Bill Wharrow or something like that, you could of course try and send your articles to 'Linguistic Inquiry'. (I was not present, as far as I know). It is of course possible that a historic template to 'Linguistic Inquiry' could be found in Claire Goll's pamphlet "Mitwelt" - cp. 'Mitte-falt' - which is stored in the university library of Graz - the very 'is of Graz'? - in Austria - when I was there in 2004 to read it, I found that it was only half way opened - 'halvspretta', not 'hals-bretta' like a 'whip-lash', not in 'Sörkedalsveien', though - and I had to ask a librarian ('bibliotekar') to open it. Given this overall impression after a hasty look at the american journals, I found that it was perhaps better to put it out on the internet after all, since I do not want that typical academic rejection which seems to be tougher the more interesting the work is. And this article is interesting and it is doubtful whether I could take such a blow. I therefore leave it on the internet and hope that some journal editor - in the field of linguistics, literature, semiotics or philosophy generally - would be interested in printing it on paper (ask me first, though) of more lasting substance and quality than this ethereal internet. In general, the further east one gets, the more serious the periodicals look, and perhaps some eastern periodical could print it. According to my view, it could of course be printed in more than one periodical, if there is interest for it.
Finally, there seem to be potentially strong political interests who claim that it is not permitted to release my identity or my work at the present moment - 'we will have to wait for yet some time', something like that. There can probably be one and only one reason for such ideas, and that is that the scandal which they want to keep hidden from the public is that Adolf Hitler could have been an agent for England - and therefore they try to keep me off the public - as if Adolf Hitler were me! I suppose the present article will lead to no progress for me but a lot of public ado about related matters - and that is how Hitler still makes progress. However, there can be no such justification for keeping a scholarly article such as the present one off public attention. Likewise, there is nothing in my books which should call for holding them off public attention.
© John Bjarne Grover
On the web 2 May 2011
Last updated 1 July 2011