The transfiguration of Venice

The transfiguration of Venice

John Bjarne Grover

The article is the original version of 26 october 2020 - a new version was published on 7 november 2020

There were a few days of great beauty with music in the air here in Venice some time ago.

I can explain a little of it with some details from my two white-metre books (in norwegian language) 'Stillhetens åndedrag' (harmony) = 'SÅ' and 'Rosens triangel' (counterpoint) = 'RT'. These two combine to sweet music in the air.

10 october 2020 shows the two outer points of a structure in Der Dornenstrauch - from the beginning to the mid point of part 4 with its poem #8 (out of 16), which is the second point. Could be 'service mystics' call this 'Tintin', embodied in the cartoon character.

A day or two later there was a xylophonist playing there - close to Guglie in Venice. Then some days later I photographed the wisteria in the garden behind the linguistics institute in Venice - when I heard a xylophone playing a very mystic (misteria?) natural scale which reminded me of some of the tonality in Nono's quartet which goes in parallel with my 'Stillhetens åndedrag'.

Then some days later I was in for a coffee in a pasticceria nearby. Just when I arrived I had to wait for a few seconds while a photographing tourist or could be local photographed in through the entrance door with his camera very low at the ground outside, at the foot of the door opening - like I had done when I took the 23 photos in the grove on the Danube Island. While I was drinking the coffee, I suddenly became aware of a dog on the floor - it barked a few times as if for calling for attention. I had not noticed it coming in, though. It stood on the point approximately where the photographer had his focus.

Today I was back to the same place and noticed that if one stands on the place of this photographer, one can see in to the place where the dog stood and one is also seen by a surveillance camera up on a corner outside. Turning around yet some degrees - there is the wisteria climbing its scales up in the air. Today I then thought: But this scale should mean that there should be another step beyond the surveillance camera - and that should be up on the next corner at the canal. There was a dove sitting there. This is the beginning of poem 50 in SÅ: - called 'Tabitha (Dorcas)': 'Ringduen er min beste venn. / Hun sitter på svenskeantennen' = 'The ringdove is my best friend. / She sits in the Sweden-antenna'. (The 'Sweden'-antenna is the old word for antennae taking in broadcasting from outside Norway). The end of this poem is the 'calibration point' in Nono's quartet around 01:40 in part 2 - and where my principle of reducing the 105 poems to 64 turn around - in what corresponds to the 'tethering rope' of egyptian hieroglyphs: It is the point of historic discontinuity whereby the travel around the globe has given an extra day in Verne's novel - or where different realities meet in a point which culture strives towards unifying. A natural idea is that ex nihilo phenomena are of this type.

The dove is also in poem 45: 'Det sitter en due i en avlyttingsmast - / at hvilen er sølibat' = 'There sits a dove in a surveillance mast - / that the rest is celibacy' with mirror point in the same poem 'og det som er nedenfor dette lover / ingenting arbitrært' = 'and that which is below this promises / nothing arbitrary'.

Now looking up the counterpoint to this harmony, the fact seems to be that 'Rosens triangel' is read as a true counterpoint, not a parallel - which means that #45 in SÅ = #20 in RT (there are 64 poems in each book). The poems in RT are three stanzas in each of the 64 poems, but the last quarter ('Benedictine') distributes its 16 poems = 48 stanzas over the 48 first poems which then each has 4 stanzas (and the resulting 48 poems follow the 'keys to heaven' reasonably well) . To this #20 there corresponds the mid stanza in #58:

Datteren føres til hushjørnets kant
av en hund som trekker i taket.
Der stanser de ikke opp en instant
men snur og kommer tilbake.

The daughter is led to the end of the house/curb
by a dog who pulls in the lead/grip.
There they do not stop for a single instant
but turn and come back.

But this benedictine stanza is just the 'steps' in the scale of the cameras - ending in the dog - where they turn and go back again.

Harmony stanza to this mid point of counterpoint stanza #58 is then the mid stanza in #7 in SÅ:

Da gir du henne en fordel
og hører en stemme som sa
at hvis du ser kattens formel
da er den vel foran, da.

Then you give her an advantage
and hear a voice that said
that if you see the cat's formula
then it is in the front, probably.

But this is just the voice that spoke in the air above the heads of the people (under the ceiling, apparently) in another pasticceria in Venice some years ago - it said 'è un ragazzo':

at hvis du ser kattens formel
a tvistus ra-gatt- SO
è un ragazzo

This is when one has to consult the 'doublewords' listed in the end of SÅ - each line in the book is aligned with a word that occurs twice and only twice in TEQ books 13-16. The words for this mid stanza of #7 are 'fat, feet, fft, field'.

This means that the doubleword for the voice spoken in the air some years ago is 'FFT' = 'Fast Fourier Transform' (converting time into frequency) - precisely the cornered steps of the scales of the FFT butterfly flowgraph diagram. The perfect explanation to that voice some years ago - and to the dog now. An FFT version of the wisteria.

This is also why PTRSIM PIK must be brought out of the shadows of political intrigue and be subjected to serious scholarly attention.

The 'formula' mentioned as 'the cat's formula' is in the mid stanza of poem 50 (between the ringdove and the calibration point):

Det var plankevann, det, ved husfoten, tidlig.
SÅ komma Savnet omkring.
Is there a forskjell, really?
Nå er det ingenting.

That was plankwater, that, at the housefoot, early.
SAW comma Yearning/Sawnet around.
Is there a difference, really?
Now there is nothing.

SO is the formula, or SÅ the ragatt-SO. I have guessed that the dog was called Adesso. The yearning was around the corner, the steps up the cameras - from the housefoot and up. Norwegian 'komma' is translated 'comma' but 'kom a[v]' = 'came from', 'was caused by'.

The doubleword for the title 'Tabitha (Dorcas)' of #50 is 'eternal'.

'Tintin' also has a dog (as I think I recall from my childhood when I read some of those cartoons). In fact when I passed the region of the xylophonist in the street (probably the day before he was there) it occurred to me that I saw the same man with some 50 metres interval (but I dont think he had the time to run past me) - with the same hairdo as that cartoon character. Could be this is a 'mystic' phenomenon which this cartoon is about. (I dont know if it has interest for 'intelligence' ideas).

The doublewords to RT are not from TEQ but from PEB, which have a more temporal character. For the mid stanza of #7 the doublewords are 'bred, brick, brief, brightness'.

The last part of TEQ also has 16 poems - the 8th of these ends 'They don't miss anything. / They have a total control' which is the exact opposite of the first lines in the work: 'Me and the Leotad girl / on the slippery slope'. It is very possible that these make for the principle for acoustic feature recognition I referred to in the last part of my PhD dissertation 'A waist of time': The border to silence (like the knocking sounds that could be recorded for a few days but suddenly left no traces in the recording any longer, even if they continued to be heard as before) and the border to white noise - cp. the 23 black-and-white (thresholded) photos.

A few weeks ago I was having some potatos near the Guglie bridge and had fun with a gull who caught in the beak every potato I threw - untill suddenly it seemed to catch sight of police and ran away.

Two interesting observations on the correlate to the 'foldover' in the 2-dimensional schimmel image in the 3-dimensional (assumed) lapis philosophorum - whether that be a relevant observation to this phenomenon of new nominalism or not: The articles 'Lapis philosophorum as the articulatory oral space' and 'The turning of the lapis philosophorum'. For those who have access to 'Rosens triangel' (or Vol.4 p.1219-1222), the discussion of Schoenberg's principles of 1) prime theme, 2) retrograde (theme backwards), 3) inversion (intervals upside-down) and 4) retrograde inversion - as a musical 'coordinate system' for solving the unsolvable meetingplace of harmony and counterpoint by thinking backwards and upside down, the example discussed in this article lends interesting empirical support to the theory discussed in 'RT' by way of the stanzas 13a, 32c and 45b (a-b-c=stanzas 1-2-3) assigned to poem 58 - or counterpointing the mid stanza in SÅ #7 - relative to the material in the article The christmas present. The stanza 13a goes: "Når fargen rød er et mystisk objekt / spredd ut på tilværelsens lerret, / da spiller det lys på en mystisk knekt / i et vindu som lydene flerret" = "When the colour red is a mystic object / spread out on existence's canvas, / then plays the light on a mystic fellow / in a window the sounds tore apart". It is of course possible that this 12-tone philosophy makes for a coordinate system of real interest which a political 'screwdriver' coordinate system could be imitating.

The article continues with some political comments in 'Some further data'.

Source

Nono, L.: "Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima". LaSalle Quartet. Deutsche Grammophon 1986. 437 720-2.