Metamagical Themas, page 31
forget about where youre bound youre bound for a three octave fantastic hexagram. you'll see it. dont worry. you are Not bound to pick wildwood flowers
.... like i said, youre bound for a three octave titanic tantagram
your little squirrel,
Pety, the Wheatstraw
Dylan is not the only popular singer of the sixties to have had a literary bent. John Lennon, when he was in his early twenties, reveled in the nonsensical, and published two short books called In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The books contain mostly nonsense poetry, although there are also several prose selections. Two of Lennon's poems will serve to illustrate his idiosyncratic style.
I SAT BELONELY
I sat belonely down a tree,
humbled fat and small.
A little lady sing to me
I couldn't see at all.
I'm looking up and at the sky,
to find such wondrous voice.
Puzzly puzzle, wonder why,
I hear but have no choice.
"Speak up, come forth, you ravel me",
I potty menthol shout.
"I know you hiddy by this tree".
But still she won't come out.
Such softly singing lulled me sleep,
an hour or two or so
I wakeny slow and took a peep
and still no lady show.
Then suddy on a little twig
I thought I see a sight,
A tiny little tiny pig,
that sing with all its might.
"I thought you were a lady",
I giggle,-well I may,
To my suprise the lady,
got up-and flew away.
THE FAULTY BAGNOSE
Softly softly, treads the Mungle
Thinner thorn behaviour street.
Whorg canteell whorth bee asbin?
Cam we so all complete,
With all our faulty bagnose?
The Mungle pilgriffs far awoy
Religeorge too thee worled.
Sam fells on the waysock-side
And somforbe on a gurled,
With all her faulty bagnose!
Our Mungle speaks tonife at eight
He tell us wop to doo
And bless us cotten sods again
Oamnipple to our jew
(With all their faulty bagnose).
Bless our gurlished wramfeed
Me cursed cafe kname
And bless thee loaf he eating
With he golden teeth aflame
Give us OUR faulty bagnose!
Good Mungle blaith our meathalls
Woof mebble morn so green the wheel
Staggaboon undie some grapeload
To get a little feel
of my own faulty bagnose.
Its not OUR faulty bagnose now
Full lust and dirty hand
Whitehall the treble Mungle speak
We might as wealth be band
Including your faulty bagnose
Give us thisbe our daily tit
Good Mungle on yer. travelled
A goat of many coloureds
Wiberneth all beneath unravelled
And not so MUCH OF YER FAULTY BAGNOSE!
The first of these is transparent and charming, while the second is somewhat baffling and disturbing. What in the world is a bagnose? No clear image comes through. And why are all these bagnoses faulty? And does "faulty" have its normal meaning here? Hard to tell.
* * *
The idea of "normal meanings" is turned on its head in a recent book of poetry by William Benton called just that: Normal Meanings. One section of the book is titled "Normal Meanings"; here is an extract from it.
Escape is, escape
was, once more,
continued.
Vineyards
as dusky.
He watches it wrinkle into a school bell.
It isn't music sometimes, I'm
happy.
Leaves, practically falling
off and into the air.
Hills river
sunset ice-cream
cone.
The buildings. Things
build up. It
must be so many
normal meanings.
The downstairs lights. Probably I doubt.
These and other
stories.
The loveliness
of houses.
Clarissa is the name of the, bug I just sent somewhere.
The falseness it abjures has seemed in statements
we are losing.
It's hard to say. A note of privilege
which turns up here in their appearances.
I drink.
The cobweb is becoming a strand of
lamplight, its black heart
blessed.
A nice
Elaine
by the beer.
Some may find the amorphousness of this type of poetry amusing or engaging; others may find it tiresome, confusing. I personally find it provocative for a while, but then I begin to lose interest.
* * *
I have somewhat greater interest in the writings of the little-known American rhetorician, Y. Serm Clacoxia, who, in the past 25 years or so, has sporadically penned various pieces of nonsense poetry and prose. Clacoxia's prose is marked by a certain degree of vehemence and fire, although it is sometimes a little hard to figure out exactly what he is ranting and raving about. Here follows one of his most lyrical tracts, entitled "The Illusions of Alacrity".
For millennia it has been less than appreciated how futile are the efforts of those who seek to sow sobriety in the furrows of trivia. To those of us who have striven to clarify what has been left unclear, it has proven a loss. To others who, whilst valiantly straddling the fine line that divides arid piquancy from acrid pungency, have struggled to set right the many Undeeds and Unsaids of yore, life has shown itself as a beast of many colors, a mountain of many flags, a hole of many anchors.
Who, in fact, were the Outcasts of Episode, if not the champions of clarity? Where, indeed, were the witnesses to litany, when their fortress of fecundity was a-being stormed by the Ovaltine Monster, that incubus of frozen cheerios and swollen bananas? And dare one wonder, with the bassoon of lunacy so shrilly betoning the ruined fiddles of flatulism, how it is that doublethink, narcolepsy, and poseurism are unthreading themselves across our land like tall, statuesque, half-uneaten yet virtuous whippoorwhills? Can it be that a cornflake-catechism has beguiled us into an unsworn acceptance of never-takism?
What sort of entiments are they, that would uncouth a mulebound lout and churlishly swirl his burly figure, unfurl and twirl his curly figure, hurl his whirly figure, into the circuline vaults of hysteresis? With a drop of sweat unroasting his feverish brow, we decry his fate; with the patience of a juggernaut and the telemachy of a dozen opossums, we lament his disparity. And summoning all the powers that be, we unbow the jelly of our broken dreams, dashing it with the full fury of a pleistocene hurdy-gurdy against the lubrified and bulbous nexus of that which, having doomed the dinosaurs, seeks the engulfing of all that moves.
Thus we act; and perhaps action itself is the Anatole's Curlicue of our era. It is high time to recognize that action, and action alone, will be the agent that transmutes the flowery barrier of unutterability into an arbitrary but sacred iota of purposefulness, which cannot help but penetrate into an otherwise nameless and universally spaghettified lack of meaning, which smears and beclouds the crab-lit hopes of half-beings begging for deliverance from their own private, yet strangely tuberculine maelstroms that begat, and begotten were from, a howling sea of ribosomal plagiarism.
This is deliberate nonsense, of course, to be contrasted with the nondeliberate nonsense of, say, Dylan Thomas, or the nonsense to be found in crackpot letters written to scientists. Crackpot ideas seem to be an inevitable ingredient of any society in which serious scientific research is carried out; there is no way to plug all the cracks, so to speak. There is no way to ensure that only high-quality science will be done. Fortunately, most journals do not publish absolute nonsense or gobbledygook; it is filtered out at a very early stage. However, one journal I have come across whose pages are filled with utter nonsense-meant seriously-is called Art-Language. To show what I mean, here are two short excerpts from the May, 1975 issue. The first one is taken from the beginning of an article called "Community Work". It seems, from the table of contents, to have been written by three people collectively. The second one is taken from an article called "Vulgar and Popular Opinions", and seems to have a single author.
Dionysus gets a job. (Re: language has got a hold on U. S.) (It's a Whorfian conspiracy!)
This is hopeless manqué ontological alienation which is still dealing with ideas about 'discovery' as a function of a metaphysics of categories. Only for researchers is the failure of a modal logic industry to `catch- my-experience --the birth of tragedy.
Going-on in A-L indexed (somehow) is a thing-in-and-for-(dynamically) itself. That we never catch up with the NaturKulturLogik has little to do with the 'actualizing' sets of the frozen dialogue ... and it's not just a ledger; our problems with set-theoretical axiomata are embedded into our praxis as more than just historical antecedents ... more than nomological permissibility ... more than selective filtration. We still don't recognize ourselves as very fundamental history producers.
The possibility of a defence of a set, as with 'a decision', is an index-margin
of a prima facie ersatz principle for action (!). (There is no workable distinction between oratio recta and oratio obliqua.) All we are left with is a deontic Drang. Think of that as a chain strength possibility of what, eventually, comes out as a product (epistemic conditions?) and the product is not a Frankfurt-ish packing-it-all-in .... A slogan (?) might be thought of as a free-form comprised of multiple structural features occurring in a (partially) given, or negotiable, unit relative to others. That is, the slogan is a unit in one sense or another. In. going-on (ideologically, perhaps), a slogan is a unitary filler-for-and-of that stretch of surf < surf which is in a B X S position ... But there is the critical issue of that `filler' as a reified function of the pusillanimous tittle-tattle of authenticity in its ellipticality (as a Das Volk holism) ... (e.g.) 'the Fox' material, passim, falls into that trap in dealing with its cultural space as a wantonly dialectical 'region' approaching the solution to `the negation of essence' (of homo sapiens, art or what?).
I am tempted to quote further, to show how the wild quality of the A-L prose just goes on and on. But life is short. It is hard for this human being to believe that these paragraphs were meant to communicate something to anybody, but the journal appears regularly (at least it used to), and can be found on the shelves of reputable art libraries. Isn't it time that somebody blew the whistle? The curious thing about Art-Language is that the collective that writes it appears to consist of people who are deeply concerned with issues that hold much interest for me: the nature of reference, the relationship of wholes to parts, the connection of art and reality, the structure of society, the philosophy of set theory, the questionable existence of mathematical concepts, and so on. What is amazing is how such concepts can be so obscured by language that it is hard to make out anything except huge billows of very thick smoke.
* * *
An American poet whose work explores ground midway between nonsense and sense is Russell Edson. He writes tiny surrealistic vignettes that shed a strange light on life. Often he performs strange reversals, as of animate and inanimate beings, or humans and animals. His grammar is also oblique, one of his favorite devices being to refer repeatedly to something specific with the indefinite article "a", thus disorienting the reader. A typical sample of Edson's style is the following, drawn from his book The Clam Theater:
When Science is in the Country
When science is in the country a cow meows and the moon jumps from limb to limb through the trees like a silver ape.
The cow bow-wows to hear all voice of itself. The grass sinks back into the earth looking for its mother.
A farmer dreamed he harvested the universe, and had a barn full of stars, and a herd of clouds fenced in the pasture.
The farmer awoke to something screaming in the kitchen, which he identified as the farmerette.
Oh my my, cried the farmer, what is to become of what became?
It's a good piece of bread and a bad farmer man, she cried.
Oh the devil take the monotony of the field, he screamed.
Which grows your eating thing, she wailed.
Which is the hell with me too, he screamed.
And the farmerette? she screamed.
And the farmerette, he howled.
A scientist looked through his magnifying glass in the neighborhood.
This eerie tale leaves one with a host of unresolved images. That, of course, is Edson's intent. And in this regard, Edson's work is quite typical. Most of the nonsense of the twentieth century, it seems, has this deliberately upsetting quality to it, reflecting a deep malaise. It is utterly different from the nonsense of the preceding centuries. Similar trends exist in the other arts, particularly in music, where "classical" composers have lost 99 percent of their audience by their experimentation with randomness and cacophony. However, the spirit of experimentation has also crept into rock music, where electronic sounds and unusual rhythms are occasionally heard. The surrealistic, nonsensical spirit also pervades the names of popular groups, such as "Iron Butterfly", "Tangerine Dream", "Led Zeppelin", "Joy of Cooking", "Human Sexual Response", "Captain Beefheart", "Brand X", "Jefferson Starship", "Average White Band", and so on.
* * *
Perhaps one of the virtues of nonsense is that it opens our minds to new possibilities. The mere juxtaposition of a few arbitrary words can send the mind soaring into imaginary worlds. It is as if sense were too mundane, and we need a breather once in a while. Perhaps sense is also too confining. Nonsense stresses the incomprehensible face of the universe, while sense stresses the comprehensible. Clearly both are important. Zen teachings have striven to impart the path to "enlightenment". Although I don't believe that such a mystical state exists, I am fascinated by the paths that are offered. Zen itself is perhaps the archetypal source of utter nonsense. It seems fitting to close this column with two Zen koans taken from the Mumonkan, or "Gateless Gate"-a set of koans commented upon by the Zen master Mumon in the thirteenth century.
Joshu Examines a Monk in Meditation
Joshu went to a place where a monk had retired to meditate and asked him: "What is, is what?" The monk raised his fist. Joshu replied: "Ships cannot remain where the water is too shallow." And he left. A few days later Joshu went again to visit the monk and asked the same question. The monk answered the same way. Joshu said: "Well given, well taken, well killed, well saved." And he bowed to the monk.
Mumon's comment.
The raised fist was the same both times. Why is it Joshu did not admit the first and approved the second one? Where is the fault? Whoever answers this knows that Joshu's tongue has no bone so he can use it freely. Yet perhaps Joshu is wrong. Or, through that monk, he may have discovered his mistake. If anyone thinks that the one's insight exceeds the other's, he has no eyes.
Mumon's Poem:
The light of the eyes is as a comet,
And Zen's activity is as lightning.
The sword that kills the man
Is the sword that saves the man.
Learning is Not the Path
Nansen said: "Mind is not Buddha. Learning is not the path."
Mumon's comment:
Nansen was getting old and forgot to be ashamed. He spoke out with bad breath and exposed the scandal of his own home. However, there are few who appreciate his kindness.
Mumon's Poem:
When the sky is clear the sun appears,
When the earth is parched rain will fall.
He opened his heart fully and spoke out,
But it was useless to talk to pigs and fish.
Post Scriptum:
I was quite aware that I had omitted some nonsense specialists, such as James Joyce, when I wrote this column. But there were reasons. I haven't studied Joyce, and I feel there is a lot of complexity there. To call Joyce's strange concoctions "nonsense" is to miss the mark.
Several people wrote in, disappointed that I did not include anything by Walt Kelly, the creator of "Pogo". I have to agree that Kelly was a unique writer of ingenious and charming nonsense. In fact, I was lucky enough to grow up knowing "The Pogo Song Book", a record of some of Kelly's most inspired silly songs, some of them belted out by Kelly himself. One that gets across the flavor very well is this one:
TWIRL, TWIRL
Twirl! Twirl! Twinkle between!
The tweezers are twist in the twittering twain.
Twirl! Twirl! Entwiningly twirl
'Twixt twice twenty twigs passing platitudes plain.
