Spells

“Spell” is one of my favorite words. It relates language and magic; to spell a word is to describe what phonemes it is composed of, to cast a spell is to say a word of power and thus control reality. It also just means “word” or “news,” as in “Gospel” = “Good News,” and its German cognate “Spiele” means, in  addition to everything the word means in English, “play” and “game” -  “Ich spiele Cello,” “Die Baseball-Spiel hat Spaß gemacht.”

This is just one of the reasons that the poem I’m almost certainly going to choose for my “exemplary poem” in Junior Poet (we choose one poem by our poet, memorize it, recite it at the beginning of our panel, then give a reading of it; at that point the professors start asking questions and other poems come into the picture) is “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” supposedly the longest sonnet ever written in the English language (there are eight stresses per line).

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ‘ vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, ‘ womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ‘ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ‘ stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ‘ her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ‘ self ín self steepèd and páshed—qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ‘ áll now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ‘ whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ‘ Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ‘ upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ‘ right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ‘ twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ‘ thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

I don’t want to give a detailed reading of this poem right now – perhaps in a month or so. But keep it in mind. It’s one of my favorite poems in the English language, and one of the main reasons for that is its incantatory quality – Hopkins said it was meant to be “almost sung” – and howo the word “spelt” is there in the title. What does it mean? That the prophecy of the Apocalypse (this poem is about the end of the world) is there to be read in the Sibyl’s leaves? Or that the prophecy is spelt out, caused, by the fact of it being prophesied? I think both connotations are meant to be present. And that’s what’s great about the word spell – it takes many distinct but related concepts and gives one word to the entire set, so you can use this one word “spell” and evoke an entire backdrop of meaning – “language,” “magic,” “news,” “game,” etc.

Alice and Bob is Married

Several friends of mine are taking Symbolic Logic this semester, and one of them has brought to my attention something somewhat bizarre. His textbook, it seems, treats “and” as if it is never equivocal. Just intuitively, this seems wrong.

Take these two examples: firstly, “The lines A and B are parallel,” secondly, “Alice and Bob are Moroccan.” In normal English, the first example almost always means that the lines A and B are parallel to each other; re-phrased unambiguously, one would say “The lines A and B are parallel to each other.” But in normal English, the second example almost never intends any connection between Alice and Bob, except for their both being Moroccan; it could be re-phrased “Alice is Moroccan and Bob is Moroccan.”

Even worse, though, there are some words that can be taken either way by a reasonable person. Take the sentence “Alice and Bob are married.” Usually this means “Alice and Bob are married (to each other).” But I could imagine a situation where it meant “Alice and Bob are married (to Charlie and Deborah, respectively).” The word “and”, it seems, can be ambiguous even knowing the definitions of all the words in the sentence – while the textbook writer for this Symbolic Logic class wants to claim it is never ambiguous, ever!

It took a few minutes of thinking for me to figure out exactly how to phrase the ambiguity formally, but here it is. “A and B are C” can mean one of two things. Either “A and B are C” = “A&B are C” = “(A is C)&(B is C)”, or “A and B are C” = “{A,B} is C” – the collection of objects {A,B} possesses a quality, namely C. This is what we mean when we say “line A and line B are parallel,” or “Alice and Bob are married (to each other).”

In other words, we use “and” to do two different things – to apply attributes to multiple things at a time (what we do when we mean “A&B are C”), and to associate things into groups, and then talk about the groups (what we do when we mean “{A,B} is C”). And there’s no way to distinguish between the two without context.

There’s an easy way to fix this, of course. Change the grammar so that when we mean “{A,B} is C”, we don’t say “Alice and Bob are married” – we say “Alice and Bob is married.” It makes sense; after all, we don’t mean “Alice is married and Bob is married,” we mean they can be considered as a unit – “Alice and Bob” – and that unit is married. Is. Not are, because it’s one thing. It’s a set containing two elements, but it’s still a single set.

of course, we’ll never actually talk like this. It sounds stupid. “Alice and Bob is married”? But it does eliminate considerable ambiguity. It’s worth thinking about.

Ofermod

We recently read the Battle of Maldon in my Medieval Literature class. It’s essentially a narrative of a battle between heathen Viking invaders and the Christian Englishmen, resulting in the defeat of the English and tribute – “danegeld” – being paid to the Norsemen.

What people find interesting about the poem is the description of the main character. It portrays Beorhtnoth, the English thane, as a courageous, pious man, who is ‘tricked’ by the Danes into letting them cross a bridge, essentially giving up a defensible position and making it inevitable the Danes would win. By ‘tricked’, I mean the Danes asked him if they could cross and he said yes.

The poem is ambiguous as to whether this was a wrong action or not – the word used to describe his character at that point is “ofermod”. There are no other examples of “ofermod” in Old English, so we just don’t know what it means. It is literally “over-courage”, “over-heart”; but does this mean he has too much courage, i.e. is foolhardy, or that he has an impressive amount of courage, a good thing? No one knows. People read it different ways. (Incidentally, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”, about the aftermath of this battle, that addresses the ambiguity in question. It’s good, go read it.)

There’s a similar disagreement about the poem “The Windhover”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom I’m studying for Junior Poet). The word is “buckle”. Does it mean that the thing buckling is collapsing? That it is being bound together, as in buckling a belt? Does it mean “buckle” as in “buckler”, a type of shield? No one knows, and which it is makes a huge difference in how the poem is read.

I’m not sure what to think of ambiguities like that. They are certainly interesting, and make possible multiple interpretations. To that extent, I like them.

But this might be just because I don’t like having a work of literature be too “preachy”, and having ambiguity makes it less preachy – but really, ambiguity only makes it seem less preachy, it doesn’t change the actual meaning of the poem, assuming there is one. After all, it seems like the poet himself knew what the poem ought to have meant, but that we cannot, which is immeasurably frustrating, and implies the poet failed somehow. Especially when which it is doesn’t determine just some nuance of meaning, but how to read the entire poem.

Which is it? Is ambiguity in literature desirable? If so, to what extent? This is a question I haven’t been thinking about for as long as I probably should have been, and I don’t really have an answer formulated yet. I have a gut reaction against books that try to preach a certain moral, and try to avoid doing so in my own stories, but then again most of my favorite books do have messages they’re trying to convey, and I don’t fault them for it. What’s going on here?

What Makes a Good Poem

I’m taking “Junior Poet” right now, and we’re starting off the semester reading a lot of more modern poetry. Particularly, we spent an entire day of class analyzing the poem “Persimmons”, by Li-Young Lee. There was much conversation about how great a poem it was, mostly based on the fact that he uses the poem to talk about the nature of poetry and sexuality in an interesting manner, and tells a somewhat interesting story.

I pretty much disagree with everything the professor had to say about the poem’s worth.

It’s not that I don’t think the poem is about the nature of poetry (it is), or that it doesn’t narrate a somewhat interesting story. It’s that all of those things are irrelevant if the music of the words themselves – the simple cadence of the phrases, regardless of the meaning – aren’t beautiful while still conveying meaning not through words, but just through the sound of the words, and if the inages used aren’t unusually evocative and memorable. If it doesn’t do those things, it seems to me, it’s really just a prose passage with funny line breaks.

But instead, the JPo class seems to go in assuming its a great poem, not looking at the form of the poem much at all. Because there’s really not much there – there’s a few tricky ornaments added, but that’s like having statues and stained-glass-windows propped up in midair without the cathedral holding them up. They fall down.

It’s not that I hate modern and contemporary poetry or don’t understand free verse. T.S. Eliot is an amazing poet who succeeds at what poets have to succeed at, as I outlined a few paragraphs up – Prufrock is actually the poem I was primarily thinking of when writing that. But many poets today seem to have forgotten what poetry is actually about.

Book Review: Watership Down

I apologize for my lack of posting this last week; I’ve been busy securing an apartment to live in this coming semester and buying furniture to put in it. I’ll be doing that for another week, then I move in August 31st and the semester starts. Until then, though, I have a decent amount of free time.

Well. That said, even though I wasn’t posting, I found the time last week to read Watership Down, one of my favorite books from years gone by. The premise: a group of rabbits leave their warren on the basis of a vision of doom one of them had, and they set out trying to make a life for themselves on remote Watership Down. Once there, they realize their group is entirely bucks, no does, and so they try to find a warren that will give some females to them. Instead they find a warren led by the Nazi-esque General Woundwort. Meanwhile, a mythology is being built up of Elahrairah, the rabbit folk hero.

Anyway, I hadn’t touched it in over three years, and decided I needed to revisit it. Verdict: It is, as I remembered, awesome; it’s maybe even better than I remembered it being. (So, if you never have, if you get nothing else out of this post – go read it!)

But there’s an interesting caveat to this endorsement I want to explore. The book’s awesomeness is definitively not because of the characters. I like Hazel, and Fiver, and Blackberry, and Bigwig; General Woundwort is indeed a disturbing villain, for a rabbit; Elahrairah makes a cool folk hero, Lord Frith and Prince Rainbow are both well-done gods, and the Black Rabbit of Inle is awesome in its role as the Grim Reaper. But -

Those characters aren’t why the book is amazing. It’s rather how well the author, Richard Adams, paints the outlines of the rabbits’ world, making up his own “rabbit language” and convincing the reader that it is real (“silflay hraka, u embleer rah!” is left untranslated in the text of the book, but the reader already knows what it means by then, and using it doesn’t break suspension of disbelief at all), showing how differently they think about things (they don’t realize cars are machines; only the most intelligent among them understand floatation), in general presenting rabbitting society as alien and yet compelling.

And probably it’s that very achievement – the establishment of so alien a culture for all the characters to live in – that makes it so the characters are hard to relate to. In the end, Hazel’s a good guy, but he’s just a rabbit, and I could never have a conversation with him, even if we spoke the same language; we’d have nothing to talk about.

And because the lack of compelling characters is a direct result of the nature of the book as semi-anthropomorphic fiction, I doubt Adams could have done any better. It’s a problem with the medium he’s working in.

Epic Metal Playlists

I recently fixed something with my computer so that I can once again scrobble (i.e. submit lists of listened-to tracks to last.fm, which will then give me musical suggestions based on my listening habits). In celebration, I suppose, I put together two playlists on my last.fm account, both of which point out phenomena I find interesting in the music I listen to – the tendency towards really long songs, songs which often tell a story and move from one “movement” to another, and the tendency to use a certain language specific to epic metal, by which I don’t mean singing in foreign languages (though this is seen as well), but rather using certain words and phrases much more often than they appear in ordinary English.

Epic Length Epic Metal – ‘Epic metal bands (i.e. viking, folk, power, symphonic, progressive metal bands) have a tendency to love really long songs. This is a playlist of all of the songs in my library over 8 minutes long. There’s a lot of them; they make up 51/828 songs in my popular music library (6%), and take up 8 hours, 52 minutes of the 66 hours, 23 minutes of music there (13%).’

Language of Epic Metal – ‘There are a certain set of words that appear over and over in the titles of songs I listen to – meaning, songs of the “epic metal” genre (viking, folk, power, symphonic, and progressive metal, to be precise). This isn’t surprising; every subculture develops its own distinct language, with words that carry special significance for its members. This is an exploration of those words. The playlist includes every song I have from these genres that contains in its title one or more of these often-appearing words (defined as appearing in >9 titles). The words: Dark, Dream, Land, Night, Song, Time.’

You probably can’t listen to the playlists on last.fm unless you’re a subscriber, but you can still look at the track listing and compare them with your own music library, if some of your musical tastes overlap with mine.

Monkeys, Typewriters, and Interpretation

It’s a common statement. “Enough monkeys with typewriters, given enough time, could eventually write Hamlet.” The idea being that all human artistic accomplishment, and Creation in general, is essentially just random noise, and inherently meaningless.

Well, firstly, the claim is false… give typewriters to monkeys and they probably won’t even try to type with them, or if they do they’ll just hit the same key over and over and over. It won’t be the string of random letters and symbols needed to “eventually write Hamlet”. And even if they did just write random symbols, the experiment would have to be run for an impossibly long time before they produced anything. If every atom in the universe were a typewriter spewing out a random character every second, it would take longer than the universe has been around to write just a sonnet of Shakespeare’s, let alone Hamlet, which is much longer.

Not that that proves much; I never saw the monkey analogy as a very good one for random chance bringing about human art in the first place.

The issue isn’t whether monkeys could really write Shakespeare. Rather, we are meant to wonder why, if Hamlet is a finitely long work that can be converted into a number (take a text file with the content of Hamlet in it; that file is just a string of 1s and 0s, i.e. a really long number), call it H, that a random number generator would eventually spew out if it ran for long enough, why should we look at it as in any way transcendent? Why should we look at human thought as in any sense transcendent if everything it produces is finite?

The answer, I think, is that even if the random number H could be generated by a random number generator, it can’t be interpreted by the random number generator. There needs to be someone out there who picks out H from the other random numbers our RNG spews out, says “this is Hamlet”, reads it, and gets from it what there is to be gotten from the play Hamlet. That requires language, something that doesn’t seem to have a very good finite representation. Without a way of translating those 1s and 0s not just into letters (which can be done with a computer program), but into words, H is no more meaningful than H*1.1 or H*0.9.

I think it’s interesting that H, as a number, is meaningless in and of itself. The computer needs pre-written rules for how to translate H into a series of letters and symbols. If it has a dictionary installed it could then try (if it were told to) to analyze the strings of letters it sees and paraphrase the entire thing. But the computer would never look at the strings of letters and see words, by which I mean things that have meanings that we can try to approximate with other words, but cannot define exactly.

It seems to me that language is really what separates humans from computers, RNGs, or monkeys with typewriters – those all manipulate symbols, but humans actually use words, language. So the fact that humans speak a language, rather than just manipulate symbols, is what makes the number H not equivalent to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They are the same quantitatively, but not qualitatively.

Talking Animals WTF?

A common motif in children’s movies (and books, for that matter) is that of talking animals. But not all talking animals are created equal. There are two different kinds of talking animals in children’s stories: the ones that have their own civilizations, and live basically independently from humans, versus the ones that coexist with humans and can even talk to them.

Of course, thesee two different kinds of talking animal stories have subgroups. Take the stories where there are only talking animals – no humans. (I include here stories where humans exist, but don’t play a big role, and there are no human characters or there are only a few minor human characters and they can’t understand the animals’ speech.)

One of my favorite kid’s movies of all time, The Lion King, has only animals as characters, and so in it the characters, while animals, are essentially human. Their animal natures don’t really have much effect other than to give an instant characterization: lions are royal and brave (generally speaking), monkeys are clever, hyenas are deceptive and ruthless, etc. But the characters themselves are basically human. The plot would make just as much sense with human characters, though the movie would be worse.

On the other hand, the book Watership Down (also one of my favorites) actually uses the fact that these are animals, not humans; the rabbits are very, well, rabbity, not very intelligent, not making very big plans, etc. There are humans, and how they endanger the rabbits is important, but the gulf between rabbit and human is so great that humans are essentially gods – they don’t care about rabbit society, and aren’t expected to. The humans can kill the rabbits if they want to, but just as often don’t care at all about them. The rabbits are the main characters, they aren’t humans though they have some human-like characteristics, and the humans are basically gods.

Now take those stories where there are both humans and talking animals, and the humans are, generally speaking, the main characters. This poses an interesting problem as to how to portray the animals. A common error, I think, is to present the animals as basically human, and to imply (through having some animals able to talk) that all animals are equal with humans. This just causes moral confusion.

I recently saw the movie Up (the reason for my making this post in the first place); in it, there are dogs with collars that make them talk basically like humans, and the plot centers on the main character trying to protect a bird (not even a talking bird!) from being captured (not killed, captured!) by the villain. Why exactly would it have been wrong for the bird to be captured and brought to America? I really have no idea. It makes no philosophical sense, I’d say. But emotionally, I think it had something to do with how the dogs were able to talk. This is my problem with stories with humans and talking animals where the talking animals are essentially human.

For an alternate kind of story with talking animals and talking humans, I have to turn to fairy-tales – the story of Cinderella, as told in the original German (Aschenputtel, which I read in German class once upon a time). In it, there are birds that help Cinderella out by giving her clothes, and who protect her by revealing her sisters as frauds (the sisters cut off their toes and heel so they can fit into the tiny shoe, and the birds call out “Ruckedidu Ruckedidu, Blut ist im Schuhe!”). They can talk, yes – but they’re not people. They don’t have personalities, per se. They’re basically nature embodied. We would be somewhat disconcerted if these birds died, because they can talk – they give us this link to nature, to understand what nature “wants”. But they don’t make us think that animals are human, or that we should feel bad when we kill a bird and eat it.

Hm. Interesting Tolkien connection; he talks about talking animals in his “On Fairy-Stories”, saying that the presence of talking animals was a clear sign that something was a fairy tale. It is, I’m pretty sure, this last kind of talking-to-animals (and not the animals-are-human kind!) that he was talking about. Anyway, good essay. Worth reading.

I Feel That

People should stop using the phrase “I feel that”/”I feel like” to mean “I think that”.

This is something I’ve noticed more and more over the last few months; people seem to think that making assertions about their beliefs and opinions is somehow offensive, but making assertions about their emotions is not. The idea being, I suppose, that we have control over our beliefs, and so if we think something that runs contrary to someone else’s beliefs, we are intentionally contradicting them, while we don’t have control over our emotions to nearly the same degree, so if we feel something differently from someone else, it’s not your fault and you’re not casting judgement on the other person anyway, you just feel differently.

In other words, it’s a kind of sickly relativism. And it really bugs me, because it signifies a larger shift away from rational debate. As soon as we start taking differences of opinion as personal insults, we lose the ability to reason with the opposition, and it all turns into a question of who’s more emotionally persuasive.

Ah well.

Aural Suggestion

I’ve been thinking recently about a certain poetic technique that I don’t recall ever hearing a name for. I have no idea if it even has a name. But it’s an interesting technique, one which (perhaps) I would like to see more.

It could, I suppose, be called “aural suggestion”. The idea is, you suggest, via rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, that the next word in the poem/song/whatever will be one thing, and then have it be something else. A few examples to show what I mean (none taken from poem of particular merit, but my only intent is to get across the idea of what I mean):

• From the Nightwish song “Wish I Had An Angel”, there are the lines “Last dance, / first kiss / Your touch, my bliss / Beauty always comes with dark thoughts“. But the kiss-bliss alliteration suggests, to me at least, that the last line ought to be “beauty always comes with darkness“.
• In my poem “Week-Day of the Conqueror”, a quatrain runs, “Tyr’s time now comes, the fighter god / Off to battle, off to war; / Now Odin’s day, the ravens’ lord / God of wisdom, wolf and lore“. The last word of the last line clearly must rhyme with war, so lore works fine – but in my opinion the wisdom-wolf alliteration builds up to using the word war once again, so, “God of wisdom, wolf, and war“, is aurally suggested, even if rhyming war with war would actually have sounded somewhat odd.
• There’s a common “joke” in which you ask questions that lead to certain answers, for example, making the victim say the words most, coast, boast, roast. They you ask them, what do you put in a toaster?  They’ll probably say toast. Of course, the correct answer is bread.

Hm… is this a valid poetic technique, or is its inclusion always a mistake? Would the Nightwish song have been better, poetically, if it had in fact run “beauty always comes with darkness”? Or does the aural suggestion add to the meaning – using a single word, “dark thoughts”, to also suggest “darkness”, getting (admittedly similar) two connotations for the price of one? Or is it meaningless – mildly interesting if you happen to notice it, but adding nothing to the beauty or meaning of the poetry?

In my own poem, there’s the line “God of wisdom, wolf, and lore”, with the aural suggestion of “war”. Perhaps the first question is, does this suggest to the listener that Odin is in fact god of wisdom, wolf, war, and lore? Or does it first propose war as something Odin is god of, but then retract it, saying he is instead the god of lore? I think the first “sounds” more accurate, but perhaps both are acceptable readings. Maybe the use of aural suggestion is mostly useful for intentional ambiguity – adding more and perhaps contradictory meanings to a single statement.

Maybe you could even have a poem where a certain word was crucial to its meaning but it was never said – the word was just suggests, so the audience subconsciously thought about it, but the word never appeared in the poem. That would be an interesting, but really difficult, poetic experiment.

Though the joke example, I think, suggests that this is less a poetic technique than a poetic trick – something that the reader will not actually appreciate having in the poem, but instead find annoying.

I don’t really have a point here; just drawing your attention to the idea of aural suggestion. And asking if anyone has ever heard of an actual term for it – “aural suggestion” was just made up by me half an hour ago in an attempt to describe, roughly, what it is. And does anyone have any examples from poems by actually historically important poets that use this?