Section One.
Still recovering this previous evening from a curiously virulent strain of the common cold, and from my own various well-worn versions of negativity with all its attendant virsionairy remainduhs, I stumbled across an extremely interesting text by Michel Chaouli, namely, _The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel_ [Parallax]. What intrigued me, and I found it almost immediately was a concept the author used in the discussion of Schlegel's notion of a 'surprising contingency' from Roman Jakobson called "semantic propinquity":
First off, I immediately connected it in a more or less synchretic fashion to my own notionality, Irronism, but the context of this fragment does much more for me, because it extends my own discussion in the very terms of the book's content, and spontaneously generated the term Chemiconic, followed closely by Chemirrconic. And this lights up also the iconism wing of the Irronism ward. I'll do a quick Chemirrconic "analysis".. Or rather a possible example of the kinds of ideas I tend to think of in terms of this discussion, and one that I hope will also extend Schlegel's thought in a new and completely appropriate way.
Let's take the idea of Ezra Pound, as a pair of words, and perform a sort of left-handed chiral manipulation to observe a new, or possible "Viermantic Propinkwitty":
Flip over Ezra Pound and you get dnoup arze, or transliterally, Denude Ars(e). Notice how, not only did I perform a horizontal chiral manipulation, but a selective vertical change to the p. Also, the name now becomes a command, an imperative. There is already an ironic element to Ezra Pound's name, in the fact that Ezra, comes from Ezra the Scribe, the eponymous high priest who reintroduced the Torah into Jerusalem. And then there is that last name Pound, a common name for a common form of English currency, and then to tie it together, the strange virulence of Ezra Pound himself regarding his own views of money and the relation of which to historical studies of Jewish influence in economics. But there's more, Ezra written in Greek is
Esdras (Greek: Ἔσδρας) which when chirally flipped gives Sardse, or shards, or surds..Chaouli's text discusses Schlegel's _Fragments_ in terms of his interest in combinatorics and chemistry, and within the discussion are some recorded tidbits which sound very common to anyone who reads literary theory, namely the poem as holos, and as fragment, or shard, or surd:
So, rather than explicitly determine here what relation Denude Ars(e)!(?) might mean in the context of Ezra Pound's ouevre, let me bring forth another fragment from the text in order to move into another area of the discussion outside the purview of this first example, as homely and magnetic as it is to me..
So, to close this section, we might pose our first example as sort of a rhetorical question encapsulating what the Chaouli calls "Objective Irony": Q: Denude Ars(e)? A: Ezra Pound! Which is neither a clear question, nor a clear answer, but a polyvalent coupling inhabiting an ironic form..
Section Two.
It's easy to look at something like Q: Denude Ars(e)? A: Ezra Pound! call it an example of reflexivity, but then, its even odder to look at reflexivity as itself a form of chirality (reflection).. Look at the name Michel Chaouli (My shell (cell) [of ] chao(s) ul/i/ulates). I really liked the phrase "Words often understand themselves better than do those by whom they are used.." This seems like a good way to segue into the broader field of affect, the grotesque, and Combinatorial Chaos. (I'll slip in the whole google book at this point)...
Another Chemirrconic Hallucignostic Chiralert which chimed in during my reading was when I looked at Wit and Witz. When I flipped wit, I saw tiw, and before I even thought 'two', my mind immediately spoke aloud Tiwaz. I couldn't even remember what it was, save that I knew it was an ancient Germanic something or other. Well, from Wit as Agent, we find Tiwaz as Agency. And in terms of combinatorial chaos, Witz, just needs a partial chiral and an aleph to give us the same thing. Tiwaz is both a god, and a rune.
The Rune Tiwaz then, also reflects back on Schlegel's notion of scientific wit as an explosive force:
So, it gets really interesting at this point, but you'll have to suspend your disbelief in me a bit, I mean, here I am using wikipedia, and other crappy secondary sources, but can you believe the Irronic resonance between
Wit as Agent, and Tiwaz as Agency, especially in light of so many things on the Tiwaz page. Just read it,
and listen into all the fragments with other fragments in mind like Wissen, and Zieu, etc.
And look for Mars of the Thing. Just that page itself is a perfect example of Combinatorial Chaos!
But let's just consider Wit / Tiw as a coin(ing). On one side, you have the modern nihilist (no supersensory world) version, Wit / Wisdom, and on the other side a god(dess) (metaphysis-supernatural).
And then there is the curious temporal irony, "an explosion of bound spirit".. Couldn't the Tiwaz rune easily be an icon for a nuclear explosion?
And then there's that detail about Tyr being one-handed, and a law-giver. That nod to prescriptive thinking, and legalism, also seems to be part the denial of chiralist readings. It is as if the Tiwaz school of 'wit' or combinatorics only allows right-handed folk-langue molecules, while wit brings forth the whole apparatchik of modern semiostructural-chemico-mathesis..
Feel like some sort of tragic hipster sitting here on the street corner 'junk-sick' (genre-wrecked-psyche')
flipping out on the coinage of wizhes.. A coin that asks the question, like an ikon in the round,
"Which two?"
note: Ancient Egypt called itself Kem't.
further note: dreamt of finding a glory hand on which the convicts thumb
had been replaced by a witches big toe, saying whereas
the witch harvests the gallows, the poet sews a hallux (allex)..
All light, all language, between hallucinosis,
and hallway.
image by Emiliano Maggi
