Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999
Subject: D=E=E=N
NUMBER OF WORDS: 1557
Well, all the votes seem to be in (what syllable completes the Hejinian
semi-word deen or what does it mean?), and the tally is: 3 for
Aberdeen, 1 for muhajideen, 1 for deem, and 1 for
its being the beginning of a word, such as deenrolled [sic].
Some speculate that it might be a typo (!), and others make a point
of relating it back to the over-all instability that results in reading,
where all sorts of innocent words like fuse or sect begin
to look like con-fuse, in-sect, etc., and the very nature
of what a word is goes ungrounded.
[Sherry Brennan writes: >>I feel compelled to say that
I think there are a lot of "half" words with just the beginning
of the word in her poem, but that (of course) they look like, and are,
whole words, precisely because of the kind of word formation we have
in English, where we make new words primarily by adding suffixes. In
other words, I think that the particular ways the poem cuts words and
lines makes you (or makes me, anyway) question whether any of the words
are "whole." So any word to which you could conceivably add
a suffix or adverbial ending becomes only a "half" word, as
well, and then you start to hear the possibilities with prepositions,
which is how we make other words, by adding prepositions in front of
them .... and so on. The more you look at it that way, the fewer whole
words there seem to be ... and the grammatical disjunctions within the
lines help to reinforce that feeling, that you're just getting snippets
that got cut and pasted together.<<
[And Grant Jenkins adds: >>Perhaps you have stubbed your
toe on the "deen" because there is no single, logical explanation
for it. As Sherry suggested that many of the words are not and cannot
be made "whole," perhaps the opposite is true. That these
words ARE whole and cannot be, to use McCaffery's terms, either
enciphered (something added for completion) or deciphered (a key found
to unlock meaning). Consider that perhaps these "words" could
be: 1) fortunate "mistakes" or "errors" (spelling,
typos) that, in their mutation, show how language changes 2) zaum-type
syllables or sounds that have no meaning other than their sound, like
music 3) indeterminate, potentially never to be figured out]
Here's something some Hejinian-lover might enjoy. I count 84
semi-words in Writing Is an Aid to Memory which cannot be explained
as obscure entries in the dictionary (hence, excluding such false starts
as quire, gan, lection, bating, which are
words, though uncommon, and despite their semblance to in-quire,
be-gan, se-lection, etc.). Those 84 are (bracketed numbers
indicate the section where they appear, and any pair of words without
a comma or other punctuation in between indicates two semi-words appearing
in a single verse):
[1] ness; [2] scription, porated, brating, pand, covery, pensated;
[4] gence ble; [5] plete, guage, straction, ception, tory, ysis, cerns;
[8] mand, mands, mand, ting-mill, neral quently, zontal, penters; [9]
clusion, yond, crete, sopher, pel; [10] ceptible, ignated finement;
[11] ness posites, victed, viction, lished; [13] dergo, cination, lic,
cury, tice, velous; [16] ment, cribed, sented, thod, mit, fection semble;
[17] pera; [18] spondent; [23] vived ternal, trious, ducer, persion;
[24] ducer; [25] quence, civious, pelled; [26] jectures; [27] mendous
prising, sume dom, duce, pery; [28] ficing; [29] vidual; [31] mand;
[32] cate, tached; [34] nishment, ceived ket-weaving, tinuous, sert,
tute; [36] deen, proach; [37] herent; [38] mena; [40] glish
Now, this evidence/influence is why I would exclude the chance of
its being the beginning of a word: this pattern sets up a consistent
perceptual expectation of discovering a missing prefix, or initial
letters; but there are no such terminal examples as conjec, perpetu,
or suscept, e.g. Moreso, I find in the absent beginnings
a thematic correlative to the whole notion of memory. It is,
of course, in the retrieval or re-creation of missing beginnings that
memory consists! Thus, the gaps have a larger significance. Hejinian's
decision to exclude visibly truncated endings comes from the same principle:
that that choice would reflect back on anticipation or futurity, which
is less her theme here. Yes?
Most of these cases can be "solved" with a handful of standard
Latinate prefixes: de-, ex-, dis-, com-/con-,
ab-, sur-, in-, etc. (perhaps why the poem attests
to Latin twice: "Latin is a very genteel business" [23], and
"points in Latin bridge a gap but unsaluted" [32]). Others
require polysyllabic solutions: such as cele-/cali- brated
or hori- zontal; for some, comical answers, such as anal-
ysis, or witty self-references about the effect of the work itself,
like ran- dom. Sometimes a missing syllable is immediately
supplied within the next few lines or elsewhere in the poem (context):
two lines after straction we read "drops of water to light
off of abstraction in the other"; and victed and viction
are shortly followed by "convicted of the inconsequences it touches
are full / convictions". Sometimes consonances can echo
out of the void: mer- cury and mar- velous
(both within earshot range of each other, both part of the same section,
[13]).
This latter similarity reflects, I think, on other choices that might
be made. Should strious be completed with indu- or illu-?
Well, two other semi-words are vidual and dicate: doesn't
the likelihood of finishing both these latter with indi- vidual
and indi- cate weight the earlier choice in favor of the similar-sounding
indu-? That's where the sound-poetry can extend below the surface.
Likewise, I find that the -sc- compound that emerges from las-
civious should bias another maneuver like cination
toward another -sc- choice, fascination. (And what about
ceptible? Hence, more justifiably sus- ceptible?) The
las- of las- civious in turns "rhymes" with
the missing bas- of bas- ket-weaving.
In other words, the possibilities are combinatorial, and meaning increasingly
becomes probabilistic here, and by generalization for asyntactical
poetry in general, perhaps. (To complete glish as Spanglish,
for example, would seem to be capricious, erroneous, in comparison with
the more determined English.) Indeterminacy does not mean that
any meaning goes: it means that meanings have to be filtered through
a sort of triage and negotiated on the strength of internal evidence.
(Technically speaking, in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Marjorie
Perloff defines indeterminacy as the inability to distinguish between
which associations are irrelevant and which are grounded in the text.)
So: Dudeen is too out of keeping with the overall rather normal
vocabulary. And Aberdeen? Why would a proper name and
a place name fit into a book which does not mention any other? (True,
Pacific is a geographical name, but out of the capitalized nouns
in the book ["Pacific," "Bach," "French,"
"Friday," "May," "Monday," "Thursday,"
"Latin," "Wednesday," "Man O' War," and
"German,* in that order] the stronger common bond would seem to
be a certain insubstantiality or non-solidity shared among units
of time, language, music,--- a jellyfish? a frigate bird?-- and the
oceanic. ) Aberdeen would particularize in an unprecedented
way.
The reader may be entrusted with the production of meaning, in
Language Poetry, but there are productions that are fabrications, and
there are productions that are deductions/inductions. I would say, for
example, that silicate is an extraneous interpellation for cate.
I am taking it that the book's vocabulary is governed by homogeneity,
certainly in comparison to, say, Kenward Elmslie's diction, e.g.
For a reader to produce random is more likely than kingdom,
due to the congruence between the form and the impression of randomness
the poetry risks giving (Is it plausible that someone might advance
a feminist reading of kingdom as preferable, as a foil to patriarchy?).
Then, why am I reluctant to produce the meaning that it might
be a typo? For one, because of the presence of apple and
nod in the same section, reprising the book's first line. They lend
an added importance to that section, so I can imagine a third, important
gesture in the same space. (The William Tell Overture of the first line,
"apple is shot nod", is glancingly signaled at "doubt
shot bit sort done" [20], to reach full recapitulation in the final
section [42]: "apple the proportion", "the test apple
bank as material think is", until the closing {1812 Overture} jolt
of "think is shot".) The belief-system, or ideology I seem
to be carrying, in remaining lukewarm to the solution of typo, is a
belief in the infallibility of the author that is stronger than my temptation
to impute the fallibility of oversight to Sun & Moon, especially
given that my copy is a re-print. The general field of meaning
I want to produce holds out the hope that between 1978 and a 1996 re-print,
someone would have caught a simple error, and that the care Hejinian
devoted to indenting each line 1 to 26 spaces over depending on A to
Z, which letter of the alphabet it begins with, would extend to deen
and every other grapheme.
Deen, then, is a genuine case of not knowing which meaning
to assign a word. I'll take it as The Exception To The Rule, par
excellence. In all other cases, a denotation is determined, or variably
weighted by likelihood. The range is narrower than "anything goes."
There are many meanings that can only be assigned "whimsically."
The opening "apple is shot nod" should not mean anything
about oranges.