Thinking bout pattern poetry and versus intertexti

After our brief conversation last week about pattern poetry, I have been thinking again about change ringing - the peculiar art of ringing church bells. Looking at your entry on pattern poetry (on 29/1/13), I was struck by the visual similarity in the notation of the bell-ringing instructions (called the method) and the example of versus intertexti that you give (except that former uses numbers and the latter mostly letters though numbers count the lines).

In the versus intertexti, letters are arrayed in rows on a grid (and these rows are numbered) and a passage is found or traced through these letters in order to find the hidden meaning in the text. (As an aside, I have to say that my personal fascination with this is twofold - 1. I am extremely diagrammatically challenged myself so looking at these verses makes my head spin, 2. I love the name - it is fantastic to say with all its "s"sounds, as well as "ex" and a sharp "i" at the end.)

In bell ringing or change ringing, there is a "method" which is, I understand, the name given to the notation or score directing a particular order of bell-ringing so to sound a tune. This is a chart of numbers that has a passage marked through it - different colours for different bells. All I know about change-ringing (which the Central Council of Church Bellringers calls, "The particularly British art of ringing bells full circle to a method") is from randomly seeing an image and briefly reading some information (from various websites including the one from which the image above has been taken).

I am fascinated by the idea of finding a text within a text (something that seems near impossible to me) in the case of the versus intertexti, and the articulation of a similarly unreadable (to me) text that is then activated in a particular way through the body and producing sound in the case of the change ringing.

I guess this could be said about any score - that is contains special information waiting to be discovered - but I nevertheless find it all somehow quite thrilling!