Replies to Bridget 2 - Versus intertexti and change ringing

The score / diagram for the change ringing is really interesting.  There are the rows of numbers where the order of the numbers changes and then the coloured lines too which trace the pattern of the numbers.  It seems this duplication must be to emphasise the shape of the method as a whole?  I suppose it would be quite hard to recognise the pattern in the spread of numbers on their own, you'd have to read every line instead of 'seeing' it.    Perhaps that's a little like what we apparently learn to do with words - to recognise them for their overall shape rather than having to spell each one out individually to ourselves.

 I just found this image in a book I’m reading (Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith) which uses a similar system to the method notation.  It’s a page from Derek Beaulieu’s Flatland (2007) in which he traces the path of each letter as it occurs on each page of Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland written in 1884.  This takes the idea of ‘seeing’ as opposed to ‘reading’ a text to an extreme. It scrubs out all the possible meaning and sound qualities of the letter arrangements to become purely graphic (although somehow it does look like a graphic representation of sound – different frequencies turned on their side). 

In the last reading group where we discussed an extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy, the conversation turned to ideas of speed reading - a technique McLuhan touches on as an extreme example of the ‘alphabetic dissociation of the senses’ that is one of the book’s central concerns.

“[In the new institutes for speed reading] they are taught how to use the eye on the page so as to avoid all verbalization and all incipient movements of the throat which accompany our cinematic chase from left to right, in order to create the mental sound movie which we call reading.”

A number of the group hadn’t read the text beforehand and so were attempting to get ‘up to speed’ during the discussion - Laura described a technique she’d learned which involves running your finger down the middle of a page and reading those words that it touched, somehow either trusting your peripheral vision to take in the rest or just joining the gaps mentally.  I wasn’t really able to make it work for me – perhaps it requires a lot of practice – but it also made me realise the extent to which I do read aloud to myself, in my head, when I read a text.  I’m not a quick reader at all.  I also thought it slightly ironic that a method which McLuhan’s described as totally visual, was in fact being taught through tactile methods – running a finger over the text.  And that reminded me of how when learning to write at school we were taught to put our left index fingers down on the paper at the end of a word to establish the gap we needed to make before writing the next.  Words were things that needed to be physically separated.  If we made mistakes we would lick our fingers and rub the pencil letters until we got a smudgy mess - there was a lot of touching of words going on.  I think alphabetic writing has a tactility all of its own which McLuhan and Rotman fail to explore again and again – I seem to keep coming back to that.

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!

Pattern poems and a Proteus poem by Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius (4th century AD)

Whilst re-reading Between Poetry and Painting by Dom Sylvester Houédard and searching the internet for his visual references I found pattern poems and Proteus poems by Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius.

An essay by J Stephan Edwards 'The Carmina of Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius and the Creative Process' explains:

Optatianus produced three distinct types of poetry, two of which are imitations of earlier forms, and one type that was an original creation. Taken as a body of work, the Carmina are part of an evolving tradition of poetry known as technopaignion. This type of poetry is meant to display the skill of the writer for arranging words in a complex way so as to create either a visual pattern with the verses themselves, known as pattern poetry, or to conceal a text within the poem for the reader to ‘puzzle out,’ or versus intexti. A limited number of pattern poems pre–date Optatianus’ work, most originating in Greece. Simmias and Theocritus are the best known creators of Greek pattern poetry. Optatianus’ pattern poems are probably a continuation of that Greek tradition and represent the genesis of his creative process. Similarly, Optatianus also wrote one known proteus poem, the words of which can be re–arranged to create new verses while maintaining the established poetic meter. There are no known examples of versus intexti prior to Optatianus, so that he is thus credited with having invented that form. He did so with amazing virtuosity. The intexti vary from simple acrostics to complex patterns that produce a graphic design within the text of the poem, a kind of self–contained illustration. As further evidence of his remarkable skill, a number of the poems also contain proteus poems, while others have intexti that can be transliterated from Latin to Greek. A minority of the poems goes so far as to incorporate all of these elements into one carmen, a masterful achievement of skill and inventiveness.

An essay by Florian Cramer 'Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet'  goes on to talk about the 'Proteus' poem Carmen XXV in more detail:

I Ardua componunt felices carmina Musae
II dissona conectunt diversis vincula metris
III scrupea pangentes torquentes pectora vatis
IV undique confusis constabunt singula verbis

 All words printed in the first and the fourth column of the poem and all words in the second and third make up two sets of words which can be arbitarily shuffled with each other.  The words in the fifth column are fixed, thereby ensuring that the poem will remain hexametric despite its words shuffling.....  In its initial notation, or state, the poem tells of dysharmonic junctions, uneven meters, rough tones and confused words tormenting the singer.  Optatianus Porfyrius, an important formal innovator of European pattern poetry, makes his poem an aesthetic self-reflection which, jumbling its own words, performs and confuses itself simultaneously. Optatianus’ Carmen XXV became paradigmatic for poetry when Julius Caesar Scaliger coined the term “Proteus verse” for word permutation poems in his 1561 Poetices, and made them a canonical poetical form for the century to come.