uncoded sound
Imagining Language, edited by Jed Rasula and Steve MacCaffrey (MIT Press, 572 pp.); Russkie futuristi (illicit tape bought at Compendium, of unknown origin, with reminiscences of the Futurists and readings of their poems)
The fact that the tongue has no joints does not mean that there is no distinction between phonemes.
Not everything which has no dimensions is immense.
Part of this book deals with a kind of language which I will call uncoded, because its strings of sounds do not bear any relationship to a set of meanings. However, the most interesting poems here, by Khlebnikov and his close associates, are in zaum, which is meaningfully coded, although it builds words which do not exist in "natural" Russian.
When Little Richard sings Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom, the meaninglessness of the phrase is not meaningless, instead it means exultation and freedom from constraint. I will skip the case against nonsense sound, because surely everyone likes Schwitters and Little Richard. When he sings "from the early early morning to the early early night", this also signifies freedom, and inconsequentiality. It means everything and nothing, a lack of dimension which brings it close to some moments of religious language. Even Richard was sober compared to The Rivingtons, strangers to reason; even "Papa Oo Mow Mow" ("is he serious or is he playin'?") was dusted by The Trashmen-merest myrmidons of the Goddess Gaga- and the ineffable "Surfin' Bird". Truly, they had seen the abyss looking back at them and asked it for a date.
Jakobson's original article on the ecstatic language of the Khlysty, a Russian sect, which he transcribed and phonologically analysed, made it apparent that Futurist zaum language was not wholly new. None of the words meant anything in Russian. This technique bears structural resemblances to words used, in Late Roman times (and probably earlier), for curses and spells; and to the Ephesia grammata, prayers in a language not understood by the priests but supposedly agreeable to the gods. The diverse values of these uses of the same phonological rule, of losing any coded meaning, imply that the device itself is underspecified, and its psychological effect is decided by the social semantic which frames it. That is, codelessness is codeless and requires coding in order to acquire a precise value. The only signal which is self-specifying is one which specifies itself, that is, it is fully coded language. This might mean that the context of this book, i.e. the prose content and the trappings of design, weight, paper quality, etc., affects the impact of the poetic content very deeply; and that the pieces would appear wholly different in a different context.
The book proposes other anomalous forms of poetry, with restricted rule sets. I do not propose to talk about these. But they come in the package.
The fund-winning and rousseauesque proposal behind sound poetry is that there is a state (or process) of infantile bliss, which coincides with an uncoded stratum of language, and that this bliss is recoverable in adult life, as a neurological-biochemical pattern, and that the exposure of adults to uncoded language triggers this regression or recuperation. My belief is that this is true; but that the stimulus-response chain in question works only under very special conditions, and probably only for short periods. We could call this oral state Lala-land.
This book is awesome in length, and any attempt to grasp the laws of poetics and brain behaviour involved needs a collection of texts like it. A number of types of text, important for the project of finding out rules, are wholly excluded.
If a flush of new information is what tosses us back into the blissful play/learning state, then un-coded language, which is poor in information, is weakly able to restore us to this bliss, and structurally complete, adult, language is powerfully able to do it.
There is a custom of going into psychology with the spirit of a museum-keeper hunting for trophy objects, with no interest in the societies which produced them (and their meanings). With sound poetry, it is not enough to babble of "infant bliss" and ignore everything else about psycholinguistics, and, indeed, about being a baby. Real babies are capricious and have short attention spans: casting the reader back into babyhood will reproduce these qualities, to be applied to your poems.
I've already written about sound and poetry in reviews of Michael Haslam (Angel Exhaust 12), Grace Lake (AE 13) and the Gododdin (AE 16), and about cursing forms in a number of others. Oh well. Kevin asked me to do this because he wanted a philological approach to this material, and so a fan of historical and text-based linguistics; but this is, I feel, the wrong way to get at something general, species-wide, unchanging, and based in brain physiology. For the first eighteen months after birth, the brain is still growing, and of course learning; the biochemical implications of this are quite strong, and if the seat of consciousness is in the brain then it is very likely that consciousness and the self are flooded by this growth and learning process. Much less certainly, the biochemical "taste" of learning make us partially recur to this protean state when we learn something new in adult life, and there is a state attendant on learning, almost a colour, whatever the kind of thing we are learning. The activities, both specialised and complex, of play and learning, are not peripheral to art: information handling is indicative of the boundary of art with non-art. Because learning and play are most important in early childhood, art which is like play must seem, or be, regressive.
We frequently find in song meaningless syllables, fitted to tunes, often repetitive and (also) repeated, for example as refrains. This is not quite universal in vocal music, being (for example) banned from hymns. (Alleluia is such a melopoeic run.) There is no history of the refrain, but the link to the ahistorical babbling or lalling of infants is palpable. One could argue that this babble or chirrup is simply due to laziness in finding proper words, and that its uncoded quality has no specific psychological effect, but these hypotheses are extraordinarily unlikely. It seems, at least to me, that such babble is vital to pop music, that it is all around us on the radio, that it relieves and relaxes us and makes us playful, and that we respond to sound poetry because we recognise this quality, and agree about its value; and that listening to scat records is a necessary preparation for talking about uncoded "sound" poetry. To our opponents we say tralala tirralirra rumti tum. Yip yip yip yip mm mm mm mm. Lesebesebimbera.
The co-existence of "meaningless variation" and 'explicit formed discourse" in art suggests that there are two levels of message of different psychic ages: ornament corresponding to infantility, and "discourse" corresponding to middle childhood, when one has a grasp of grammar, of spatial separation, and of the reality of other people. In poetry, recurrence and ornament obey a different set of rules from the rational minimalism and precision which govern the logical layer. These two layers are not quite stable in their relationship. A third, inexplicit set of rules dictates when one gives way to the other.
The problem with babble is its licentiousness, its endless repetitiousness. The objection to seriousness is that it continues one theme of attention for too long. So both modes are repetitive; the difference is in the pattern of their internal variation.
What interests me is the distinction between melodic line and ornament. How do we know which is which? are there really two channels in music, or in poetry, following different mathematical rules and even using different parts of the brain?
Lowell George sang "I've been from Tucson to Tuhumcari/ Tahachapi to Tonopa", and "Smuggled some folks and smokes out of Mexico". Futurist theory tells us why these lines are so great, and tells us how to look for "smokes" curled up inside "Mexico", where the reversal of the sounds is as potent as the doubling. We also notice that the use of foreign placenames, with their alien phonetics, is one of the most potent devices of poetry. Hustled some force of dwarfs out of Dusseldorf.
The modernist theology is that sound poetry is a break which cuts horizontally across time, but the principle seems to underlie texts almost as old as writing itself. They flag as their competitive attraction the newness of their techniques, but simultaneously accumulate texts from each of the past three millennia in order to acquire hereditary legitimacy as a second line. We look for something fast, chic, and detached, and find a museum being dumped on our heads. He who justifies the arbitrary would look for a straight edge in a dumpling.
Anglo-Saxon, like certain other Germanic languages, has a double series of personal names, with different phonetic rules, so that Offa corresponds to Uhtferth. The simpler group [Tammo Lubbo Otto Ezzo Ubba Aella] are felt to be hypocoristics (i.e. pet names), which would have been used by children (with constancy, i.e. later than the babble stage) to refer to siblings. Their phonology resembles, in features like reduplication, simplification of clusters, assimilation, etc., child speech. That is, we know what Anglo-Saxon children sounded like although we only have formal, adult texts. Note that reduplication includes double consonants.
For Osip Brik, phonetic repetition (zvukovoy povtor) is the basis of all poetic language. But not all repetition is poetry.
A certain Appalachian ballad, recorded by Hedy West, has a refrain 'splattimer lattimer lingo". There is a transcription of one of the legendary outburst-hymns of the Khlysty, completely nonsemantic: nasontos, lesontos, phurtlis, natruphuntru, natrisinphir, Kreserephire, Kresentrephert, tscheresantro, ulmiri, umilisintru, gereson, drowolmire, tschesondro phorde, kornemila, koremira, gsdrowolne, korlemire sdrowolde, kaniphute, jeschetschere kondre, nasiphe nasiphont, meresinti, pheretra. (Sound values as in German!) Conybeare cites similar (perhaps) strings of rubbish recorded in Greek and Egyptian magical papyri. The words are mostly grouped in rhyming pairs, but some are also "reversals': kresentrephert/cheresantro (where "tsch" stands for "ch", in frequent phonetic alternation in Russian with "k"), kresentrephert/ pheretra. Owing to phonetic shifts before written record, Russian has no -nt- or -nd- clusters; compare Latin sunt Ru. sut', English thousand Ru. tysyacha; the frequency of the -nt- cluster in this text acts therefore to signal exoticism, "ringing" a missing place in the matrix of syllables. It would be quite erratic to connect this pointed use of a non-string to borrowing from real languages, say Finnish or Greek. We find another reversal in Hugo Ball's 1916 poem 'Caravan', which has 'jolifanto ambla o falli bambla' (so olifa/ofali) then 'wulubu ssubudu uluw ssubudu'. This was published in his novel Tenderenda der Fantast. A Venetian lullaby favoured by Zanzotto starts "enkete penkete". The Cramps sang "I'm the most exalted potentate of love/ The celebrated Hottentot of twine". Nonsense language operates by doubling. So in poems, we could find pairs of words which double each other, but simultaneously have a logical meaning. But in fact we could redefine all rhyme as a case of this. In Milligan's Greek Papyri, no.48, we find a spell (in Greek, praxis) with an Egyptian magical incantation: kata toutou tou theou [by this god] sabarbarbathioth sabarbarathiouth sabarbarbathioneth sabarbarbaphai. (Theta as syllable terminal is impossible in Greek, although of course it is possible in Hebrew and Egyptian, and may be imitated from those languages.) Scheerbart's impressive sound poem of 1897 runs in part 'Zepke! Zepke!/ Mekkimapsi-muschibrops (...) Lakku- Zakku- Wakku- Quakku- muschibrops(...) Lesebesebimbera." This phonetic construction does not seem to be tied to any particular language. We should hypothesize that it therefore belongs to infancy, to vocalising before acquiring a particular language.
I recall my mother frequently bringing up the names Misterton and Mosterton, nearby villages in South Leicestershire, as absurd and touching (and possibly as evidence of the low credibility of South Leicestershire in general, as seen from North Leicestershire); evidently they remind her of a pre-existing structure, which is in fact already semantic; the names are funny for a simple reason. Rhyming is a way of forming new words suitable to a rustic area where people cut bread with garden spades, sleep in trees, and look the same from the front as they do from the back.
Learning a new language is likely to switch on the play circuits, if this theory is right; and curious poets can test this by learning one. Does learning put the brain into a temporarily different state? does language-learning stimulate phonetic play? Zaumnik poetry presumably has a lot to do with the atmosphere of certain language faculties, where adults such as Jakobson, Khlebnikov, and Shklovsky were carrying out the "infantile" task of language-learning full-time. The more unfamiliar a language structure, the more you have to regress (and abandon "reason') in order to acquire it. The study of non-Indo-European, perhaps Turkic or Finnic, languages, is a more radical step than studying, say, Rumanian or Norwegian; but Khlebnikov's decisive experience was studying Sanskrit and Old Church Slavonic, and discovering the common roots, and sliding into a world of roots.
Tsvetayeva's "Poloterskaya" must be the greatest poem ever written about housework; (the name is the form used for names of dances, like the polonaise, and so means "Floor Polisher's Dance", and indeed there is a lot about floor polishing being a gliding motion like dancing); it contains, but does not mention, a low-grade but popular Russian joke linking pol'ka (Polish woman or kind of dance) and polka (a shelf, but also the diminutive of pol, 'floor', which was originally made of wooden planks). The poem is full of the kind of dream doubling and coupling of words which makes mummy into mummery: Kolotery-molotery,/Polotyery-polodyeri,/Kumashniy stan,/Bakhromchatiy shtan. This quatrain is pure dream, but we could say something like:
Ripple-skimmers-moth-skinners/ Flashwipers-floorwhippers/ Red cotton flock/ frilled trousers.
I am not quite sure about the frills, but perhaps we could say
Red cotton-rag strips
Gleam stripes-flounced bottom.
Where mop meets georgette, the Poloterskaya combines unmotivated phonetic association with full-scale natural language. Unfortunately, such mixed poems don't get indexed by impoverishedly consistent academics, and, however interesting they are, it's hard to collect them. Carried away by prose, I never read much Russian poetry. How many such poems did Tsvetaeva write? Most of her poems don't use this technique. How many other poets used Futurist sound technique within conventional poems? Pasternak may have been the most successful in doing this. Hans Arp also seems a likely candidate. Such mixed work is not included here. Unmixed work seems to me, relatively, single-track and uninteresting.
The search for phonetic patterning (of the type kolotery-molodery) in the structure of all Latin poems was de Saussure's later project, which you have read about in Jean Starobinski's Les mots sous les mots. It was unpublished because its results were negative; in a way which the phantomicity of the presence of "jakobson" in "jean starobinski" may point out to us; but Jakobson's uncovering of Futurist-style phonetic echoing in all kinds of poems is reported throughout his Questions de po‚tique. It may be a basic principle of great poetry.
Some English critics believe that the level of sound is the place of authenticity, sturdiness, reliability. But it belongs to arbitrariness and delirious inconstancy.
Repetition and reversibility are marks of infant speech, applied to syllables and words. But when applied to larger linguistic units, such as entire clauses, they are signs of rhetorical sophistication. We could see the paradox as a reversible sentence.
Nowadays we locate the liminal close to the everyday, just handy: the wilderness turns out in practice to mean the woods a mile outside town. Or, the beginning of time turns out to be the twelve days of Christmas, when shapes go blank, shaggy kallikantzari roam the village, and the shift from shapeless to shape is re-enacted. Boundless and dimensionless substances like light, sex, god, the ocean, are inside poems, and there supply a vital contrast to the unfolded and specified elements of the poem. Every syllable starts out as a blank ur-syllable. Babble is composed of such archisyllables, before individuation. There is no point siting the transcendental out of walking distance.
"Infant bliss" may relate to being allowed to play all day, to the spring-like sensations of growth, to non-specialisation of which babble is a form, or to the total attention of a mother waiting on you hand and foot. Distinguishing between these seems to be beyond our knowledge. But this question is vital for aesthetics.
Kitzinger has described how in the decaying Roman Empire there was a revival of provincial visual traditions, without perspective, involved rather in magic, and ascribed value by ethnic narratives. This is for him the origin of mediaeval art. Such stelae, jewels, etc., correspond to the language of magic. So the position of ordered grammar in poetry corresponds to geometrical perspective in art, and possibly to legal procedure in the running of society, and medicine, as opposed to magic, in the care of the body. It seems that in our time the collapse of external space in poetry, and the rise of subjectivity, have brought about a rejection of syntactic structure and a resort to certain magical and infantile forms.
Babies learn to walk. They become much less dependent on their mothers. Walking offers a new access to space, and so anticipation, movement planning, a new concept of time. This makes the coding of sound into language, to express the new cognitive complexity, appropriate. Babble belongs to a world which may have infant bliss but which is cognitively poor. But even after the emergence of an autonomous outer space there is still a capsule of subjective space, within our bodies and within the grasp of our hands. However much you geometrise art, the perspectiveless space is still there, lurking and archaic.
The Futurists tape includes reminiscences of Mayakovsky by Kornei Chukovsky, a gramophone recording of Mayakovsky reading his own poems, reminiscences of Khlebnikov by two women, readings of Khlebnikov poems, Kruchenykh reading his own poems, and readings of poems by obscure futurists Iliazd and Vasily Kamenski. This is really a great delight, a reward for turning over Compendium's tape counter. Mayakovsky's voice is quite pleasant, if stagy; a surprise since I have always imagined that, if I met him, I would want to hit him over the head with a saucepan. Semyon Kirsanov reads Khlebnikov much better than Jakobson. Chukovsky has an absolutely wonderful radio voice, ornamenting every potential "drop", exquisitely varied, and yet discreet. I have never read anything by him, but his daughter, Lidia, used to write for the dissident magazine Kontinent. Could we compare Kirsanov's shift into children's poetry to the large-scale adoption of avant-garde techniques by advertising?
Sources
The Cramps, The Smell of female (live at the Peppermint Lounge)
Jakobson, Questions de poetique (these texts are available in other forms); especially Structures subliminales en poesie.
- essay on the Khlysty (can't remember the name)
Khlysty text quoted from a German book on das russiche Sektantentum (I have forgotten the author's name)
Ernst Kitzinger, Byzantine art in the making
Alison Elliot, Child language
The Silhouettes, Get a job
Richie Valens, La bamba
Little Feat, Sailin' Shoes
George Milligan, Selections from the Greek papyri
Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism
Cab Calloway, Minnie the Moocher
Little Richard, Tutti frutti
The Rivingtons, Papa Oo Mow Mow
The Trashmen, Surfin' Bird (brilliantly covered by The Cramps)