Monoecious silence and other nonsense

Arrowhead (Sagittaria Sagittifolia): a monoecious plant
from the book "Wayside And Woodland Blossoms", by Edward Step

I recently did an exercise by Karen Swenson from the book The Practice of Poetry. It consisted of choosing unfamiliar words from a dictionary, assigning different parts of speech to them and using them in a poem. The object of the exercise was to concentrate more on sound than on meaning. Here is my attempt:

In dargion safety the sparrow lings softly,
as the orphrey, shallooning his wings,
ginks and clacks to the Trisagion west.
Coffling wanly the niblick sinks
into the monoecious silence.

I found it interesting that ‘orphrey’ (actually an ornamental border on ecclesiastical vestments) must have subconsciously reminded me of osprey and led me to turn it into a bird - showing how we may be influenced by similar sounds to infer meaning, often without realising it.

I liked the phrase 'into the monoecious silence' and wondered if I could recycle it to use in another poem. The dictionary told me it meant, as a biological term, 'with unisex male and female organs' and as a zoological term, 'hermaphrodite'. "Ah", I said to myself, "that won't work then!" But no sooner had I thought that than my mind did a little hop, skip and jump (the way it does) and informed me: "A monoecious silence is one which is sufficient unto itself". And, yes, in a poem you could say that, since poetry isn't wholly subordinate to the structures of meaning that would pin words down… It's one of the reasons I like poetry so much - the alchemy of sound, meaning and association; the mental gymnastics.

This set me thinking about Noam Chomsky's sentences:
1. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
2. Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

Chomsky said “It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these sentences) has ever occurred in an English discourse. Hence, in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be ruled out on identical grounds as equally "remote" from English. Yet (1), though nonsensical, is grammatical, while (2) is not grammatical.”

People have tried, successfully, to incorporate the first sentence into a prose piece, drawing on the several meanings of the words. There is this, for instance, by C.M. Street:

"It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously."

The second sentence is not so easy to use in prose, being ungrammatical, but it doesn’t present too much difficulty for poetry. For example, off the top of my head:

Across the pale defeated hills
furiously sleep ideas,
green colourless.

Poetry does not depend upon grammar to quite the extent that prose does. It incorporates other ways of understanding than by logical processes. The evocation of emotions and intuitions from the varied meanings of words and their sounds, from their echoes and resonances, means that poems may even incorporate contradiction –“green colourless” - and paradox and still convey something meaningful. T. S. Eliot said that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” and this partly explains how. The right brain is engaged as well as the logical left brain.

Jung has talked about the rush of psychic energy that symbols may give us, caused by the conjunction of different images; their union releases an insight, making us go “Aha!” I think the same psychic charge occurs when the mind does that little hop, skip and jump in order to go outside the usual structures of meaning and expand its understanding when confronted by words used in uncommon and uncharacteristic ways. Which is why I think poetry is often more exciting than prose...

Dazlious

I like the word ‘dazlious’ invented by the character, Linda, in the film Snow Cake (see my last blog post). The Urban Dictionary defines ‘dazlious’ as “an exclamation of beauty and awe” and gives a transcript of Linda’s story which puts the word in context:

"Mr Fantastic from the Fantastic Four, he's got arms made of elastic so they can stretch for two, maybe three hundred miles.
He's been imprisoned in a cave for seven days with no food and no water and no light. But on the 8th day he manages to loosen a rock and push his way up through the top and up into the daylight. Just as the sun is coming up over the mountains and filling the sky with this white-yellow light. And there's this stillness, and in the few minutes he's got before his captor, the evil Dr. Doom returns, he stops for just one second. And all he can hear is his own breathing. But he's totally overwhelmed by how big the world is, how small and unimportant he is. And as he turns around you see his face look to the sky and he says very quietly, so that no one can hear him, he says 'Dazlious.'"

I am one of those ‘charmed by cute contrivances like “dezlious” [sic]’ as one critic in the New York Times puts it. Dazlious is a word I have a use for; I seem to find the world increasingly dazlious. When I do, I want to express it and I have a few stand-by lines from various poems that sneak into my mind. If, for instance, the night is full of stars with a bright moon half-hidden by clouds yet illuminating them, I always think of Keats’ lines: “When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face / Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” and I say them to myself -- it helps for some reason to express my feelings of awe at the beauty and mystery of the night.

At other times, perhaps coming out of the house into a glorious Spring day, early in the morning when the world seems young and fresh, I find Wordsworth’s lines on the French Revolution on the tip of my tongue: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!” At other times, on a day which just seems full of wonder and possibility I might wave my arms around a bit and recite “ O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! he chortled in his joy” -- although obviously not when there are people around.

So 'dazlious' is a word I've added to this little repertoire. I think we can say a bit more about it than that it’s an exclamation of beauty and awe. To begin with it’s an adjective. It has the adjectival ending “-ous” which gives the meaning “abounding in, characterised by, of the nature of”. Its root is fairly obviously ‘dazzle’ meaning “to blind temporarily or confuse the sight of by overpowering brightness, tempt or delude or startle by brilliant display or prospect”. So we could say it has the meaning ‘an abundance of being dazzled’. However if we simply added ‘–ous’ to ‘dazzle’ we’d be most likely to get ‘dazzlous’ -- dazz-lus, which sounds very lacklustre, the stress is too even and uninspiring. But with ‘dazlious’, just the addition of the ‘i’, giving the sound i: as in ‘deep’, transforms it into a much more delicious word. It makes us linger over the ‘daz’, stressing it, elongating the word and our experience of it: daz-lee-us. The sound itself is uplifting.

One day last week, having been hunched over the laptop for hours, I decided to go out for a walk. The sun had started to go down behind the hill and there was a hint of frost in the air. As I set off, zipping my coat against the cold, a flock of geese suddenly flew over, heading towards the coast. Because the sun was low in the sky it shone brightly onto their white underparts and as they beat their wings the shafts of light were broken, causing a rhythmic flashing as the geese moved soundlessly across the sky above me. I watched, entranced, until they disappeared into the west. Then, standing in the middle of the lane, my head still turned to the sky, I said, very quietly so that no-one could hear me, “Dazlious!”