candice

thanks for such a fascinating associational Grand Tour of Prynne as echoes
of words long dead and secrets that are almost but not quite about to be
revealed but I remain perturbed at some of your projections, your decoding
figures.
I can understand a writer not wishing to court or tout for 'appreciation and
understanding' but if, as the slant your post seems to imply, that refusal
of the 'common herd' is more or less wilful, then I have to ask why?
What are the external pressures, the raison d'etre for,
Prynne-as-you-paint-him's encryption?
It is certainly not a situation comparable to the survival of Mandelstam's
late work in the Stalinist winter. Prynne as you receive him is a body of
work that requires leisure and access to resources to survive, implicit, it
would seem, in the poems is a mode of reception and support (imagine your
version of Prynne as a unemployed packer living on a housing estate, in ,
say, Gateshead)- which contradicts the notion of their not seeking
understanding and even more so audience - it would seem that the
understanding audience sought is restricted to suitable persons only. This
even raises the ghost of the old evil of culture as a marker for social
boundaries, the knowledge needed to be 'acceptable' to a group.
Who exactly, and why precisely, does Prynne's strategy of encryption intend
to exclude?
I did, as you mention, raise that tarnished word 'elitism' in an earlier
post, I did so with regret and do so again. I'd emphasise that the point of
what I'm pondering is Prynne-as-presented, I'm not necessarily discussing
Prynne-as-is.

david birch-rune

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Sent: Friday, July 28, 2000 6:12 PM
Subject: (Visual) Texts & Staves


> I've been following the interesting exchanges of yesterday and
> today between cris cheek and Lawrence Upton, among others, and
> particularly appreciate cris's cryptographic bent ("well, I would,
> wouldn't I," as John Temple said in earlier post) in discussing
> what she calls "hybridizing writings." Although she and Lawrence
> take these writings in a hypertextual direction that Henry has not
> been pursuing in his own posts on the crypto-totalizing thread--
> where he's stressed a kind of poetic encryption that operates
> cumulatively, gathering up prior texts, enfolding elements of them
> into the current work, where they _sing_ (as he says)--a method
> and a mode in one that (as Henry also says) _layers_ these textual
> elements spatiotemporally--cris's hybridity is not all that different
> from Henry's sonographic cryptidity. Something like an ark ensues
> from such textuality, which bears its content/s spatially through
> time as marked by linguistic usage broadly and specifically poetic
> usage in terms of what we're about here--where its relevance to
> You-Know-Who is about to return with a vengeance. (But don't blame
> me, blame Peter Riley, who--finally!--raised the Big Question of
> "great poetry.")
>
> He posed that question, as I recall, in a sort of chicken-and-egg
> way from the reader's perspective, asking how we know great poetry
> when we find it if we have to decrypt it to recognize it as such,
> adding the quite reasonable caveat about how any poetry could be
> great if its decryption is necessary. Fair point, but one that's
> based on a rather narrow sense of coding and decoding, which are
> merely the mechanical tasks associated with retrieving verbal
> message/meaning from its (also verbal) medium. Something's been
> "buried" (en-crypted) or "hidden" in plain view (Poe's purloined-
> letter effect) for some reason, purpose, or purposeful effect,
> which can be as frivolous (and often is "elitist," as David
> Bircumshaw protested) or as deadly serious as the secret society
> it entails. That is, even if we're not talking Freemasonry, there's
> a brick wall being erected around something, both to signpost the
> (thereby occluded) presence of that something (Amontillado anyone?
> By the cask-et-ful!) to those schooled in the masonic trade (who will
> also know how to spot the loose brick that permits the wall to be
> penetrated) and to obscure that same something, often to _shield_ it
> for its protection or safeguarding from prying eyes or those whose
> business and guilds are otherwise. Either way, the secret must have
> its society, even if so small a one as to be constituted only by the
> self (shades of Emily Dickinson) or, more typically but still small-
> scale, by the dyad of encrypter and decrypter, who, by extension,
> may be the writer and the reader, both of whom are necessarily
> singular, if not sufficiently so from the writer's (usual)
> perspective.
>
> A writer who employs encryption, though, is by definition
> restricting his/her audience to those who can bring something _as
> readers_ to whatever's encrypted and needed, relative to that, by
> the writer, so, for this kind of writer, a single reader is, in
> principle, both enough and a feast of a condition for the encrypted
> text. Because this writer isn't looking for an audience to provide
> the usual critical or sales & circulation gratifications of writing
> (appreciation and understanding, basically), but rather something
> more like a relationship with a reader, this is where such texts
> intersect (I think) with the hybridizing, performative writings that
> cris and Lawrence describe. These writings all create their own
> readerships rather than targeting one or more of those they know to
> be "out there" (if that distinction isn't not intolerably crude).
> And so does the text composed and decomposed cumulatively, or by
> accretion, that Henry describes relative to poetic encryption. If a
> poem accumulates canonic references, layering them in a discursively
> archaeological manner, say, those layers and levels construct what
> they construe for a readership that shares the given canon.
>
> Assuming that everyone knows by now how Prynne has worked the English
> literary canon through time and throughout his oeuvre (and fortifying
> _The Gig_'s "N&Q" section while he was at it), there's no need to
> belabor that enormous crypt he's labored to build. It's interesting,
> though (to me, at least), that at a certain point during the past
> three decades he'd accumulated enough bricks (brickbats, some would
> say) to enable his own work to begin to function masoni-canonically
> (or canoni-masonically) in its own right, which _Triodes_ demonstrates
> in a consciously overt way, being almost entirely composed of decomposed
> or decomposing elements (key terms and phrases) from everything going
> back to _Kitchen Poems_, many of which he's used on many occasions prior
> to _Triodes_, in fact, which is what makes them "keys," obviously. Some
> of them get a bit bent or twisted in _Triodes_ by means of one or another
> of those Germanic and Romance language streams, along with Latin and
> Greek, that have fed the oceanic English we sail or swim or sink in
> today. An example that caught my eye was "fax by return" because, for
> one thing, by the time I came upon it (p. 7) I'd already noticed the
> preponderance of Latin words Prynne was using this time out (other poems,
> such as "Bee Target," are in French for all practical purposes, for
> instance)--so, aha, I said, TORCH by return--and, for another thing,
> this phrase echoed one ("safe by return") in a poem over which I'd been
> obsessing, "Glove Timing."
>
> The reason I'd been so focused on that poem, though, is because it's the
> facing-page one of my real object of interest, cryptographically speaking,
> Prynne's rune poem--the one and only poem in his entire oeuvre that I
> (or anyone else probably) can say for certain is encrypted because that's
> what runes have been for since the days of Roman Britain, when the Romans
> themselves made an encryption system out of the "message sticks" used by
> the unlettered locals (who, as soon as they learned to read, returned the
> compliment by creating "Anglo-Latin," wholly encrypted language, many
> extant texts in which continue to elude decryption to this day). Runes
> are a code in and of themselves _canonically_, in other words, so it's
> not really surprising that Prynne would have created a rune poem for and
> within his cryptic project, by which I mean that the rune poem has an
> encrypting function in both senses. (Verbally, it even quotes an 8th c.
> encrypted word--"seafatorn"--from the Franks casket, its unique instance.)
> What's in the rune poem and made from the runes and dots that comprise its
> "bricks" constitutes and bears, ark-like, the site of a Sutton Hoo-esque
> ship burial--and (I believe) serves as the ark of what I termed Prynne's
> "covenant" in an earlier post. The rune poem is unlike the Sutton Hoo
> ship in one important way, though: the "treasures" it holds are all
> living things. And it's also like Sutton Hoo in a very important way:
> it's empty, i.e., holds no body (_that_, I think, is embodied everywhere
> else in the Prynne, er, corpus).
>
> This is a sacred place, one that enshrines a memory of great love and
> great loss, but it's not one of those fearful Tacitussian groves of the
> _Germania_, with their dead bodies decomposing from the trees; it's a very
> sweet place, in fact, with its flowering cherry tree, humming bees, rising
> bread, and sun-growing bean--the seed of a poetry of joy--and its garland,
> strung between two trees, placed at either end of this runic row, a yew
> and an ash, which are eternally _connected_ (are you getting this, Peter?)
> by this flowering garland (the Anglo-Saxon word for which is literally
> "life-ring") across the intervening "grove-dark" space (of death,
> presumably, given those Dante-esque terms) that separates them. If,
> as I believe, Prynne's poetry as a whole both expresses that trauma of
> separation and the broken-in-twoness experienced by the survivor, it is
> also a striving, step by step, for reunion across that divide, for
> restoration, line by line, poem by poem, of what (or who) was lost. What
> you as a reader of that poetry experience, Peter--from _outside_, or so
> you've put it--as a withholding of something from you, as a "won't say"
> or a music no sooner recognized than shattered, I've experienced from
> within this little runic shrine to what/who has been withheld from this
> poet--because this is where I came into Prynne's poetry (as one of the
> very first poems by him I read), and I only "in-got" here because of
> my training as a medievalist.
>
> But I didn't have to be a medievalist (Christ, isn't Cambridge full of
> those sort?!) or one who could read runes (not all medievalists can, of
> course, including some or all of those at Cambridge, apparently)--I
> didn't have to start here, with this poem, to know that I was in the
> presence of great poetry because others know that, too, by virtue of
> the other ways they've come into it. Just as Prynne's is a many-gaited
> step, poetically speaking, so too is this a many-gated poetry, and
> that's partly why it's great, I'd say. But there's more to it than that,
to
> recall now the "staves" I've added to cris and Lawrence's "visual text"
> heading: it's in the craft of those that the (theoretical) encryption
> lies (ho ho), but it's also the means by which Prynne has revolutionized
> English poetry, in my humble etc., and you don't get much greater than
> that!
>
> But THAT will have to await another post, tomorrow, because this
> one's long enough (more than, for some, I realize). But let me not
> neglect to wish Peter _many returns of the day_ by way of that
> Triodic "uh" which has been itching him. _Triodes_ alludes more to the
> rune poem than to any other single work in the Prynne canon, as far as
> I can tell--one ref. to it will interest the cris cheek who works the
> margins ("the text/omits, the margin includes, you dope"), though it's
> not cris who's "the dope," of course--and there are many refs. to
> torches as well (a "fiery arm" upraised a la the Statue of Liberty,
> e.g., and another one that assimilates Pandora to Tarpeia, I suspect).
> I think "uh" carries a torch as well--if it's read runically--which is
> the only reading I can offer as the kind of reader I am. What it means,
> then, would be _ur cen_ in Anglo-Saxon, or "you torch." As for what's
> to be torched, well, if you're saying it with runes, there can only be
> one possible candidate, and the rune poem itself can be read as sign-
> bearing of the very same message, repeated along its identical top and
> bottom rows, if you read the 3d B of each string of birch runes as the
> first letter of a runic power-word ordinarily spelled "alu," but which
> Prynne has purposefully rendered with an ae/_ash_ (hint, hint) to yield
> not _balu_ (meaning "bale") but _baelu_, meaning, yup, "torch."
>
> Candice
>
>



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