Mapping the Intimate Contours

Memoir is usually seen as an internal psychological exploration. But I felt that I wasn’t just writing about the personal loss of my mother; I was also mapping the intimate contours of this mysterious transformation we all experience, because that’s what I’d wanted when my mother died: a more resonant description than 'the stages of grief' could offer.- Meghan O’Rourke

The words Meghan O'Rourke used in a New York Times interview to describe writing about her mother's death have stuck with me: "mapping the intimate contours."

It's a phrase that describes one of the important things artists try to achieve.

Thanksgiving symbolizes harmony in a melting pot

Maybe this is a stretch. It's certainly a bit outdated with the approach of Christmas - the holiday for which Thanksgiving serves as an healing balm.

Thanksgiving is celebrated as a time to count our blessings, a harvest festival with ancient roots tied to the natural high-latitude season for chowing down.

But in a world of mechanized agriculture, in a colonized land filled with immigrants of various races, ethnicities and religions, I'm thinking the cultural significance of Thanksgiving stems from its symbolism of community harmony. Thanks for not killing me. I have no plans to kill you.

Think of the iconic image of Thanksgiving: pilgrims and Native American's dining together. An armistice before the grueling winter. We're all in this together. Pass the turkey, please.

At Thanksgiving, Jews, Muslims and Christians can - and do - dine together without the theological ackwardness that accompanies religious holidays like Christmas, Hannukah or Ramadan. (Saying grace aside, of course.)

Next time someone asks me what holiday is the most important in America, I'm going to tell them it's Thanksgiving.

It's all fugue, contrast and tension to me

After spending the past 6 months launching a new website - STRAY: The Adventure Journal - I've returned to my interest in literature by picking up "It's all Greek to me" by Charlotte Higgins. A survey of Greek influence on the modern world, the book rightfully starts out with a discussion of Homer, that well-spring of Greek culture - and thus Western culture.

From the first chapter, it's got me thinking about literary theory. The author had me when she started talking about the "architecture" of the Iliad. Specifically, I was struck by a discussion of how Homer, in The Odyssey, slips in mention Agamemnon's less than happy homecoming to Argos after the Trojan war. "He returned home only to be slaughtered unceremoniously by his wife's lover Aegisthus - who in turn, was murdered by Orestes, Agamemnon's son," she writes.

Higgins points out the architectural function of including this story in Odysseus' epic is to provide an alternative story against which the main story unfolds. If Odysseus doesn't play his return right, he might meet the same fate as Agamemnon. Will Odysseus' son Telemachus turn out to be as brave a boy as Aegisthus? Will Odysseus wife Penelope, who house is lousy with suitors, betray her husband the way Agamemnon was betrayed?

The story of Agamemnon's return seems superfluous, but is in fact central to establishing the drama of the Odyssey.

It got me thinking of several techniques and elements of storytelling. The first is the concept of literary fugue, which I've discussed before. That is, a pattern that serves as a benchmark for the main action of the story. Here, the story of Agamemnon's tragic homecoming serves as a pattern against which the story of Odysseus is compared.

The second technique, then, is contrast or juxtaposition. When Odysseus accomplishes his homecoming, it is more meaningful because the readers understands the alternative. There is a tension between the possible and the actual.

And speaking of tension, prior to known how the story unfolds, the introduction of the story of Agamemnon's return serves to heighten the reader's anticipation through foreshadowing possible outcomes. We want to know if the same pattern will be repeated. We fear for Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope, while rooting for them to come out on top. We want Odysseus to root the greedy suitors, for Telemachus to become a man and for Penelope to stick by her man.

Cutting it Short

It is generally true that algebra in its development in individual countries passed successively through three stages: the rhetorical, the syncopated, and the symbolic. - Tobias Dantzig

The first time I remember hearing the word "syncopated" was in Ken Burn's documentary on Jazz. It seems to have a specialized meaning in music, which is to modify rhythm by stressing or accenting a weak beat. In Burn's movie, Wynton Marsalis uses it in his running commentary to describe the musical flights of various great jazz artist.

So when I came across the word in Tobias Dantzig's book Number, I was intrigued that the word seemed to have a more fundamental meaning with broader implications for abstraction and meaning -- and therefore possibly for writing and art.

In his book, which traces the origins and evolution of numbers and mathematics, Dantzig demonstrates a progression from oral mathematics that uses only words (such as "the sum is independent of the order of the terms") to symbolic algebra in which graphical symbols represent concepts previously conveyed by the words (a + b = b + a).

Syncopation is the process of abbreviation by which the words become symbols. Certain words that are used regularly are gradually shortened until they have no obvious connection with the original word.

Webster's tells us that the word syncope dates to 1550, and comes from the Greek synkopē, which literally means cutting short from synkoptein to cut short. It is the loss of one or more sounds or letters in the interior of a word.

Dantzig offers the history of the symbols + and - as examples of words become algebraic signs.

In medieval Europe the latter was long denoted by the full word minus, then by the first letter m duly superscribed. Eventually the letter itself was dropped, leaving the superscript only. The sign plus passed through a similar metamorphosis.

Here seems to be the key trait of syncope: abbreviation. It is the process by which a sign for something becomes abbreviated.

In this way, it seems to be subclass of metonymy, which Webster's tells us "is a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated."

This certainly seems to hold in the broadest sense that metonymy consists of using a derivative sign to represent an original object or concept. The "sails crossed the ocean," being a classic example of this kind of derivation (i.e., the sails are derived from the ship.)

When we see a sign on the side of the road with a simple graphic of ship on it and find a marina at the next exit, its the end result of the process of syncopation.

Punny brainteaser #2

The latest offering, of modest difficulty, from Luis, the cafe clerk:

Pablo has two coins that add up to 15 cents. But one of them is not a nickle.

How is that possible?



One dime, one nickle.

Aristotle's Poetics and plot

I've started Aristotle's Poetics, the Penguin Classics version. I'm only into the intro by Malcolm Heath, but it's already fascinating. The first thing that caught my attention in a big way was Heath's discussion of the primacy that Aristotle assigns to plot -- as contrasted with character. The argument at its most basic goes something like this: even if we know nothing about the character, we can imagine what a normal person would do in a given situation; thus a story, at it's simplest, can do without a complex character, but not without a series of connected actions (i.e., plot). "Do" here is key, as Aristotle sees action as the core of a story.

The most interesting part is Heath's caution that Aristotle's discussions of plot focus on the underlying sequence of events in a story. "The reader," he writes, "should be careful not to forget the level of abstraction at which Aristotle is working throughout the chapters on plot: he is not concerned here with the construction of the verbal artefacts (his spelling) which are tragedies, but with the design of the patterns of events which underlie them."

He makes the distinction again here: "Aristotle is often quoted as if he had said that a play has a beginning, a middle and an end. This is wrong. It is the plot, the underlying sequence of actions, that has this structure."

I've come across this distinction before -- most recently reading Gerrard Genette -- is important, because the "artefact" often mixes up the time, beginning at the end of a story then flashing back to the beginning then coming back to the end again. In some cases, the story focuses only on the moment of crisis in a story.

I'm thinking of Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. The couple has spent quite a while together and Hemingway's account could have begun before they met, showed them meeting, the discovery that the woman is pregnant, and the scene on the train platform where they heatedly discuss her getting an abortion. But Hemingway only shows the scene on the platform -- though he very cleverly alludes to the larger story with these two lines: "He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights."

You are what you analogize

A stanza from Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was display on the home page of Poet.org this morning.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

The poem reminds me of William Carlos Williams' Red Wheel Barrow and Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica, in that it seems to be a meta-poem, a poem about writing poems, about the nature of art.

The entry for Stevens on the site placed him between the English Romantics and the French Symbolists -- between, and I'm interpolating here, "inflection" and "innuendo." Which got me onto Symbolism (so attracted to abstraction, the French). The Poetry Portal says the Symbolists "rejected the pastoral tradition, and took their themes and images from city life, emphasizing its bleak, hallucinatory and/or illicit aspects."

This is, of course, only one characteristic of the Symbolist movement. But it got me thinking about the imagery and analogies (not to mention forms and techniques) writers use change over time.

Homer derived most of his imagery from nature. The exception to Homers nature-based imagery may be the scene in the Iliad in which Hephaestus makes armor for Achilles; his animated forges and girls made of metal are VERY unnatural, the stuff of science fiction. These rare technology-based images aside, Homer was grounded in nature. How many Homeric similes in the Iliad depict a lion ravaging a sheep while quaking shepherds watch? His audience were farmers themselves and intimately acquainted with nature, so those analogies were accessible to them.

It makes sense then that people living in cities would write for other people living in cities by using urban imagery. Suburbanite that I am, I'm wondering how to work Starbucks and rush-hour traffic into my writing.