Songs From The Mouth Of The River

[Douglas Mercer]

Douglas Mercer
September 28 2024

According to Samuel Johnson the pun for William Shakespeare was the fatal Cleopatra for which he was well willing to lose the world. And it’s true he was inordinately interested in the surface of his words and no sooner had he written some than he was referring back to them, as if words themselves in their divine frenzy constituted the world itself; in his late plays all character had been done away with and who was saying what was beside the point; it was as if the play itself was one long dramatic monologue of---William Shakespeare. In these closing plays he pushed language to the limit in his inimitable late style and gives us knotty poetry resistant to interpretation. More than one passage has just about everyone throwing up his hands as to what he is trying to say:

And his love too, who is a servant for
The tenor of thy speech, dear glass of ladies
Bid him that we, whom the flaming war doth scorch
Under the shadow of his sword may cool us
Require him advance it over our heads
Speak in a woman’s key—like such a woman
As any of us three, weep where you fail
Lend us a knee
But touch the ground for us no longer time
Than a dove’s motion when the head’s plucked off
Tell him if he in the blood sized field lay swollen
Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon
What you would do

This is a man at the peak of his art, suave, cool, composed; this is a man who has become so indifferent to the world and to humanity that he has come to realize that nothing in the external world can match what is going on his head. This is language reifying itself in solipsistic speech, this is language selecting its own society and shutting the door, speaking only to itself, concerned only with itself, imperious and free, constituting its own ground in self-affirmation, this is language speaking to and for itself only (rep ipsa loquitur)

***

A less told history of Mathew Street began in 1974, when Peter Halligan leased an old apple warehouse on the relatively empty street and established a new hub for the city’s creative misfits with the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream And Pun.

Nietzsche began his academic career as a philologist (a lover of words) and famously said that until we are rid of grammar we will not be rid of God. His view was that by the rules of grammar we impose structures on the world and thus what we envision is a construct, that is we see ourselves, not the world; it has since been leaned that grammar is innate to the human brain and thus grammar is built into the ground plan of nature, thus there is a one to one mapping between brain and nature (the two being one and the same thing). Of course having gone stark raving insane in 1889 there is no way the philosopher could have known that, the relevant fact about universal grammar not having been unfolded until some seventy years later in the 1960s.

***

It seem inconceivable that Martin Heidegger was unaware of the ground plan of James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake. It was Heidegger after all who posited that language was alive and it was Joyce who took up this idea, though of course there no evidence that Joyce knew of Heidegger himself and the latter’s work on language post dates the former’s death. Thus both were toiling in the dark vis-à-vis the other, though both were tracking the same trace from near identical angles if in different forms. Pascal said that humanity is one man thinking, Emerson had his idea of the oversoul, and Shakespeare called the prophetic soul the wide world dreaming on things to come. All are correct. Which is why it’s always best to glow last, to exit in the universal wake, and be able to get the faculty together once we are exposed to everything. Then it is just a matter of clerical work.

Joyce’s final book is a night book, a realistic account of one man dreaming on one night (the time elapsed in the book is, more or less, eight hours). Based on the cycles of Vico it constitutes the wide world streaming, or one man thinking, or one man dreaming and, as befits an art form consisting solely of words, reality is made up of words with no object other than themselves. The hero’s initials are HCE, ie, here comes everybody, thus putting it in the frame of Emerson’s oversoul or Jung’s pool of life, or Steinbeck’s we’ll see everyone on the road.

Like Shakespeare the pun was for Joyce the thing for which he was well willing to lose the world, and many thought he did or lost his mind in the bargain. He had to gingerly give Finnegan’s Wake to his benefactor (a million pounds in today’s money) Harriet Weaver, knowing that she and all his supporters would not like it and think he had in fact gone stark raving mad. He was correct, and he got resistance from nearly all his friends and all quarters, even Pound (make it new!) was a dissenter. The main criticism was that he had left the world in solipsism and had created a private mythology; but that was short sighted, everyone jumps in the pool from his own direction, but the pool is common (see Emerson’s notion of the oversoul). His method was fully Heideggerian taking all of the Indo-European languages and compressing them into one, as if the songs from the mouth of the river, after meandering for a time, were to all find outlets into the single vast sea before him. By doing so he created a kind of high Esperanto or punning portmanteau language, artificial but fecund with suggestion.

His method is basically a kind of baby talk or pun world where brillig goes the slithy shores. Human language becomes human languish hinting that focus on language alone will lead to attenuation and enervation or languor, but this is just his Celtic slyness and charm for no one had more certainty in the victory like nature of language. Memory becomes mummery, or maimery, likewise speaking of the chief of the muses (memory) as something which can become buried (repression, Freud) or can be misrecalled and thus maimed. He speaks of the night of the dream (the higher dream of Eliot, drama, trauma) as the hole affair which we go trough, another playful illusion to the obvious whole / hole dichotomy and that we end up in a trough (cul-de-sac) rather than making it through, thus spinning in our own tracks. This betokens his belief in Viconian cycles and that life and death are a never ending going over once again or repetition that we exist in forever, the last word of the last sentence of the book being the first word of the first sentence of the book, that is there is no end and no beginning; so we get English Obliterature or total recoil. This reveals his Aristotelianism and his devotion to the hard rock of reality but Aristotle remained Plato’s schoolboy as they say.

He was more on target by saying that funeral is fun real or fun for all.

If I am misremembering the quotes that is alright, if they are maimed or mummified or misrecoiled. The words stand on their own and speak for themselves and they all belong to me at any rate.

Language / gauge / that thing which measures.

***

Martin Heidegger posited that language is alive, it is virus become god and it traverse the informational field and encodes its meanings, the key is left in the lock and once you turn it vista upon vista of sound and solid sense is opened up to you (open is pen); you can read lucidly, that is once you know the rules of the game it’s easy and you can rule. For who is to be master---that is all and the words mean just what I say they mean, neither more nor less. It’s the perk of having put it all back together again with the help of the god’s horses.

***

In Plato’s essay Hermogenes holds that words are arbitrary and hold no intrinsic meaning; there may be words like hiss which are onomatopoeiac or echoistic but that was just human genius or a lucky strike; a rose by any other after all; words are just signs of convenience and nothing can be read into them or out of them.

Cratylus on the other hand holds with Heidegger: the final theory of relations between name and object named is posited by Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus who believes that names arrive from divine origins, making them necessarily correct.

I should explain to you, Socrates, that our friend Cratylus has been arguing about names; he says that they are natural and not conventional; not a portion of the human voice which men agree to use; but that there is a truth or correctness in them, which is the same for Hellenes as for barbarians, that is words are diving things.

Socrates rebukes this theory by reminding Cratylus of the imperfection of certain names in capturing the objects they seek to signify. From this point, Socrates ultimately rejects the study of language, believing it to be philosophically inferior to a study of things themselves.

In this view language is adventitious. It was Aristophanes who lampooned Socrates for having his head in the clouds but here he shows himself as a “hard headed realist” and says language is just froth on the waves. But words are older than time and time worships them and all by whom they have their life. Their advent was not adventitious but a grand adventure, a vent is an opening by which something can come through, in Spanish it is a window through which one can see through, it is also the wind of torrent of words and, finally the event itself at the end of time.

***

Etymology is the study of the roots of words so to say “universe” is to say there is one version, or one true thing; or that contemporary has to do with time; these are from the origin and one can decipher meaning by the building blocks, that is they are naturalistic, song from the mouth of the river.

Vowels are a vow / consonants are constant and are consonant.

As honor is our loyalty.

Letters are what let or make. A letter that is sent will always arrive at his destination. Letters tell and are telling.

But soon we come to the enigmatic, eerie and uncanny; knowledge has ledge in it, and ledge had edge in it; like nestling or nesting dolls; lore has ore (the central quarry), adapt has apt meaning that to adapt is to be apt; the present is a gift and whole has a hole in the middle of it, and nowhere is now here. Evil is live backwards, and language has gauge in it, that is words are the things which measure; no time like the present is an idiom which means don’t do tomorrow what you can to do today or it can tell you what the present is: it is like there being no time. Grammar has the imperious g (always signifying the god) standing to the side and you have two mirrors (mar) reflecting one another, and ram is random access memory; you can paint yourself into a corner or into a corona or a coroner as you wish; ur is primal as in urge (the primal will); ur is in turn (it's funny how thing's turn); ur is in burn and urn in is burn; ore is always gold in the center (more, core, lore); golden is olden; science is séance (Fleance is the rightful heir of Macbeth); rain is reign; son is sun; flash is related to flush (hitting it square); crash has ash in it; conceptually sex, vex, hex are related; floor has roof it (one man's roof is another man's floor); send has end in it and end is den; it goes without saying and IT is information technology, it comes and it goes; information goes in formation; man is a glassy essence looking into a glassy sea; glass has lass (fat lady, Venus); and so on and so forth; these meanings are meanderings and are not built in from the inception but are recognized at last; these are not etyms or atoms of building blocks (a lock is block); these are meanings which language itself speaks forth to one who can read, to one who has accepted that there is something to read, not read in, but read; read is dear; these significations are not human constructs but divine in origin; it may seem far afield but at the last syllable of recorded time it will be as clear as a bell on a midwinter’s eve; syllable sibyl prophecy or the wide word dreaming and streaming on what is to come.

So should our title not be songs from the mouth of the river but words at the edge of space?

If it seems arbitrary it is, but the most high-handed reserves the right to arrogate all things to itself. To speak, that is, for itself.

Are we through the looking glass on this? Yes indeed but one look is all it takes.

***

Notes:

Mersey Beat

Mercerism: a false religion in the book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep

Mercer

Commerce: traffic, the traffic of our stage

Mercenary: one who acts for himself

It is the mercy: Crowhurst (see Deep Water, White Biocentrism, August 4 2024)

Mer: sea (Mar)

REM rapid eye movement.

REM: tell me are we locked in the punch

In earliest use, the term mercery was amorphous in nature and described the sale of a wide range of goods, from small items like needles and thread, to expensive materials such as silk or brocade. The term can be dated to the early 11th century. The first reference to mercery was in use for foreign merchants from modern-day Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

Lightening hit the house of wax
The poet goes out into the night
And I set alight
The traces of the future

True story

Future suture

At the end of Lovecraft’s story The Whisperer In The Darkness the monsters reconstruct the narrator’s friend not in perfect likeness but in actual fact.

A suture is a stitching together of parts, generally after some after some injury. A surgical suture, also known as a stitch or stitches, is a medical device used to hold body tissues together and approximate wound edges after an injury or surgery. Application generally involves using a needle with an attached length of thread.

To have something sewn up means to have it in the bag—our future will not be a thing of shreds and patches.

Douglas

Lass / god

The future: ah, the future, the world is not over until The Fat Lady sings (see The Fat Lady Sings, White Biocentrism, July 17, 2024). A stitch in time saves.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (/ɛrəˈtɒsθəniːz/; Greek: Ἐρατοσθένης [eratostʰénɛːs]; c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC) was an Ancient Greek polymath: a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. His work is comparable to what is now known as the study of geography, and he introduced some of the terminology still used today. He is best known for being the first person known to calculate the circumference of the Earth, which he did by using the extensive survey results he could access in his role at the Library. His calculation was remarkably accurate (his error margin turned out to be less than 1%). He was also the first to calculate Earth's axial tilt, which has also proved to have remarkable accuracy. He created the first global projection of the world, incorporating parallels and meridians based on the available geographic knowledge of his era.

Eratosthenes' name has Earth in it.

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