Kid Twist
– PERISCOPICS

To CA
Bare-kneed May-girl


The snake that loves the twilight is come out,
Beautiful, still, and deadly…
                                —Death’s Jest-Book


The Muses, we know, are the daughters of Memory; and it sometimes pleases at least one of them to honor her mother. Thus I was pleasantly startled to discover (about myself) that a string of words I had been quoting for thirty years as an exemplar of metaphoric precision was other than I remembered it: it was “adagios of islands” and not—but let us examine this string a little before proceeding to my misquotation.

“Adagios” is a technical term in music; it refers to the slow, drawled-out tempo at which a movement or passage is to be played. Islands, of course, do not move, except, I suppose, plate-tectonically (but those would be larghissimos), and are, analytically as well as etymologically speaking, isolated from each other, so the progression uniting them must be that of a person moving languidly (legato?) through or among them—obviously not in a motorboat (prestos) or a hydroplane (prestissimos)—but under sail. The two nouns together, then, delimit the (potentially infinite) range of musical reference to the motion of music, independent of, say, its sound; and—by virtue of the “of”—join that motion, which is the subject’s through space as well as in time, to the silent, unmoving islands. And it is “adagios of islands,” plural: the isolation of indeterminably numerous islands overcome through motion—in fact or in wish only, only the whole poem can tell.

No doubt there are many more, and many deeper and perhaps more accurate things to say about this string. But as this is not an exposition, or a eulogy, of them, but rather a page from the libro de la mia memoria, I will proceed at once to my misquotation.

Which was: arpeggios of islands.

This too is a technical term in music; but my acquaintance with it began as, and largely remains, a lexicographical, not a musical, one. I encountered it as a headword in a dictionary, and its phonemic pattern (as perused, not pronounced) no doubt played a part in my erroneous substitution, as we shall see; but what caught my eye—for I was on my way to some neighboring word, exactly which I don’t remember—was the illustration that accompanied the definition, whatever that was (I didn’t read it): on a stave, under the rubric “as written,” four noteheads stacked on a single vertical stem; and to their right, under “as played,” their further articulation into a right-triangular pyramid of twelve notes, ascending step-wise, on five vertical stems, with some mysterious ledger lines beneath the stave.

It was, then, as a graphical, that is, a planar representation of lines and ellipsoids that

“arpeggio” presented and principally stuck; and owing to the phonemic and alphabetic likeness, and no doubt to the back-contamination in the string of “islands,” the step from the graphical to the cartographical was inevitable (at least for me): for it is against a two-dimensional grid of horizontal and vertical lines that the quasi-ellipsoids that compose archipelagoes appear on maps.

Now, I do not in any way wish to suggest an equivalence of value between the original string and its, so to speak, illegitimate offspring. The former results from a “felt emotional affinity” (as Dewey would say) between one direct experience and another; the latter (to say the worst of it), from passing to one word from another by means of a third. And yet that too is a kind of experience, in which a kind of felt affinity is playing a part; and the emotion felt as affined is no less of a felt emotion for all its seeming, and actual, aloofness from immediacy. No doubt the change is “a poor thing” by comparison with its occasioning circumstance, but it is, indeed—as Touchstone goes on definitively to conclude—“mine own.”

And my question is: mine own what?

Observe that the substitution, or, if you prefer, the distortion, of the original was not simply a bull or a malapropism—it was not (à la Slip Mahoney) “adenoids of islands,” or (à la Mugs McGuiness) “adagios of eyeglasses”—or a mere lapsus linguae or simple hiatus in consciousness filled in willy-nilly; it had a gist, indeed, a coherence, at least if we take into account the mental detour that produced it, along with the result: a gist, that is, from neighboring things joined in a spatial and temporal continuum of sensory-motor experience, to separated shapes exhibited planarily and statically in permanent isolation each from the others, and connected only, if it all, by the cartographical convention of the orthogonal grid and the geographical convenience of a collective noun. Even the “of” participates in the gist: the “of” that predicates of the objects the subject’s own experience of being in or among them, expressing intimacy, becomes the “of” of representation (as in “a map of”), expressing an alienated view from outside and, in this case, from very high above. And even if we take the result apart from the detour, arpeggiation involves (as in the illustration) the articulation of a single composite chord (already, “as written,” articulated) into its multiplied constituents (“as played”)—and this too belongs to the gist in question.

Now, it is the nature of such gists, or “imaginative trends,” in general that particularly interests me, for in them we catch sight of an agency—unnamed, but very real—whose operations are more comprehensive (and in life, more momentous) than this adagios-arpeggios business suggests—indeed, even those two little strings are already themselves expressions-in-miniature of two vastly different intuitions of aesthetic form, as contrasted by Dewey: form as “the moving integration of experience,” and form as “motion arrested in a prerogative object”—whatever “prerogative” happens here to mean. If we look to the coherence in virtue of which we may call the multifarious results of its operations veritable gists, we may suppose an active, and even what today would be called a “proactive,” principle that, rather than responding to or qualifying experience as it happens, predetermines (and, to that extent, predestinates) what in the immediate flux will be raised to the level of experience in the first place, for what is congenial there it appropriates, and what is intractable to its action it either relegates to non-existence or domesticates to its measure by such freaks as the mental detour delineated above (observe what, of the original string, was retained). And if we look to the possible, and, often enough, actual eccentricity of the results, we may suppose the principle in question to be a personal endowment of each individual, at least when it is that, as—judging from the easy reception by so many of what is called “reality,” and the well-nigh universal appeal of the popular forms of what is called “art” congenial to that—there must be considerable consentaneity in its normal operations.

In short, I should like to propose the existence of an agency, or principle, that functions as a kind of private—usually consentaneous, in some few cases eccentric, in some fewer cases downright peculiar— a priori category, to whose prerogatives, even unto annihilation (as above), the supposedly “transcendental” categories of “time,” “space” and “causality” are wholly responsive.

Like those, however, this category is transparent to the empirical subject whose own protomorphic principle it happens to be, and, in all normal cases, is likely so to remain. If any deviant from the norm is to learn of hers at all it must be by her expressing it in…well, in a prerogative object, i.e., a work, provided it be one into whose production no extra-expressive interests such as fear (of giving offence, as currently) or greed (for preferment, as always) have insinuated themselves to pre-empt or to inter-mediate, and thereby to compromise, its free operation—i.e., a work of art. Of course, what we find so expressed is usually discounted as a willful distortion of the common “reality,” and no doubt any artist’s original naiveté may degenerate into a self-imitative manner; but in fact, each legitimate case is a candid account of an actual personal world; and which, among such legitimate works, count for any individual likewise endowed with his own—as opposed to what he may respect, admire, appreciate, honor, recognize as “culturally central” or “historically significant,” and so forth—are precisely those  whose expressed idiomorphic gists harmonize with his actual private one; whence there arises, for each such individual, a completely idiosyncratic closet canon of art works that may—and—if we were honest about it—usually does, deviate drastically from the received one.

But that aside, there is another way in which one may become apprized of his idiomorphic tendencies, so to call them—namely, by a felt dissentience between his own and what, in my own case, I may with complete justice call the world’s, at least as far as the latter’s may be inferred from its outwardly manifested prepossessions. We have seen what happens to intimate, flowing, liquid, languid adagios when they are domesticated to a timeless and spaceless, planar and piecemeal, aloof and right-angular measure; now consider what must happen to a girl for her to be, as it were, arpeggiated so.

And to love.

[1] One recalls “As silent as a mirror is believed/Realities plunge in silence by.” (Quoted from memory)

[2] The 1951 edition of Webster’s “thin paper” New Collegiate Dictionary.

[3] It might have been “armature.”

[4] And what the Gnostics would call this Aeon’s.