Lipophonemism, Lipotaxism

In "Voyelles" Rimbaud assigned colors to vowels:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu…

and goes on to amplify:

A, noir corset velu de mouches éclatantes

Que bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d'ombres.

In the late Paul Schmidt's translation (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, trans. P. Schmidt; New York: Harper & Row, 1976):

A, black belt, hairy with bursting flies,

Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties,

Pits of night.

The interesting thing to me is how much the affect of Schmidt's translation actually depends on the vowels u, especially in the short bu- phone, and i. Bu- evokes flies, I guess, but more broadly there is something abrupt about u and i. (Not you and I; we're all right). Those were the two vowels I was left with last Wednesday when The Writhing Society worked with the lipogrammatic procedure called La belle absente. That's the one where you compose a text using all the letters not in a name, in this case our own. (The opposite, le beau présent, uses all the letters in a name, and only those. I wrote a beau-présent poem when my son was married last June.) My name, Tom La Farge, took out the three other vowels. What I wrote felt to me more brittle and more vulgar than what I would normally write.

Christian Bök's chapter of u's in his monovocalic Eunoia (mentioned in the last post) makes you feel what an aggressive vowel u is, especially when followed by hard consonants (-ck, -nt). Here again it's not the vowel alone that carries the affect as the phoneme. Besides the obvious vulgarities, other u+hard consonant combinations produce the same effect:

Duluth dump trucks lurch, pull, U-turns. Such trucks dump much undug turf: clunk, clunk—thud. (78)

Poets used to write more about the affect intrinsic to sounds, and others have pointed out the absurdity in trying to create an affect-lexicon of sounds. Tennyson's line "the murmur of innumerable bees" stood as an example of euphonious sound-combinations expressing the lulling noise of the hive until John Crowe Ransom pointed out that you get nearly the same effect with "the murder of innumerable beeves." The feeling, in other words, was being projected on the basis of the content, not the sound. But I don't agree with Ransom. I think the line he found, about the slaughter of hecatombs of steers, is euphonious, and does rather appallingly convey a lulling, undifferentiated hive-noise, with the possible exception of the intrusive hard d. In other words the affect-content of the sounds and the meaning-content of the words are set at odds.

There's much more to say about this: about the affect we share with animals, about bird-song. Not tonight.

The other procedure we practiced last Wednesday was one of the most interesting oulipian ones, invented by the co-founder François Le Lionnais, and as far as I know rarely imitated. This is what Le Lionnais calls "la rien que la toute la," which Oulipo Compendium translates as "the only the wholly the." It could be called lipotaxis: what is left out is parts of speech, specifically nouns, verbs, and adjectives. That leaves adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns, including the indefinite pronouns. Clearly it helps to remember your grammar-school grammar here. Just after first reading about this procedure I was walking in Prospect Park with Wendy. It had rained recently; a large puddle covered one section of the path, and from beyond it a three-year-old boy was bearing down upon the water with every appearance of appetite. His mother, some distance in the rear, then called out: "Not through it, around it!" A perfect example of la rien que la toute la.

Jacqueline Cantwell, who works in the courts in Brooklyn, came to class with an event on her mind, witnessed that day. Here's how she describes it:

I was going into the courthouse and saw an old woman in line for the machines that check for weapons. As soon as I saw her, I knew she was ill. She was an old woman carrying over-stuffed bags. She had hospital bracelets on her wrists. The real give away was her white bra worn over her pink sweater; no woman does that.

I walked past her. A young woman, an attorney, was laughing at this woman and her fellow attorneys joined in.

I went into the library and ten minutes later, the same old woman comes into the library and announces she can't breathe. She starts ranting something while we get her in a chair. I called security and said I needed help with the old woman, "What's wrong with her is she's crazy." The court officers came and walked her out the building. She needed help; 911 should have been called. I thought court security was going to call 911 for her.

I was so upset because our duty is to hold off the street--and that means street attitudes and behavior. We are not supposed to laugh at the ill and throw them neglected on the street.

Here is what Jacqueline wrote:

For her to likely

Over her to likely

Above her to likely

Next for her

Next over her

Next above her

Because she surely next over

Because they surely next over her

Because next over them surely she

But for those hither

Wherever she hither for

Wherever she hither over

Wherever she hither above

Wherever next for her

Wherever over her

Wherever she surely not over

Wherever they surely not over her

Wherever next over them surely she

But for those hither

We all agreed that this piece accurately reproduces a fragmentary, repetitive, disoriented, yet still dignified state of mind.