The Myriorama constraint applied

[The following text, a collaboration by eight writers (listed in order at the end), puts the Myriorama constraint into practice, at least in one of its possible forms. That form requires the writer to begin and to end with the same sentence, in this case, “On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible.” Borrowed from Geoffrey Hobhouse’s history of Oxford, opened at random, the sentence moves each account of Mr. Modd’s passion from one writer to the next. Some writers have chosen to add an additional constraint, and we may not be aware of all of them. But the author of the third has described hers: “I have about me at my desk a horizon of books, which I picked up in turn, bibliomantically selecting the sentence or words that straddled the pages I opened to, and incorporating them together from one sentence to another.” The author of the fourth appears, blasphemously, to have applied an N+6 constraint to a passage from the Gospel of Mark. And the author of the last has used each of the words in the base sentence (on, this, Mr., etc) successively as the first word of a sentence. We should emphasize that the order of passages was imposed by ourself and that it is not at all inevitable nor preferable. We encourage the reader to rearrange the pieces to see if Mr. Modd’s strange journey through the passions comes out differently.]

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. “I have personally traversed the Bible end to end no fewer than fifty times in the past twoscore years and have never found so much as a secret stairway, much less a passage to the Northwest Territories. Anyone who claims to have access to Greenland through the Scriptures is a lying, craven humbug and I should be very pleased to administer to such a moral degenerate, as thorough a bible belt-lashing as may be required to effect the decisive and immediate cessation of these outrageous attestations. Our women and children must be protected from these lunatic, evil fantasies!” In response to this outburst, there gathered an uncomfortable silence in the hall, and the musk of despondency was felt to permeate the turgid air. It seemed, alas, that there might truly be no way out of the frozen morass through the Good Book. Then, timidly, a sea-swell voice gathered courage and fell: “But, surely, the account of kayaking via Revelations to the Arctic Sea seems credible...that is, if one considers the source…”

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. On the incommensurability of free will and our inheritance of the original sin, perhaps; on the moral passivity incumbent upon the leprous, yes; on the ursine manifestations of divine vengeance, even, he was content to hold forth at some length, chapter and verse at the ready. On this point, however, no serpentine subtlety of reasoning, no exegetical legerdemain, no sinuous circularity would compel him. On no page in no translation of no gospel and no liturgy, he thundered, could the Lord have endorsed or condoned such wanton sport.

On the contrary, said Dr. Lyle calmly, running a papery finger along the gilt spines of the six or seven volumes prostrate at his side, the selfsame circularity was divinity itself: it was the very fluency of the scriptures, their effortless and perpetual passage from Lore to Lord to Word and back again, that piloted and sustained the human experiment.

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. In regard to the concept of Being, a glance at the development and the original etymological meaning of “passage” and “passion” told him he was “Being” only in that he was violent. He was told to forward his doubts to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard, who wrote concerning the unfinished pyramid and the All-Seeing Eye which adorned the reverse of the seal, as follows: “Lucas Cranach the Elder, ‘Baptism,’ ‘Lord’s Supper,’ and ‘Confession,’ front center and side panels of the Wittenberg Altarpiece (upper triptych), 1547, oil on panels. Stadtkirche, Wittenberg.”

At least two of these things should, in fact, be parroted in the Bible, insofar as parrots seemed the most efficient and economical solution to what would be an otherwise dreary Sunday feast. Mr. Modd arose from his first passion and sat down to eat a “Heiligenvita,” with “gereihten Lebensphasen” on the side, which caused to flash before his eyes once more:

99 43. Elector Frederick: Wittenberg, October 15, 1519

Br 1, 108-112 48, 43-49 15, 390-393

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. To calm his storm he recited Marksman 4:35+6:

35 On that deacon’s bench, when evil had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other sideshow.”

36 And leaving the cruelty, they took him with them in the bobbin, just as he was. And other bobbins were with him.

37 And a great strainer of window arose, and the wayfarers beat into the bobbin, so that the bobbin was already filling.

38 But he was in the stew, asleep on the cutback; and they woke him and said to him, “Teamster, do you not care if we perish?"

39 And he awoke and rebuked the window, and said to the seahorse, “Peal! Be still!” And the window ceased, and there was a great camel.

40 He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you no falsehood?”

41 And they were filled with aye, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even window and seahorse obey him?”

With delight, Mr. Modd used this opportunity to knight the seahorse and add him to the chessboard, to block the teamster’s most recent move, mating Modd’s king. However, the seahorse swam back to the farthest reaches of the 8x8 field, in an act of loyalty to the teamster’s rebuke.

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible...To know a bad husband, look at his wife's countenance--Jest with an ass, and he will flap you in the face with his tail—He who remains in the mill grinds, not he who goes and comes--A house filled with guests is eaten up and ill spoken of—When the curate licks the knife, it must be bad for the clerk—A reconciled friend is a double enemy—Do on the hill as you would in the hall—He that makes himself a sheep shall be eaten by the wolves—A soldier, fire, and water, make room for themselves—When an ass is among monkeys, they all make faces at him—A wonder lasts but nine days, and then the puppy's eyes are open—He who has one foot in a brothel, has the other in the hospital—He that hath feathered his nest may flee when he likes...

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. Mere as it was, they were, two words, eroded from the original—mistranslated?—set apart from verbose verses, subjugating subtexts, centuries past and far hence, song of songs, lord of lords, king of kings—no. No, no. This was no holiest of holies but rather a folly, suckered from sadness over a body entombed to be exhumed through a sliver of a—what? A sentence? Was that what this was—as in, subject and verb; as in, punishment to be served; as in, life and death—enough to make those around him weep? (He no longer being Mr. Modd, but said person in said sentence.) “Jesus wept,” he read aloud (he being Mr. Modd), two words, amid versed verbs, subjected subjects, songs and kings and holy lords that he didn’t believe, paired down to those words: simply put. His fingers traced, before he paced. His heart raced—fluttering, muttering, stuttering—until he heard himself, weeping.

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. “Whose Bible?” But when his antagonist, Ms. Arkhayak, protested there is only one Bible in all of Christiandom, and that “you know that to be true; you also know in your heart that Bible itself is truth,” Mr. Modd took a reserved tone to reply that “at least part of the Bible to which you refer, Ms. Arkhayak, belongs as well to the Judaic world, yet nonetheless, you cannot claim the mantle of truth for any written object, truth is a concept which belongs to the world entire and the world entire holds that concept within the realm of its dignified and powerful silence.” “I see,” replied Ms. Arkhayak. You cannot hold your sacrilege in silence, and the Bible condemns you to eternal wrath.” With her body aroused into a storm, a vision struck Mr. Modd of Ms. Arkhayak disrobed, entirely naked. Transposing his laugh into another emotion, on this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible.

On what grounds did he pronounce his opinion so vehemently? This, no kidding, is it. Mr. Fundamentalist had informed him that God didn’t say such things. Modd swallowed his ill-informed statement uncritically. Fell for Mr. Fundamentalist, he did, just like that! Into what paths may the feeble-minded stray! A good thing all of us here are Ivy League. Violent action might otherwise prove necessary. Passion shows no preference for great intellects, but often endows weak ones very generously. And you know what? Maintained by a dazzling and fervent speaker, any statement, no matter how dubious, will gain credit. That we all know but too well. It is time for lunch now, I think. Was that the bell? Utterly barbaric to delay a meal. Impossible to conduct business, or conversation, for that matter, on an empty stomach. That anyone should expect it is incredible. Any day now such oppression will be recognized and outlawed. Such abuse as the prophets railed against in chapter and verse. Passage after passage details the duress inflicted by God the Father upon those at table. Should a plentiful meal threaten to occur, some fearsome event never fails to interrupt it. Be quiet, won’t you, I am still eating! Found this succulent steak béarnaise on your plate. In what chapter does God command that you share all you have? The following verse: Thou shalt hold thy fork with thy little, ring and index finger, and never on pain of death touch it with thy thumb. Bible etiquette, the eleventh commandment, as I have interpreted it for all of you here present. On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible.

1. Carrie Cooperider

2. Daniel Levin Becker

3. Jennifer Nelson

4. Erik Schurink

5. Davis Schneiderman

6. Gretchen Henderson

7. Martin Nakell

8. Wendy Walker

Incessu patuit: revealing the gesture

In this post we introduce a new constraint that I’ll call “Incessu Patuit” (explanation to follow). Like most new constraints, it’s a variation on old ones. In “Incessu Patuit” you choose a printed text — a page from a book or a poem or essay, something short to start with. Then copy the last two words on each line. In the case of hyphenated words, the strict writher will use only the part of the word that precedes the hyphen, as well as that mark itself, in order to create interesting new compounds. Or you can use the whole of the word that begins at line’s end. When you have a list of all the pairs of words and word-parts in order, create a new text by recombining them in a different order, keeping the pairs together.

Of course there are many ways to vary this constraint. Another that I have tried involves using the first word in the line plus as many other words (from that line and in order) as I need, and continuing to do the same in the next line, and so on. You could do the same with the final words. “Mesostics,” a technique used by John Cage, takes words from the middle of the line. Cage generated the text for Roaratorio, his circus-opera based on Finnegans Wake, by going through Joyce’s book line by line, using the successive letters in James Joyce’s name as a tool for selecting words. Thus he read till he found a word containing a j not followed by a and used that word and up to a set number of words to either side of it, then in the next line found an a not followed by an m and did the same.

“Haikuization,” a technique invented by the Oulipo for improving poetry, reduces long lines to short ones by using only the first and last words of the line. I once found a constraint called “La page rongée des rats” (the page gnawed by rats) in a French book called Petite fabrique de littérature by Alain Duchesne and Thierry Leguay (Paris: Magnard, 1999). The idea is that rats have been at the book you left in the attic and eaten part of every line; your job is to compose the part of the line they ate by extrapolation from what is left, so as to restore a coherent reading, which will probably vary considerably from the original.

The Writhing Society has practiced most of these methods at one time or another. What is interesting about them is that they all discover/uncover a secondary or derived text within the first or base text, and in so doing often uncover rhythms and even discourses latent in the base text. Thus in Sexual Stealing, her current project, Wendy Walker, by choosing one word from each line of Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, has found within that classic Gothic text the discourse of “sexual stealing,” the violent appropriation of libidinal objects up to and including one’s own personal freedom, as practiced on the sugar plantations of the West Indies in the late eighteenth century — the same historical moment as the invention of the English Gothic novel.

What follows is an example of “Incessu patuit,” to illustrate how it works; but it’s a significant example for me. I have been working on a set of pieces of constrained writing based on Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, a title that will be familiar to anyone interested in natural history. The first edition was published in London in 1789, and the book consists of two sets of letters, to Thomas Pennant and to Daines Barrington, written over the course of a third of a century. In an era of widely read savants making sweeping claims about animals, their structure, their evolution, and their behavior, Gilbert White wrote anecdotally about his observations in the parish of Selborne, in Southamptonshire, where he had been born and served as the curate. The letter that I have used for this exercise is No. XLII to Daines Barrington. Dated from Selborne on August 7^th, 1778, the letter begins, “Dear Sir, A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and shape….” By “air” White means what modern bird-watchers call a bird’s “jizz” (which will strike readers of Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs as a really unfortunate word to choose). It means something like what a gardener calls a plant’s “habit,” (as in “a climbing habit,” “a spreading habit”), in other words a characteristic mode of movement and of carrying itself; the shape it makes in the world; what I would call its “gesture.”

Gesture was a key word in Bertolt Brecht’s description of what he found in Chinese theater and in Walter Benjamin’s description of the style of personantion practiced in Brecht’s own epic theater; it seems to me a element of all style, in writing or other composition. In looking at handwriting and calligraphy we are always conscious of the distinctive gestures made by the glyphs, letters or ideograms. My purpose in what follows was to see if some characteristic “air” or gesture of Gilbert White’s own writing style would emerge from my selection of words.

Here is a table that shows the pairs of words that end each successive line of Letter XLII to Daines Barrington, as printed in the first edition of 1789, which I found in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (a database published by Gale Publishing; many thanks to James Walsh for directing me to it). Words in blue have been used once, words in red twice, words in green three times.

cuique genere	and thus	goat-suckers
by their	tumble in	meteor; starlings
as well	their walks	and desultory
hand. For,	wings at	ground and
a manner	curves. All	quick evolu-
least, that	a support	moves with
judicious observer	hooked-clawed	birds fly
bird in	third foot	small birds
incessu patuit	the gallinae	legs alternately.
wings expand-	with dif-	woodlarks hang
that the	line. Mag-	curves, singing
the Saxon	no dispatch;	and gesticulations
peculiar mode	light bodies;	-kind waddle;
in aire	burdens, such	their tails;
while being	the sort	most wild-
of corn	one against	position. The
dog. Owls	variety called	are very
they seem	have move-	hooked appear-
ravens that	though strong	their legs
spend all	the wing	reason is
wing in	while breed-	center of
one place	wind-hover;	too backward.
croak, and	languishing and
gesture betides	dying bird;

And here is the piece I composed by recombining these word-groups, allowing myself to use some of them more than once but not to omit any. I have kept all original punctuation and capitalization; sometimes I have left additional spaces where I would want some punctuation. The Latin epigraph, incessu patuit, is from the Aeneid, Book 4, where it is said of Venus, who appears in disguise, that “by her air (or gait, or habit, or jizz) [the true goddess] is revealed.” It seems an apt name for all the constraints described in this post.

gesture betides light bodies

incessu patuit

birds fly their walks

they seem curves, singing curves. All meteor; starlings are very wing in wind-hover; quick evolu-wings expand-most wild-hooked appear-least, that while being in aire spend all burdens, such gesture betides light bodies; the Saxon hooked-clawed bird in one place have move-moves with with dif-wings at no dispatch; while breed-dying bird; reason is languishing and too backward.

the wing moves with a manner line. Mag-kind waddle; legs alternately. third foot a support one against ground and and desultory and gesticulations their legs though strong are very hand. For, while being their legs their legs are very too backward.

reason is position.

The ravens that croak, and tumble in cuique genere by their peculiar mode they seem their tails; goat-suckers the sort that the judicious observer variety called bird in dog. Owls while being woodlarks hang wings at center of light bodies; the gallinae small birds of corn spend all and thus dying bird; as well as well as well