I Love Remixes: Tauf Aleph

I am full of interesting (yet mostly useless) interesting facts. As far back as I can remember I was never interested in memorizing prime ministers, countries, provinces, PI to 60 decimals (although that would be kind of cool). I was more interested in things like “When a horse gallops all of its feet are off the ground” and “In Anglo-Saxon they called the sea a Whale Road” and things of that sort. Sometimes it pays off, most of the times—not so much.
We were supposed to be reading Phyllis Gotlieb’s Sunburst this week, but apparently there was a book store mix up and the book never came in. So instead, for those that couldn’t get a hold of the book, the prof decided that we could read another piece of Gotliebian fiction titled “Tauf Aleph”
I have to say, I enjoyed this piece although I know very little about Judaism. I enjoyed it because a very long time ago I heard the traditional story of the Golem. Apparently it was some kind of protector of the Jewish faith and it’s believers. It could be summoned in times of needs, but almost always ran amok sometime after being summoned. I’m quite aware that there are various incarnations of this story, but the one I heard went something like this.

There was a Rabbi in Prague and for some reason that I can’t remember the people of Jewish faith there were having problems with anti-Semites. Anyway, this Rabbi decided he would raise a Golem out of clay to protect the people. Part of the ritual involved writing the word “Emet” in the Golem’s forehead, which in Hebrew meant “life” or “truth”. When the Golem was summoned it could do only what the Rabbi asked him, so the Golem did the Rabbi’s bidding and for a while the people lived in peace. But as time wore on the Golem continued to grow and with it his violent intentions had grown. The people, now scared of their protector, asked the Rabbi to destroy the Golem. The Rabbi agreed and when he got the chance he rubbed the first letter from “Emet” and left “Met” (which is Hebrew for “Death”) on the Golems forehead. The golem dried up and crumbled in to piece of clay.

Gotlieb’s story about the “Golem” O/G5/842 is an interesting one because it is a revision of a classical Hebrew mythic. I love remixes, by the way, and this one is a doosey. First off, the Golem in Gotlieb’s story is self aware. He has the ability to use a facsimile of “reason” which is dubbed “logic”. The “prime directive”, if such a term can snagged from both Robocop and Star Trek, is to venture to a distant planet where the last Jewish person lives. He is sent there because Samuel Begelman is near death and (I gather) it is important for Samuel to have some prayers said over him when he dies. So what the Galactic Federation does is program an old mining robot with all the prayers and textual accoutrement required to give Samuel his last rites. Anyway, long story short, Golem gets there, finds out that there are other sentient beings that Samuel has been teaching Judaism to, but since they are lizard-like and not humanoid, and since they reproduce hermaphroditically Samuel ends the listens and banishes them out into the wilderness (Doesn’t that just scream appropriation of biblical stories?) Golem being the semi-sentient being he is, or rather a reasonable facsimile, convinces Samuel that it doesn’t matter what they look like as long as they believe. This whole thing about the robot being a better Jew than the human is being is fascinating to say the least.

For one, this is not merely a commentary on Judaism, it’s a commentary on all religions. Each religion is filled with rules, regulations, and veritable lists that amount to “Do this and God will be nice to you, do that or God will fucking spank you.” What ever happened to believing for the sake of belief? Faith is not rules and measures, it’s about having it in you heart, or in Golem’s case in his matrix.

There are two things I want to talk about before I post this post to the net:

The title
The Revision of the Golem story

From limited research for this post I found out that “Tauf” and “Aleph” are, respectively, the last and first letters of the Hebrew alphabet. What possible meaning could this have? Well, if we think about the fact that Samuel is the last human Jew, and that the Cnidori become the next evolution of believers in Judaism we might being to understand what the significance of the title is. There is also something nagging about “First and last, last and first” that I can’t seem to pin down.

As I said previously, I love remixes. Especially when they breathe new life into a piece while keeping true to specific, integral elements of a given myth or story. The fact that this Golem is benevolent and introspective opens the story to many questions, questions such as “If the Golem is a better Jew than Samuel is, is it because he knows the texts or is it because of something more ‘human’?” I don’t usually answer my own questions because they’re usually rhetorical, but in this case I have to say that I don’t think it is that Golem is a better Jew than Samuel. I think that Golem is the personification (or rather, robotification—har-har-har.) of “the word”. He helps Samuel to see how he goes wrong, and how the physical attributes of the Cnidori are blinding him to the fact that they believe.

The Futility of It All.

“After the Sirens” is a fleshy and visceral look at the horrors of war. It paints a stark portrait of a family surviving a nuclear holocaust by piling on clothes and using their own bodies to protect their precious child from the affect of the initial blast and the fallout that followed.
The tempo of the piece never lets up and never once left me thinking, “Ugh, this is dragging.” The reader is immediately thrown into the story much like the characters are thrown into the predicament of which they have absolutely no control; all they can do is react, and all we can do as readers is sit and watch in semi-horror.
There is something heart-wrenching about this piece that is unavoidable. Right from the outset when the husband starts rifling off commands to his wife as the radio announcer counts down the time remaining before the nuclear attack there is a feeling of inevitability, of impossibility, but most of all a feeling of futility.

“Look,” he said, “don’t ask me any questions, please, just do exactly what I tell you and don’t waste any time.” She stared at him with her mouth open. “Listen,” he said, “and do exactly as I say. They say this is an air-raid and we’d better believe them.” She looked frightened nearly out of her wits. “I’ll look after you,” he said; “just get dressed as fast as you can. Put on as many layers of wool as you can. Got that?”
She nodded speechlessly.
“Put on your woolen topcoat and your fur coat over that. Get as many scarves as you can find. We’ll wrap our faces and hands. When you’re dressed, dress the baby the same way. We have a chance, if you do as I say without wasting time.” She ran off up the hall to the coat closet and he could hear her pulling things about.

The except from After the Sirens I included above is contains such a vivid scene of terror and reaction. There is such a sickening feeling of futility that the author evokes in this piece that it conjures up images of those odd 1950s school films that told children to crawl under their desks and cover their heads if ever there was a nuclear attack. These images resonate because they are constantly being re-hashed. I vaguely remember that in 2003 there was a scare terrorist scare in the states and all over CNN they were warning people that they should buy plastic sheeting and duct tape to cover their windows and doors. That just screams futility, and this is the family in After the Sirens faces.

If anything at all, this is the most anti-war piece we’ve read in this class so far. It demonstrates how when two nuclear powers, whatever two they may be, clash and those in the seat of power decided that a nuclear strike is the only remaining option (which it never is) lives are spent to prove a point. These people in positions of power obviously consider the casualties, but these lives are irrelevant in war. War is about numbers, not about people.

SCANSION! HUH! GOOD GOD! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

A note to anyone brave enough to read this:

This is my essay for this class. The scansion doesn't show up properly when I pasted it in from Word so ignore it. (I guess)

In discussing poetry there are many ways that a person might begin. They may choose to discuss the thematic motifs present in the work, they might opt to focus on the images in a given piece, or they might venture into the poem with their task set on discussing the rhythm and meter. Scansion, the act of “scanning” the lines of a poem for its metrical feet and determining where a poem lies in relation to the metrical continuum is not an exact science. It requires many readings, usually out loud, and an understanding of where stresses lie. Scansion, as said previously, is not an exact science; a poem cannot be fed into a formula, go through a few mathematical algorithms and come out the other end a scanned piece of poetry ready to be placed in its corresponding metrically scanned pile. There are certain instances when a reader’s pronunciation of a particular word differs from another readers or even the historic pronunciation of a given word. A great example of this is the word “Fiery”. “Fiery” can be pronounced either “FIE-ER-EE” or “FIE-REE”; depending on the pronunciation the syllabic count changes and thus affects the foot and ultimately influence the scanning of the line.
For some, the fact above bolsters the reasons why one should use scansion to read poetry as it provides rules that are flexible to accommodate all types of poems; for others it the definitive reason to avoid scansion like the plague as it is inexact. It is the belief of this paper’s author that scansion is a valuable tool to deploy when initially discussing a poem. Before discussing content, the form must be visualized; then and only then can one combine a reading of the content with the form to have a fully realized idea of what a poem and its poet seeks to convey. In Lampman’s poem The City of the End of Things the reader is presented with an epic in three parts that is written in slightly regular iambic tetrameter with many variations in certain feet that reinforce a few particular movements in the piece. An appendix at the end of this essay is available for perusal, but due to length constraints a mere handful of scanned lines of particular interest will be discussed in detail. It is the authors hope that this essay will act as a primer, rather than a definitive scansion of Lampman’s poem.
In Lampman’s introductory stanza he writes:
Beside the pound- ing cat- aracts
x / x / x / x /

Of mid- night streams unknown to us
x / x / x / x /

‘Tis build- ed in the leaf- less tracts
/ / x x x / x /

And vall- eys huge of Tar- tarus.
x / x / x / x /

Lurid and loft- y and vast it seems;
/ x x / x x / x /

It hath no round- ed name that rings,
x / x / x / x /

But I have heard it called in dreams
x / x / x / x /

The Ci- ty of the End of Things.
x / x x x / x / (1-8)

To begin with, Lampman’s initial line sets down the framing. In the first two lines Lampman writes in iambic tetrameter, in line three he mixes the rhythm, jarring the line by starting the first foot of the third line with a spondee followed by a pyrrhic foot and ending the line with two iambic feet. This jarring of the spondaic and pyrrhic foot creates a tumultuous rhythm that seeks to shake the reader out of the comfort of the previous iambic lines. Looking at the content of the three lines in conjunction with the form brings something of interest to the surface:
Beside the pounding cataracts
Of midnight streams unknown to us
‘Tis builded in the leafless tracts (1-3)

The first two lines of the three singled out above employ two very natural images, the “pounding cataracts” and the “midnight streams”. The former is sublime, while the latter subdued. The third line with its first foot of spondaic energy jars the reader out of the sublime image of the waterfalls and subdued image of the dark stream, and turns the reader away from those images to ones that are “builded in leafless tracts”. The third line with its initial spondaic and pyrrhic feet thus act as such: they signal to the reader that nature is not the focus of the poem, nor does it play much of a role in this place the poet seeks to bring them. Nature is not even a backdrop, it is an afterthought that is never revisited in the poem.
Line four is uninteresting metrically as Lampman brings us back to iambic tetrameter, but with this return we have an informative allusion to Tartarus; the classic dark abyss of Greek mythology. The word “informative” is specifically chosen as to describe Lampman’s inclusions of Tartarus in The City of the End of Things; the inclusion is not so much interesting as it is informative to the reader of the poet’s intentions, that is that Lampman intends to show the reader a specific hell. Lines 5,6,7 and 8 seem to “catch” the reader from moving too quickly and glazing through their internal lexicon of the definition of hell. Lampman wants to show the readers hell, but this hell is not the classic one. To slow the reader down Lampman employs three major stresses in line 5 “LU-rid”, “LOF-ty”, “VAST” and also adds an extra syllabic to lengthen the meter slightly. Lines 6 and 7 return to iambic tetrameter and simply serve move the poem alone, while line 8 is metrically similar to line 3. Here in line 8 Lampman makes his second revealing point of the stanza as marked by the spondaic foot followed by the pyrrhic foot. Again Lampman jars the reader away from their ideas of hell that may have had the chance to congeal during the previous lines. In line 8 Lampman reveals that his hell is not the Christian hell or the Tartarus of Greek mythology, it is in fact a unique city, a city of apocalypse.
The two following stanzas are of substantial length and have within them some interesting instances of metrical variation. Sadly, as stated above, only a few of the most interesting can be mentioned due to length constraints.

None know- eth how high with- in the night,
/ / x / / x / x /

But in its murk- y streets far down
/ x x / x / / /

A flam- ing terr- ible and bright
x / x / x / x /

Shakes all the stalk- ing shad- ows there,
/ / x / x / x /

Across the walls , across the floors
x / x / x / x / (10-14)

This particular section of the poem is of interest metrically because of the rhythm and urgency in the lines; and also, it is of interest because of what happens to that rhythm when the reader reaches the final line in the segment above. In line 10 Lampman follows the initial iambic tetrameter of line 9 (omitted from above) of the poem with a highly irregular meter. Then Lampman opens the second line with an urgent spondaic foot followed by an iamb, two trochaic feet, and an extra stressed syllable. This line is so full of stresses that it is literally bursting at its meter with an extra stressed syllable. Lampman wants the reader to consider the following description of the “murky streets far down” as being connected to the incomprehensible height of the iron towers in lines 9 and 10. Lines 12 and 13 of the second stanza read:

A flam- ing terr- ible and bright
x / x / x / x /

Shakes all the stalk- ing shad- ows there,
/ / x / x / x / (12-13)

line 12 is iambic tetrameter, while line 13 is not. Line 13 differs only from line 12 by its initial foot which is spondaic rather than iambic. Weather this sponadic first foot was merely a product of employing alliteration in the line, it still affects how one might read the following line which contains something the reader has yet to see in this poem: a ceasura.
Up until line 14 there is energy slowly building in the form of tempo; at line 14, after the ceasura, it is almost ready to break free. The caesura, the pause in the line marked with the double bar ( ), signals to the reader a turn, a change. The change here is the perspective from which we are supposed to view this Hell. As said previously, Lampman subtly weaves the notion that this hell is not the usual hell of fire and brimstone. In line 14 of the poem Lampman inserts the caesura as a marker; there is something here he wants the reader to see if they have not seen it yet. If one returns to the beginning of the stanza and pays attention to the images, one might see that Lampman has created an inversion of what nature is. In the nature, beyond the shade of the tall trees is the sun and sky, in The City of the End of Things, the light comes from deep within the bowel of the city as described in the lines, “A flaming terrible and bright/Shakes all the stalking shadows there.” (12-13). And as for the sky, Lampman provides, “Its roofs and iron towers have grown/None knoweth how high within the night.” (9-10).
Still, most telling of Lampman’s intentions within The City of the End of Things are the following quatrains:
Through its grim depths re-ech oing
x x / / x / x x

And all its wear- y heights of walls,
x / x / x / x /

With mea sured roar and ir- on ring,
x / x / x / x /

The in human music lifts and falls.
x x / x / x / x /

Where no thing rests and no man is,
x / / / x / / /

And on- ly fire and night hold sway;
x / x / x / / /

The beat, the thun der and the hiss
x / x / x x x /

Cease not, and change not, night nor day.
/ / x / / / / / (21-28)
Up until these two quatrains of the poem a person performing a scan of The City of the End of Things might find the changes in foot and meter jarring without reason. The changes may seem to go against anything pleasing to the human sense of rhythm, but this is exactly what Lampman is narrating for the reader. Lines of particular interest are lines 4 and 8. Line 4 gives us a pyrrhic, followed by three trochees, and an extra syllabic stress which can be scanned as such:

The inhumanmusiclifts andfalls.
x x / x / x / x / (24)

This line gives the reader a jab by presenting an almost complete trochaic (DUM-da) inversion of the more rhythmically please iambic (da-DUM). The form of the line equates the content of the line in that Lampman is writing about “inhuman music” that “lifts and falls”; in a way Lampman might be signalling that the rhythm that he has chosen to employ throughout the poem is in fact inhuman and thus would obviously be unpleasing.
Line 8 gives us a spondaic foot, followed by an iambic foot, followed by three more spondees. Line 8 can be scanned as follows:

Cease not, and change not, night nor day.
/ / x / / / / / (28)
Rhythmically this line is strong and punctuated; the flood of stresses that fills the line speak to the futility and repetitiveness of the city. Nothing ever changes in the City of the End of Things; it is the same mechanical monotony day in, day out. The use of two caesuras in the line works to reinforce the content by forcing the reader to depart from natural rhythmic flow of speech by segmenting the feet; the line must be read with pauses, and each segment of the line, as dictated by the caesuras, comes out in fragments which only can be combined at the end to make a cohesive piece. Much like the work completed in assembly lines, products are initially in fragments must be pieced together to make a whole.
There is so much more that has been left unexplored by this essay that the treatment given feels lacking. However, the author of the paper believes that within the allotted space he has made every effort to create a satisfactory primer for reading Lampman’s The City of the End of Things. As well, the author hopes that with this limited scansion of the text some insights have been made as to the intentions of Lampman and as to the benefits of learning and using scansion to analyze poetry. Form and content have a symbiotic relationship wherein meaning is the product; to understand the content with no understanding of the form is to understand the poem partially. And as Alexander Pope famously wrote in his Essay on Criticism, “'Tis not enough no harshness give offense, The sound must seem an echo of the sense.”

A Strange Manuscript Found on a 4th Year Syllabus

I just finished James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. It wasn’t a poorly written book, nor was it a brilliantly written one. It’s somewhere between “Meh.” and “Ehh.” I suppose that if I had never read H.G. Wells’ Journey to the Center of the Earth, then maybe this text would’ve held my attention more tightly than it did. It almost felt like a knock-off, void of the wonder that the Wells yarn had. I was waiting to see more of the environment, maybe some natural phenomena that would cast the story in an eerie light (something like the electrical storm type thing that was described in the Wells text at length) But no, what I got was a sociology report and a commentary on charity that I actually wrestled with during the Tsunami just after Christmas two years ago. It wasn’t that I came into the text expecting something and finding another, I’d never do that. It was just a knee-jerk reaction to reading something that signaled other texts. Anyway, enough of Wells. On to De Mille.

I’m turning over a new leaf this year. The last time I wrote a blog for a course I was taking at York (last year, actually) I received a comment at the end of the year from my Professor that went something like, “You are quite brilliant and have a wonderful, enticing writing style; however, almost all of your posts amount to you calling the things you’ve read for this course bullshit. Try opening up your mind and understanding something that’s different from how you think.” So instead of focusing on the negative I’ll try and focus on what I liked. First, I really enjoyed how De Mille used the narrative frame to poke fun at himself and in a way, deflected the anticipated criticism. The best example of this is when De Mille has Melick say, on page 225 of my pagination,

“What a pity it is that the writer of this manuscript had not the philological, theological, sociological, geological, palaeological, ornithological, and all the other logical attainments of yourself and the doctor! He could then have given us a complete view of the nature of the Kosekins morally and physically; he could have treated the geology of the soil, the ethnology of the people…”

It works in two ways; he makes light of his limitations as a writer, but also deflect criticism by way of saying in a very transparent way that, “Look, yes I know there are short comings of my descriptions, but it’s easy to say that when the specialties I lack are specialties my readership might have.” It’s a great trick, I should learn that.

Another instance of this, that isn’t as tongue-in-cheek as it is self-deprecating, is on page 217

“In order to carry out properly such a place as this the writer should have taken Defoe as his model, or, still better, Dean Swift. ‘Gulliver’s Travel’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ show what can be done in this way, and form a standard by which all other attempts must be judged. But this writer is tawdry; he has the worst vices of the sensational school – he shows everywhere marks of haste, gross carelessness and universal feebleness.”

I remember in vocal class when it came to final exams that most of the students would preface their solo performance with, “I know it’s going to suck, sorry.” or something like that. My teacher scolded us about that, he told us that doing that makes the audience uneasy. When De Mille does this it makes me uneasy. It makes me ask, why is this relevant? And say I was enjoying this, why is this here?

The second thing that I enjoyed, although it might seem a little formulaic at first sight, was the idea of flipping the conventions, sociological, and psychological norms that exist in our society. The whole thing with how those paupers are higher on the hierarchical ladder, while the “capitalists, Athons, general officer, and finally Kohen” are at the low rung. What might seem formulaic is the fact that the societal norms that drive the Kosekins are the transverse of what drives us to some extent. We are driven by our own self-preservation; we attain wealth to maintain the status quo. In the Kosekin society it is “better to give than to receive,” but there is the twist that it is better to have-not than to have. This is an extrapolated view of a charitable society; no good deed is done without aspirations to the benefits. What makes this aspect of the novel interesting for me is that when we first see the generosity of the Kosekins we take them to be a people kind and true, as is the belief that Almah states on page 116. She says,

“I suppose not, but you will understand better after you have been her longer. At any rate, you can see for yourself that the ruling passion here is self-denial and the good of others. Everyone is intent upon this, from the Kohen up to the most squalid pauper.”

At this point in the novel the characterization of the Kosekins seems spot on, but a diligent reader (such as my self, har har har) notices that something is amiss as Almah explains what she says about the “most squalid paupers” being above the Kohen. When Almah explains that, “In this country the paupers form the most honored and envied class.” It should signal that the charity of the Kosekins benefits them far more than the items they are charitable with. That twists you into a knot if you think about it in respect to our society. Whether we give to charity to feel good or for the tax break, no charitable instance is strictly charity. In that way, the Kosekin society is not much different from ours!

I wish I had a third thing to add here, but I don’t. I suppose that concludes my post on De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.