"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfills Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world”. That’s actually King Arthur’s farewell, and it may be a bit portentous in the present banal context, which is my notice of publishing this post a day and a half in advance of the usual schedule. But I anticipate being tied up for the next couple of days and, besides, man was not made for the Sabbath. Or for Wednesday, either. One needs to break free and go wild from time to time just on general principle.
This little essay will be about poetry and mathematics and word games, mainly. In the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” which is so to speak Alexander Pope’s literary autobiography, Pope claims that the gift (or burden) of writing poetry was thrust upon him at birth. Over his poetic urge he had no control: “I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came/I left no calling for this idle trade.” He was actually imitating Ovid, of course, the infant who simply couldn’t restrain himself from squalling for his mother’s breast in perfect hexameters. But my interest here is in the use of the word numbers to mean poetry. The reference is to meter, measure or rhythm, and the mathematical bases of music. But before we get to numbers, let’s say a couple of words about words, since not all word games are mathematical though they are perforce verbal. There is a very ancient Latin word game, puzzle, or mystery, the SATOR AREPO. You may well be familiar with it. It is based in a five by five square grid. Five is a privileged Pythagorean number, the conclusion of the first set of “Pythagorean triplets” in which a2+b2 = c2 (i.e., 32 +42=52). So the SATOR AREPO is already super “mystical”. It's pretty puzzling lexically as well.
It is easier to see some of the
amazing things this construct does than to say what it means. If
AREPO is an otherwise unrecorded personal name, it could say “The sower [ploughman]
Arepo performs the work with the wheels”--referring to a wheeled plow. This puzzle appears frequently
in medieval church decorations. It is hard to think it is of Christian origin, however, since it is found in the pagan city of Pompeii, sealed by volcanic ash in the year 79. But it is also hard to think it is not Christian, since its twenty-five letters, rearranged, spell out PATERNOSTER + A/O (“I am the Alpha and the Omega”) twice with no remainder. Well, they say that an infinite number of chimpanzees with an infinite number of Remington typewriters might in infinite time reproduce the first folio of Shakespeare….It is not really necessary for the SATOR AREPO to have a cryptic meaning. Surely the dazzling graphic calisthenics are enough. You won’t find any words more thoroughly crossed than these! In any event, it is very cool, cool enough to provide yet another level of deeply satisfying incomprehensibility to Christopher Nolan’s recent film entitled Tenet. (Note that TENET is necessarily a palindrome for the puzzle to work.) I talk about the SATOR AREPO a little in my book The Dark Side of the Enlightenment. Here I simply want to use it to introduce the very fancy term technopaignion, from the Greek words techne (art, skill) and paignia, (play, sport or game). A prominent literary form of the technopaignion is the shaped poem. A poem can be both aural and visual. Most of us today first experience poetry aurally: hearing the popular songs that are nearly an inescapable background of American life. But reading a poem begins with an ocular act, seeing something. And what we see can be manipulated by the typographer’s art into various patterns or shapes with their own capacity for significant suggestion. We call this body of shaped poems pattern poetry. Such works, usually regarded as curiosities, are very numerous in many languages and cultures over many centuries. A very playful and avant-garde artist, the late Dick Higgins wrote a book on the subject that I can recommend highly.*
Not all “playful” literary art is serious, let alone philosophical or theological. Higgins’s book is replete with light-hearted poetic jokes featuring shaped verses contorted into every imaginable shape. Valentine
greetings beg for the treatment as do animals and wine bottles. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the mathematical conventions of learned, platonizing Christianity do lie behind some of the best known “skillfully playful” poems in the western traditions, such as Dante’s Comedy. In one utterly fantastic scene in the Inferno the poet, speaking in his own voice, guarantees to his readers the literal veracity of the whopper he is just about to write by swearing upon “the notes of this Comedia…”! Harmonic “notes” of a similar genre are everywhere in cathedral architecture and baroque mural paintings and Bach compositions. Such works have engaged my attention throughout my career. The marriage of form and content is a fascinating feature of most art. How do shape and disposition relate to theme and meaning? A verse in the apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon” says this about God as divine artificer: “Thou hast arranged all things by measure and number and weight” (Wis. 11:20). This encouraged philosophical poets to believe that their art might in some fashion mimic or at least reflect what Dorothy Sayers in a challenging book called The Mind of the Maker. A Scandinavian scholar who had studied these matters deeply, Maren-Sophie Røstvig, writes thus: “In the Renaissance, cosmic and poetic unity were of the same kind….Behind this cosmic and poetic unity was felt to be the unity manifested by divine revelation…” The poet’s job was in part to echo the numerical techniques of the Divine Artificer. The specific unifying element was often mathematical and numerical, as evidenced, for example in the “golden” section or golden number (division into mean and extreme ratio) frequently revealed in visual, architectural, and literary constructs of the era.
Cryptic verbalization is in fact an artistic implication of a belief in divine harmonies. Here I must confess there is something missing in my own mental armature. I am pretty good with words, but lousy at Wordle. I struggle. But what Augustine says regarding scriptural obscurity has a much broader truth. Those things we learn with difficultly are more satisfying than those easily grasped. In the beginning was the Word. That is the beginning of the Gospel of John, but also of the modern cross-word puzzle. The neon sign on the Pentecostal church is
perhaps a far cry from the elaborate cross-poems of Hrabanus Maurus
in the early ninth century, but they are literary kin. Had I more time I would say a little more
about this Frankish monk , Hrabanus. We
overuse the phrase “mind-boggling”. It
should be reserved for such rare phenomena as his masterpiece, the De
laudibus Sanctae Crucis (In praise of the Holy Cross),
a vast verbal and visual grid that takes the concept of the cross-word to heights requiring an oxygen mask for the reader’s survival. In the creation of artistic cryptograms of all sorts the role of the most common symbol of Christianity, the cross, has been immense. That is in part because our Latin letters T and X, both viewed as versions of the cross, very early introduced into platonic Christianity rich emblematic possibilities from the Hebrew
and Greco-Roman traditions respectively. I have written about this elsewhere in relation to St. Francis of Assisi, who adopted the tau-cross for his own “mystic” signature. More fundamentally the cross has the fundamental “shape” of western writing itself—horizontality and verticality.
The human appetite for harmony would seem to be hard-wired. According to legend it was by accident that Pythagoras discovered the perfect musical fifth while walking past a blacksmith’s shop where men were beating out metal with hammers of different weights. The artistic desire to embrace and emulate the numbers of universal harmony and “divine proportion,” once those numbers were grasped, directed or influenced the construction of many of our most familiar works of art, architecture, music, and literature. It is perhaps of small intellectual significance that Herbert’s poem “The Altar” actually looks like an altar. In judging the poem, we must use the same criteria we use to evaluate all poetry. But you have to admit that the typographic layout does add something extra, a psychic surplus value. George Herbert, who was a brilliant man, thought it was worth doing.
*Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 275 and dozens of fabulous illustrations. Higgins also has a short book about the shaped poems of George Herbert, perhaps the best-known poem-shaper in the major canon.
