eratio poetics issue seven, spring 2006

Scott Wilkerson

Notes toward a grammafossil folio,
Atlanta Modalplexic, a trewe and tragickal repertory:
Book 1 (performed 21 January, 2006 before a hostile audience
under the Industrial Park, Exit __ Overpass, a goodly bridge,
nary a trolle in syte)

which is to say, rolling disclosure, a mapping if summary
connectives review thus an exigent, a fixity, not probabalistic
intensional paper plan or number theory for refinements in
hagiographic clusters, whereupon a parallel duplicity may be
discerned, but by whom a cleansing formulation in draft, in (ek) or
state funded striganomical, umbraical projects are or are far from,
so far as we know, a properly interdisciplinary sample graphic
trend dynamic correlation or façon de parler so to speak; that said,
a current or true currency of interpolation self-contained non-
restrictive mechanics becomes the evolving standardized
ineluctable derivation as of the closing bell curving upward against
predicted supply chain letters of resignation, commendation, and
(ek) an indeterminate outward discarded from the file; in common
parlance we do not say "in common parlance," but restore
coordination among select branches in remaining trees thought to
lie beyond accepted frontier, solvency to an nth speculative,
velocity to the symmetrical politesse, equanimity to the real as
when we permit enough trope to hang a self with in the public
square of opposition revised according to footnotes appended to
the codicil on the just application of the classical model in which
are presumed to be held lessons for each, all, every, any and as the
line approaches the Y axis, so, too, does the quantity converge
infinitely close to the zero sum game play with approved
representations of implicit transactions among the good people of
the (ek)static intorsions intrsinications per capita dissembling
magnifica not to say a coterie of charmers with rhymes pinned to
designer eschatologies in the manner of your gourmand cannibal
critics with credit and credentials enough to consume entire
archaeologies of thought in time it takes to produce a declaration
of consensus in accordance with a crystalization of
implementations formerly ratified but only now taking effect and
cause right along with them to the floor for further polyplication
and particle oversight up to and including but not limited to such
enumerated constraints as could be seen to proscribe a
prescriptivist inscription, that is: arrivals and departures (ek) by
which is understood a conic section subtending our working
schematics for the new home of the Halawaukee Institute for
Exegetical Arts, a buried lead, matter of fact, now that you mention
it, if we might, high expectations duly lowered, at least to the
median level of water passing through the Bean Mill tributary, a
local issue really, little appreciated in other parts of the (ek) of the
Free; plasticity then is a question for outcome measures and the
tyranny of Delta T, the journal of portents, a reliquary of dread
composites, a grimoire of sinister chortles and middle managers,
men with many keys, women with intersticial methdologies
imputed downward through the viscera, this doomed body of
electric else; false alarums, false allegations; move along;
nothing to see here.

Dear Grammo,

I am writing to you somewhat in the manner of the Humphrey
appearing in section two of the submission appended below.

(Listen, don't trust him; there is no Humphrey;
Yes, there have been certain other "correspondents,"
[quotes added later]

but this H_____y is a fraudulent representation)

I leave to you the matter of whether any of this constitutes poetry.

(because, of course, he imagines himself the laureate manqué
of a collapsed tradition of versification without justification and,
moreover, did we forget to say, don't trust him(!)?)

or prose, or, indeed, some fugitive form.*

(*for which we wouldn't give nine cents to save the last dime in
Christendom; to say nothing of how this whole "Dear Grammo"
gambit is too droll by half)

Respectfully, intra (ek), Ex(H_____yx)m{y: Gy}, pro(x)(y)

Scott Wilkerson
Halawaukee Center for (Ex)egetical Arts

Four Humphrey Predicates

I. As Theoretician With Tools For Solitary Work

From his study, good Minos may have seen
the consequences for members of the convocation,
trundling our hero in some stylized conveyance
to the columnar plinths of the labyrinth gate.
Indeed, one might conclude that in this mise en scéne,
there exists the one true value-free zone of inquiry,
the ontology of the hidden.
This is to inquire whether it remains an accepted axiom that
good things are knowable by the style of their derelictions.
For my own records, I note that it is possible
to think of these relations in terms of our querulous
career petitioners to truth, the same ones
who prattle endlessly on about the discourse of
ruin, in the discourse of ruin.

I cannot pretend to have arrived at any clarity on this
matter, but I confess that merely invoking the problem
gives me some sense of entitlement, a kind of proprietary
claim to its more controversial formulations.
And, incidentally, because so much of this seems wholly
indefensible, I am declaring it an economy of scale and —
therefore — idiomatically, nothing but my own, indeed, truly,
mine.

Judicious Excisions:

none but this, then, for a harlequin's despair,
his habitation of games, votive perplexity
for auxiliary saints and their coteries of
revenants in the card catalog

(We were measuring the twilight for
stars, draped in the monastic threads
of winter's memory, our shadows, a liturgy in
ambiguous flourishes, the broken signature
of a day ending itself for the greater, you know, good.)

**there seems also to have been a dispute
over pronouns with Humphrey as an antecedent

** him, it, and they?

II. A Bon Vivant Of The Decorous Quasi Compilatam***

Good Sir,

Before we get to the important news regarding the matter you
raised in your last (enclosed), I want to amuse you with some
doggerel from this week's plunder, remarks by an anonymous
writer of eleventh century Lobbes—now Belgium—on whether one
can discern, from a written text alone, the authenticity of saintly
miracles:

"As the innumerable and manifest merits of these fathers combined
surpass the eloquence of all the wise rhetors, lest someone whisper
that, nevertheless, we have coined a fabulous lie, the pen of this
story (which has been undertaken) proclaims unequivocally not the
dreamy records of some sort of falsification, but the past works of
an amazing virtue."

I take this to mean that the improbable is somehow self-authorizing
or, indeed, that the unbelievable is credible evidence for its own
truth. Now, there are obviously some larger issues to be addressed
before I can sell that on the street, but the logic here is so
provocative and asymmetric, I have taken it up as a kind of
template for good living. Of course, you can see that this relates,
however obliquely, to the substance of my project. Moreover, as I
have made real progress since last we spoke, it is no small pleasure
to discover now a legitimate historical program for my
motivations, which are yet unclear even to me. But I have no
reservations about my choice of material.

*** everybody's doing it

Incidentally, I don't know that Whitman ever declared Leaves of
Grass an epic, but I can report that it sure copies like one, to say
nothing of the odd delight one finds in reproducing the pagination
in every detail. Naturally, I am using the 1892 "Deathbed" edition
which was itself an expansion, a revisited revision, and, therefore,
a copy. And although I wonder what moral implications it might
have for the final draft, surely turning back now would be more
perverse than having begun at all, not least because every word is
so extraordinarily good. Indeed, I feel as though they are my own
and I am

evr yr hmbl svnt,

H_____y

Enclosure:

(Humphrey, if that is your name, I know what you're up to. And if it
is true that I confess a secret fascination with the project, then it is
also true that you deserve my candor. To that end, I am in the
unenviable position of having to warn you that some things are
more permissible than others and some things, not at all!

querulously,

. . .) Grammo Pro(xy), esq, implicit as an egg

III. The Penitent Phenomenologist

My confession will not precipitate
the kind of shock that follows
a storm's opening paragraph.
Taken together, my many claims are perhaps too
modest and do not constitute the revelation
you deserve, the disclosure you demand.
I could propagate through a doomed medium
of secret glyphs, as fear pressing some forgotten
November sky down into our silent food, into
our glib assertions, our calendars of deception.
I could further conceal all this with ritual vanities
in the guise of heroism, art, my entire repertory of
comic tempests and charitable distractions.
But you, because you have waited with me for
the inversions of history to right themselves,
cannot now pretend I was never standing on my head.

Strangely, having admitted this much, I wonder whether
it is fair for me to declare absolution because we both know,
don't we, that what I am about to say will not survive
even in the gentle light that shows us how to die
in so many words,
Grammo,
Compilo,
Daddy-O.

IV. Cartographic Elegy On The Occasion
Of A Despondent Humphrey Arriving Late

Because we made maps together,
I can see properly through the
unmeasured intervals of our loss, plot a trajectory of
my missed opportunities, or, as the legend has it,
an emerging lifetime of miscues, Grammo's notes make no
reference to this part:
It is not perversity, but in fact a hard honesty that
compels me to insist upon some aesthetic recovery of
my failure, a modicum of ruin held between us,
of the systems that fell beneath our
crushing hysteria for spelling out, by turns, our
humility, our platitudes, even our secret disdain
in the damaged topography of freedom.

We are the last patriots in a vanishing republic of shame.

Of course, we could cry over these spilled coordinates;
or we could claim it was all a question of scale.
The truth is I never believed in your autonomy and
certainly never wanted it for myself. These borders are
indeterminate, indefensible and transgression, too simple.
It would be love spoken in sophistic tones to remind you
that the boundary of demarcation separating each of us
from the other and both of us from some uncharted region
is a necessary condition of all three. But keep that to yourself.
I confess it is not heroic, but the dismissal of grim warnings on the
frontier of a betrayal is a lesson I would teach all innocence, a dark
curriculum of fatalism and diffidence that leaves me wandering
ever away from you in wider and stranger circles, finding
nonetheless, that it all looks so familiar, as though you
had been here
before.
The usual questions of timing
were at issue, and I think also
the problem of propriety.
It was a Saturday spent transposing
one quantity of betrayal into the corresponding harmonic
of resignation. Or it was the ghastly spectacle of two
lovers imprecisely affixing dark humor
to a variation on the same ironic failure
of putative Mouths, or:
I am some dissident Humphrey.

Let's call it a theory of imbrications
even open books are not finally "open" in the sense
that logos requires — let's say desires — some old-fashioned topoi,
enough space to work, to dig down through the record, to operate
on the principle of closure, but quietly, in the guise of plain
memory dissolving with yet more modulations
of our daily business, let's call it "us."
So, speaking to all this is a matter of some urgency and has a
texture, as confession, as revelation, as sudden clarity, let's call it
"the self-referential."
If it will make you more comfortable, I can go first, just simply
start, or let's call it "begin" with some
halcyon and pastoral observations:

And to your left, a eucalyptus tree,
or in any case, our speculative approach
to the "eucalyptus" idiom, an informed précis,
actually, of some related thematic material:
the imperiled Ozone, melting polar cap,
bumble bee extinction, what have you.

Off to the right — and this is an
unscripted appearance! — the Problem
of Spatial Relations, known in the quaint
bucolic vernacular as anything that can be done to a logarithm;
but how will our grammarians come to terms with
the received view that you can take the boy (ek) out
of the city, but not the city, etc: rain forests, soil erosion,
magnolia qua marginalia, Horace's Eclogues, on and on.

Now, of course, we return to the glistening rhizomes
of the midtown interchange, the chromium ventricles of
our reflexive concentricities, Grammo on the colonnade,
a primordial monstration of glyphs in the perpendicular:
reinforced concrete,
a vertical, flâneur epistemology,
the names of a closing sky,
our second nature, and,
if you can believe it,
the lost, last Humphrey of our
possible, whirled.



	`

	Scott Wilkerson Notes toward a grammafossil folio, Atlanta Modalplexic, a trewe and tragickal repertory: Book 1 (performed 21 January, 2006 before a hostile audience under the Industrial Park, Exit __ Overpass, a goodly bridge, nary a trolle in syte) which is to say, rolling disclosure, a mapping if summary connectives review thus an exigent, a fixity, not probabalistic intensional paper plan or number theory for refinements in hagiographic clusters, whereupon a parallel duplicity may be discerned, but by whom a cleansing formulation in draft, in (ek) or state funded striganomical, umbraical projects are or are far from, so far as we know, a properly interdisciplinary sample graphic trend dynamic correlation or façon de parler so to speak; that said, a current or true currency of interpolation self-contained non- restrictive mechanics becomes the evolving standardized ineluctable derivation as of the closing bell curving upward against predicted supply chain letters of resignation, commendation, and (ek) an indeterminate outward discarded from the file; in common parlance we do not say "in common parlance," but restore coordination among select branches in remaining trees thought to lie beyond accepted frontier, solvency to an nth speculative, velocity to the symmetrical politesse, equanimity to the real as when we permit enough trope to hang a self with in the public square of opposition revised according to footnotes appended to the codicil on the just application of the classical model in which are presumed to be held lessons for each, all, every, any and as the line approaches the Y axis, so, too, does the quantity converge infinitely close to the zero sum game play with approved representations of implicit transactions among the good people of the (ek)static intorsions intrsinications per capita dissembling magnifica not to say a coterie of charmers with rhymes pinned to designer eschatologies in the manner of your gourmand cannibal critics with credit and credentials enough to consume entire archaeologies of thought in time it takes to produce a declaration of consensus in accordance with a crystalization of implementations formerly ratified but only now taking effect and cause right along with them to the floor for further polyplication and particle oversight up to and including but not limited to such enumerated constraints as could be seen to proscribe a prescriptivist inscription, that is: arrivals and departures (ek) by which is understood a conic section subtending our working schematics for the new home of the Halawaukee Institute for Exegetical Arts, a buried lead, matter of fact, now that you mention it, if we might, high expectations duly lowered, at least to the median level of water passing through the Bean Mill tributary, a local issue really, little appreciated in other parts of the (ek) of the Free; plasticity then is a question for outcome measures and the tyranny of Delta T, the journal of portents, a reliquary of dread composites, a grimoire of sinister chortles and middle managers, men with many keys, women with intersticial methdologies imputed downward through the viscera, this doomed body of electric else; false alarums, false allegations; move along; nothing to see here. Dear Grammo, I am writing to you somewhat in the manner of the Humphrey appearing in section two of the submission appended below. (Listen, don't trust him; there is no Humphrey; Yes, there have been certain other "correspondents," [quotes added later] but this H_____y is a fraudulent representation) I leave to you the matter of whether any of this constitutes poetry. (because, of course, he imagines himself the laureate manqué of a collapsed tradition of versification without justification and, moreover, did we forget to say, don't trust him(!)?) or prose, or, indeed, some fugitive form.* (for which we wouldn't give nine cents to save the last dime in Christendom; to say nothing of how this whole "Dear Grammo" gambit is too droll by half) Respectfully, intra (ek), Ex(H_____yx)m{y: Gy}, pro(x)(y) Scott Wilkerson Halawaukee Center for (Ex)egetical Arts Four Humphrey Predicates I. As Theoretician With Tools For Solitary Work From his study, good Minos may have seen the consequences for members of the convocation, trundling our hero in some stylized conveyance to the columnar plinths of the labyrinth gate. Indeed, one might conclude that in this mise en scéne, there exists the one true value-free zone of inquiry, the ontology of the hidden. This is to inquire whether it remains an accepted axiom that good things are knowable by the style of their derelictions. For my own records, I note that it is possible to think of these relations in terms of our querulous career petitioners to truth, the same ones who prattle endlessly on about the discourse of ruin, in the discourse of ruin. I cannot pretend to have arrived at any clarity on this matter, but I confess that merely invoking the problem gives me some sense of entitlement, a kind of proprietary claim to its more controversial formulations. And, incidentally, because so much of this seems wholly indefensible, I am declaring it an economy of scale and — therefore — idiomatically, nothing but my own, indeed, truly, mine. Judicious Excisions:* none but this, then, for a harlequin's despair, his habitation of games, votive perplexity for auxiliary saints and their coteries of revenants in the card catalog (We were measuring the twilight for stars, draped in the monastic threads of winter's memory, our shadows, a liturgy in ambiguous flourishes, the broken signature of a day ending itself for the greater, you know, good.) there seems also to have been a dispute over pronouns with Humphrey as an antecedent him, it, and they? II. A Bon Vivant Of The Decorous Quasi Compilatam* Good Sir, Before we get to the important news regarding the matter you raised in your last (enclosed), I want to amuse you with some doggerel from this week's plunder, remarks by an anonymous writer of eleventh century Lobbes—now Belgium—on whether one can discern, from a written text alone, the authenticity of saintly miracles: "As the innumerable and manifest merits of these fathers combined surpass the eloquence of all the wise rhetors, lest someone whisper that, nevertheless, we have coined a fabulous lie, the pen of this story (which has been undertaken) proclaims unequivocally not the dreamy records of some sort of falsification, but the past works of an amazing virtue." I take this to mean that the improbable is somehow self-authorizing or, indeed, that the unbelievable is credible evidence for its own truth. Now, there are obviously some larger issues to be addressed before I can sell that on the street, but the logic here is so provocative and asymmetric, I have taken it up as a kind of template for good living. Of course, you can see that this relates, however obliquely, to the substance of my project. Moreover, as I have made real progress since last we spoke, it is no small pleasure to discover now a legitimate historical program for my motivations, which are yet unclear even to me. But I have no reservations about my choice of material. * everybody's doing it Incidentally, I don't know that Whitman ever declared Leaves of Grass an epic, but I can report that it sure copies like one, to say nothing of the odd delight one finds in reproducing the pagination in every detail. Naturally, I am using the 1892 "Deathbed" edition which was itself an expansion, a revisited revision, and, therefore, a copy. And although I wonder what moral implications it might have for the final draft, surely turning back now would be more perverse than having begun at all, not least because every word is so extraordinarily good. Indeed, I feel as though they are my own and I am evr yr hmbl svnt, H_____y Enclosure: (Humphrey, if that is your name, I know what you're up to. And if it is true that I confess a secret fascination with the project, then it is also true that you deserve my candor. To that end, I am in the unenviable position of having to warn you that some things are more permissible than others and some things, not at all! querulously, . . .) Grammo Pro(xy), esq, implicit as an egg III. The Penitent Phenomenologist My confession will not precipitate the kind of shock that follows a storm's opening paragraph. Taken together, my many claims are perhaps too modest and do not constitute the revelation you deserve, the disclosure you demand. I could propagate through a doomed medium of secret glyphs, as fear pressing some forgotten November sky down into our silent food, into our glib assertions, our calendars of deception. I could further conceal all this with ritual vanities in the guise of heroism, art, my entire repertory of comic tempests and charitable distractions. But you, because you have waited with me for the inversions of history to right themselves, cannot now pretend I was never standing on my head. Strangely, having admitted this much, I wonder whether it is fair for me to declare absolution because we both know, don't we, that what I am about to say will not survive even in the gentle light that shows us how to die in so many words, Grammo, Compilo, Daddy-O. IV. Cartographic Elegy On The Occasion Of A Despondent Humphrey Arriving Late Because we made maps together, I can see properly through the unmeasured intervals of our loss, plot a trajectory of my missed opportunities, or, as the legend has it, an emerging lifetime of miscues, Grammo's notes make no reference to this part: It is not perversity, but in fact a hard honesty that compels me to insist upon some aesthetic recovery of my failure, a modicum of ruin held between us, of the systems that fell beneath our crushing hysteria for spelling out, by turns, our humility, our platitudes, even our secret disdain in the damaged topography of freedom. We are the last patriots in a vanishing republic of shame. Of course, we could cry over these spilled coordinates; or we could claim it was all a question of scale. The truth is I never believed in your autonomy and certainly never wanted it for myself. These borders are indeterminate, indefensible and transgression, too simple. It would be love spoken in sophistic tones to remind you that the boundary of demarcation separating each of us from the other and both of us from some uncharted region is a necessary condition of all three. But keep that to yourself. I confess it is not heroic, but the dismissal of grim warnings on the frontier of a betrayal is a lesson I would teach all innocence, a dark curriculum of fatalism and diffidence that leaves me wandering ever away from you in wider and stranger circles, finding nonetheless, that it all looks so familiar, as though you had been here before. The usual questions of timing were at issue, and I think also the problem of propriety. It was a Saturday spent transposing one quantity of betrayal into the corresponding harmonic of resignation. Or it was the ghastly spectacle of two lovers imprecisely affixing dark humor to a variation on the same ironic failure of putative Mouths, or: I am some dissident Humphrey. Let's call it a theory of imbrications even open books are not finally "open" in the sense that logos requires — let's say desires — some old-fashioned topoi, enough space to work, to dig down through the record, to operate on the principle of closure, but quietly, in the guise of plain memory dissolving with yet more modulations of our daily business, let's call it "us." So, speaking to all this is a matter of some urgency and has a texture, as confession, as revelation, as sudden clarity, let's call it "the self-referential." If it will make you more comfortable, I can go first, just simply start, or let's call it "begin" with some halcyon and pastoral observations: And to your left, a eucalyptus tree, or in any case, our speculative approach to the "eucalyptus" idiom, an informed précis, actually, of some related thematic material: the imperiled Ozone, melting polar cap, bumble bee extinction, what have you. Off to the right — and this is an unscripted appearance! — the Problem of Spatial Relations, known in the quaint bucolic vernacular as anything that can be done to a logarithm; but how will our grammarians come to terms with the received view that you can take the boy (ek) out of the city, but not the city, etc: rain forests, soil erosion, magnolia qua marginalia, Horace's Eclogues, on and on. Now, of course, we return to the glistening rhizomes of the midtown interchange, the chromium ventricles of our reflexive concentricities, Grammo on the colonnade, a primordial monstration of glyphs in the perpendicular: reinforced concrete, a vertical, flâneur epistemology, the names of a closing sky, our second nature, and, if you can believe it, the lost, last Humphrey of our possible, whirled.
	Humphrey's Predicate Worksheet Here follows a provisional view of the disjunctive/combinatoric schema in which: Ex(Hx)= something is a Humphrey or, more properly, meets the conditions of a Humphrey. And though I formalize with the existential quantifier, I consider this an unresolved modal relation, or: Mp (possibly p where p is the corresponding relation in a Metatheory of Humphrey predications. Let 'A' be As Theorist With Tools for Solitary Work Let 'B' be As Bon Vivant of the Decorous Quasi Compilatam Let 'C' be The Penitent Phenomenologist Let 'D' be A Despondent Humphrey on the Occasion of Arriving Late Let 'G' be the Grammo Proxy conjugate for partially indeterminate ordered pairs in an n-tuple set, notated thus: < x(1)…x(n) > but this inconclusive because: Some object Humphrey is a member of the set of things called 'G': Ex(Hx)m{y: Gy} And each of the following Cartesian Products is a member of the set of things called Humphrey Dyads A[A] BA CA DA [ ] represents a scenario obviously AB B[B] CB DB undefined for this calculus AC BC C[C] DC AD BD CD D[D] Ex(ABx)m{y: Hy} Ex(BAx)m{y: Hy} Ex(ACx)m{y: Hy} Ex(CAx)m{y: Hy} Ex(ADx)m{y: Hy} Ex(DAx)m{y: Hy} Ex(CBx)m{y: Hy} Ex(DBx)m{y: Hy} Ex(DCx)m{y: Hy} Ex(BCx)m{y: Hy} Ex(BDx)m{y: Hy} Ex(CDx)m{y: Hy} With this basic kit of axioms, we can begin to formulate boundary conditions for all (?) possible Humphrey Dyads and their mereological relations to the reflexive Grammo.