Symphony in *DheH-
A galalith bead game
‘But it isn’t Easy,’ said Pooh to himself, as he looked at what had once been Owl’s House. ‘Because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.’ He waited hopefully… ‘Well,’ said Pooh after a long wait, ‘I shall begin “Here lies a tree” because it does, and then I’ll see what happens.’ This is what happened… (Milne)
Overture
One doesn’t kidnap or coerce a goddess or god, one may only invite them to attend an event, make polite requests, tempt them with offerings, and hope they will oblige.
And likewise, godlike reader, yourself. I am grateful you’re here, and thankful for your interest and your time. As for what this Symphony in four movements can offer to one who already has everything: simply a playing together of different thoughts about inspiration (and sometimes its lack) and connecting games (to try to get it back).
But I’m not sure how much you know about my wider aim, and this particular game I like to play, which is to take a single object or idea, often something apparently simple and everyday, and then show how it can be re-interpreted and re-expressed in a different way.
In this case, I’ve taken as my theme a string of galalith beads, galalith being a kind of solid plastic made from milk protein, hence the name — milk+stone or gala+lith from Greek. It was popular in the early 20th century for making ersatz marble, costume jewelry and so on.
So all the ideas you’ll find here are playing on some aspect of galalith in different contexts. And the contexts I’ve used to re-interpret and re-express this idea of galalith are from my Variations deck of cards, which is designed exactly for this: to give different contexts for an idea to vary across, different domains of knowledge, different types of uncertainty, different physical sensations and body parts, and different emotions.
Remember, as you go, that it is only a game. And if even the poets are allowed their fun, surely so much more, just playing a game, can I have some.
‘The poet cannot be obliged to prove that what he treated as a basis and a cause is as he claimed it to be… or to produce a rational proof of what he treated as a basis and foundation. Rather the premise that he relied on must be granted without proof.’ Asrar, al-Jurjani, in Larkin, p.145
‘As for the poetic syllogism, even though it does not attempt to cause assent to occur, but only an act of imagining, it does appear to cause assent, and it is not acknowledged to be false insofar as it is poetic. And its premises are used by way of their being granted.’ Al Shifa, Ibn Sina, in Larkin, p.147
Are you still with me? If so, we’ll begin…
I. A galalith bead game
***
To help you develop the ideas in your mind, the aspects of galalith at play in the words and pictures of this first movement are:
· common cosmogonic myths about the role of milk in the origin of the world and humankind, especially when it is curdled or churned
· myths about milk and the Milky Way galaxy in the night sky, its mythical parallels with earthly rivers (e.g. the Indian Saraswati), to which it is sometimes connected by a world tree (e.g. the Indian plaksa tree)
· the role of milk in Indo European ritual (e.g. Avestan and Rgvedic soma rituals) and its early association with poetic inspiration and enlightenment, and the later Buddhist metaphor for the five stages of understanding in terms of milk products
· the role of milk as the first food in human/mammal infancy
· recurring proto-language roots and derivatives found in Indo European, Semitic, Afro-Asiatic, Asian and Amerind languages for milk (gl, gal, lac, lk) and a playful suggestion about them being onomatopoeic imitations of the sounds and mouth movements of suckling, their form and meaning fixed together non-arbitrarily
· other poetic references to milk — Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Ovid’s story of Galatea and Pygmalion (in which a milk white marble statue comes to life)
· the act of producing milk solid from milk as a metaphor for creativity and especially poetic inspiration, which produces the words/meanings of a poem from the stream/river of consciousness, and another family of words (from *DheH) about suckling, flowing, breath of inspiration, putting (the breast in the mouth, the inspiration in the poet)
· the power of the creative imagination (and interpretation) to transform, for instance, snow in the moonlight into blossom (a famous trope in old Chinese and Japanese poetry), a urinal into a Fountain (Marcel Duchamp), a glass of water into an Oak Tree (Michael Craig-Martin), bread and wine into body and blood (transubstantiation), milk (as soma or even galalith, as here in this game) into inspiration…
So much for the rhyming of ideas. At a syntactic level, the use of words derived from similar roots naturally leads to alliteration on the surface of the text. Also, I’ve playfully chosen words which allude to the well-known first and last sentences of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which together form a single unit which loops the end of his book to the beginning:
· riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
· a way a lone a last a loved a long the [… riverrun &c]
I suppose I’m suggesting overall that inspiration comes and goes, freezes and flows, is caught and lost again, in cycles.
***
Now, I enjoy reading footnotes, sometimes more than the text itself. If that’s you too, you may enjoy the following recapitulation, going through the picture poem frame by frame, and sometimes word by word. Otherwise, you can always skim forward to the Minuet, Scherzo, and final Variations on a theme.
THEME – Galalith. Vintage carved galalith bead necklace
river rennet run
· ‘Galalith’ (from Greek, literally ‘milkstone’) is a synthetic material manufactured from casein in milk and formaldehyde.
· Rennet is the Egyptian goddess of suckling and nursing.
· Rennet is a natural enzyme found in the stomach of mammals that curdles casein in milk, and is used in making cheese.
1.3 Religion. White fig (ficus infectoria) tree
past plaksa chalav min ‘alaq/ shakhor shakhar/ for fallow bays
· The Vedic plakṣa tree is a fig tree, variously identified as the botanical ficus infectoria with its small white edible fruits, or else (perhaps as a later development) ficus religiosa. Some commentators claim the tree of knowledge in biblical Eden was a (sycamore) fig tree.
· The Hebrew words chalav (milk), shakhor (black, burnt), and shakhar (dawn) allude to the ‘black milk’ of the first published version of Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, in Hebrew. (Felstiner, p.34)
· The phrase ‘خَلَقَ الْإِنسَانَ مِنْ عَلَقٍ’ is from the Koran, describing the creation (khalaq) of humankind from a clot (min ‘alaq). (The Koran, p.597)
· The ‘fallow bays’ are two chariot horses used by Indra to reach the site of the milky soma sacrifice of the Rgveda. (Jamison, p.26)
4.8 Interest. Excitement. (Sexual desire) Pygmalion and Galatea, by Auguste Rodin
glacial galalith Galatea yields to/ lactic burning lip/ melting mountain fountain
· The sculptor Pygmalion’s Galatea isn’t named in Ovid’s tale in Metamorphoses, in which a milk-white statue comes to life. In fact a later writer added the name, drawing on the same Greek root as galalith. Pygmalion sacrifices to Venus who grants his wish, and with ‘burning lip’ he kisses the cold statue (as related in Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning), which ‘putting quyght away/ All hardnesse, yeelded underneathe his fingars’ (Ovid, p.257).
· The usual etymology given for ‘glacial’ leads us to another source (*eis-/*is-) without accounting for the prefix gl-. We shall come across the glacier and its meltwater again later, at the source of the River Arveyron.
· The phrase ‘lactic burning lip’ is (also) from J.H. Prynne’s Blue Slides at Rest. (Prynne, p.572)
1.5 Mathematics. Natural Sciences. (Astronomy) Rupin pass — Milky way panorama at Udaknal campsite
dhimahi dadhi/and milky wheel
· ‘The verb dhimahi [in Rgveda, 3.62.10] … has almost always been translated “Let us meditate.” But Jamison and Brereton (as well as Witzel and Goto) understand this to be an optative [expressing a wish] on the verbal root dha, to place or put, rather than the verbal root dhi, to meditate or consider deeply.’ (Smith, p.253) Who’s to say whether the authors of the hymn intended to play on the homonymy of ‘put’ and ‘meditate’ in Sanskrit?
· Dadhi means milk curds in Sanskrit. Dadhyanc (‘sprinkler of curds’) is the name of a legendary priest in the Rgveda (e.g. 1.80.16, Jamison, p.207).
· The dhī (Sanskrit: धी) of dhimahi (धीमहि) and dadhi (दधि) is also contained in the visionary inspiration of Sarasvati’s Dhyana (धी (dhī, or inspirational vision) + अयन (ayana, or way/movement) = ध्यान (dhyana, or way/movement of inspiration)) which later became chan (Chinese: 禪) and then zen (Japanese: 禅).
· The stones which press the juice from the soma plant for the milky soma sacrifice are said to roll like wheel rims. (Rgveda, 5.31.5, Jamison, p.695)
· ‘Aratus speaks of [the milky way] thus: “A radiant girdle belts the azure sky –/ the Milky Zone;” which someone else, I believe has rendered, “that shining wheel, men call it Milk.” … Greek writers … knew it as kyklos galaktikos, the “galactic circle” [or milky wheel].’ (Wintemberg, p.237–238)
3.7 Enlightenment. Awakening. Kamadhenu, The Wish-Granting Cow
to Saraswati’s source
· In early Indian myth, the Milky Way connected to the earth at the source of the river Saraswati, where a plaksa tree stood.
· Kamadhenu is a Hindu cow goddess, Gau Mata, the mother of all cows, a giver of unlimited milk, with a peacock’s tail. The peacock is sacred to Saraswati, originally a river goddess later especially associated with creative inspiration.
· ‘Cowda pavonis’ is a play on the Latin alchemical term cauda pavonis, literally ‘the tail of the peacock,’ which is the name of a stage in alchemical transformation where the diverse aspects of a substance are clearly revealed to the seeker in a moment of inspiration.
2.1 Questions about what we know. Buddha meditating under the Bodhi Tree
a glass of milk — a galaxy — a plaksa tree/ transubstantiation altering the accidents/ connecting earth and sky/ for all the pipal all the time
· ‘An Oak Tree’ is the name of a conceptual art work created by Michael Craig-Martin in 1973. It is a glass of water on a high glass shelf, accompanied by a text which describes changing ‘a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water … the actual oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water.’ It has been interpreted as a metaphor for transubstantiation, which is the miraculous transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ in the Christian ritual of Eucharist.
· In post-Vedic literature, the plakṣa tree connects the realms of heaven and earth, the Milky Way and the river Saraswati, its earthly counterpart.
· It has been suggested that the small white figs of the ficus infectoria look like stars, accounting for the association of the tree with the Milky Way.
· Buddha attained enlightenment (bodhi) while seated under a ficus religiosa tree, also known as a pipal tree, or bodhi tree.
· ‘You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’ (Lincoln, 1858)
2.2 Questions about what there is. Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp
Milk-white mountain river/ milklight sleeting everywhere/ widely as it flows/ on blooming groves
· Before Bai Juyi, who is commonly credited as the originator of the trope, the Tang poet Zhang Ruoxu had the idea of metamorphosis involving moon/flowers/snow (月照花林皆似霰):
‘moonlight sleeting everywhere
on blooming groves’
(Zhang Ruoxu in Minford, p.821)
· It was Bai who nailed the characters (雪月花) Sei Shonagon would later introduce into kanji as ‘setsugekka’: moonlight making snow of flowers, flowers of snow, the moon itself a white flower/snowflake.
· Moon River is a popular song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer.
· Marcel Duchamp presented his conceptual art work ‘Fountain’ in New York in 1917. Consisting of only an unusually oriented porcelain bathroom fitting, it scandalized the art world at the time, and has been a cause célèbre ever since. Duchamp’s biographer Calvin Tomkins invites us to see in its curves ‘the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha.’
1.8 Language. Ymir Suckling the Cow Audhumla, by Nicolai Abildgaard
A naming motive miming mouth movement/ the gulping gullet cow-calf coveteth/ doux, vos petits glouglous
· ‘As for authentic onomatopoeia (those such as glou-glou, tic-tac, etc.), not only are they not very numerous, but their choice is already to some extent arbitrary, since they are only the approximate and already half conventional imitation of certain noises.’ (Saussure, p.102) Saussure is not arguing against the fixity of language within a speech community, but against a naming motive for the elements of language.
· The onomatopoeic noun glou-glou (glug-glug) for wine is first recorded in a play of Molière, The Doctor Despite Himself, (‘Qu’ils sont doux, vos petits glouglous’), whose drunken hero Sganarelle makes good use of meaningless cod Latin to impress the gullible Géronte.
· *glakt and *melk are Proto Indo European roots of many words related to milk in daughter languages (Gamkrelidze, p.484–487), *lac is an Old Chinese root (Gamkrelidze, p.485) for modern Mandarin 酪 lào for milk, and *M-L-K is proposed as a root for words relating to ‘nurse, suckle, female breast’ preserved in language families as diverse as Afro-Asiatic, Caucasian, Indo-European, Uralic, Dravidian, Eskimo-Aleut, and Amerind (Ruhlen, p.248). Ruhlen joins Saussure in arguing against onomatopoeic explanation, and professes awareness of ‘no suggestions in the linguistic literature that there is any intrinsic connection between the sounds and meanings discussed here.’ (Ruhlen., p.249)
· ‘For as the cow through kind milk the calf nourisheth till an ox,/ So love and loyalty leal men sustaineth;/ And maidens and mild men mercy desire/ Right as the cow-calf coveteth sweet milk –/ So must do rightful men mercy and truth.’ (Langland, Passus 15, 466-470)
· Auðumbla is a primeval cow in Norse Mythology, attested in the Prose Edda, composed in the 13th century by Icelander Snorri Sturluson. ‘When the rime melted into drops, there was made thereof a cow… four milk-streams ran from her teats, and she fed [the old frost giant and proto-being] Ymer.’ (Anderson, p.59)
2.8 Questions about what’s the cause. The ancient Egyptian cow goddess Hathor
what stirred the milk of the dawn cows/ poured me out, and curdled me, my state forever changed/ connected differentiated — who can know?/ or if they do not know…?
· ‘Indra and the Angirases opened the Vala cave and released the cattle and the dawns by the songs they recited. These songs were powerful because they contained the truth that the cattle were the dawns, and therefore, by singing this truth Indra and the Angirases obtained both cattle and dawns.’ (Jamison, p.22)
· ‘Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?’ (Job 10:10)
· ‘When the then maiden [Dawn, Aphrodite, the bride] ascended the ladder [to the bridal chamber] and her state in life was forever changed.’ (Edwards, p.64)
· ‘Who really knows? Who shall here proclaim it? — from where was it born, from where this creation?/ The gods are on this side of the creation of this (world). So then who does know from where it came to be?// This creation — from where it came to be, if it was produced or if not — he who is the overseer of this (world) in the furthest heaven, he surely knows. Or if he does not know…?’ (Rgveda 10.130.6 and .7, Jamison, p.1609)
· The ancient Egyptian cow-headed goddess Hathor was connected in myth to the (sycamore) fig tree. (Shanahan, ch.9) She was invoked for inspiration.
4.9 Self awareness. Source of the Arveiron.
Arve reveille fast flows Дон oratoire/ 酪成蘇 (lào chéng sū): the curd becomes crisp cheese/ the ultimate springs where nothing is created or destroyed/ and too shall plaksa whey
· Shelley’s poem Mont Blanc uses the glacial meltwater source of the River Arve as a metaphor for poetic inspiration.
· The Don (Дон in Cyrillic) is a river whose name (like the Danube and Dniepr) derives from the Proto Indo European root *dhen-, meaning a fast flowing river, which yields other words for rivers and springs in daughter languages such as the Latin fons, and English font, and fountain.
· ‘Don’ also means gift in French, for example as in ‘the gift of oratory.’
· 酪成蘇 (in Chinese: lào chéng sū, literally ‘milk curd becomes crisp cheese’ — 蘇 sū (or so) being a dairy product introduced from Baekje Korea and made in Japan between the 7th and 10th centuries, by solidifying layers of milk skin, and used as an offering to the gods) is from a verse by the medieval Japanese monk Dōgen, which develops his own response to the Mu Koan originally asked by a disciple of the Tang master Zhaozhou: ‘Does a dog have buddha nature?’ Teachers before Dōgen had answered both No (無, mu in Japanese), and Yes, and sometimes both, as acknowledged here by Dōgen, who references an established Buddhist metaphor in which the development of successive products from milk represents different levels of understanding, both in individuals and in the stages of Buddha’s own teaching. (Petzold, pp.216–217, Heine, p.101)
· Considering the general causes of natural phenomena, David Hume states: ‘These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry.’ (Hume, p.36) So too, if not more so, are the ultimate springs and principles of human reason itself shut up from its own reflexive enquiry.
· Mass/Energy is not created or destroyed: the same principle has been expressed in different ways by Epicurus, Anaxagoras, Lavoisier, and Rankine. Here I am using it in the context of mental energy/inspiration.
· ‘It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.’ (Lincoln, 1859)
· Whey is a liquid waste product of cheese making.
2.5 Questions about what to do. Ten context cards played in the first movement
venture and fall, spilt milk doesn’t cry/ couldn’t give a skiff so long’s the boat a float/ puts up some bootstrap breath of inspiration until/ no lassi no lac no lào no longer
· I Ching Hexagram 29, K’an:
‘Gorge… you are told to venture and fall.’ (I Ching, Ritsema, p.344)
‘Water shows us the right way in danger. It shrinks not from any danger nor from any plunge.’ (I Ching, Wilhelm, p.58)
· ‘It is over, my skiff is afloat.’ (Kierkegaard, p.221)
· ‘I send forth my eloquent speech to Indra and to Agni; like a boat upon a river I sent it forth with my chants.’ (Rgveda X.117, Brereton, p.1586)
· Joyce’s concluding sentence in Finnegans Wake reads: ‘a way a lone a last a loved a long the’
· Lassi, lac and lào all recall milk products.
A coda, if I may: by now I’ve played ten context cards, and opened up the theme of galalith, especially its genesis in milk, and drawn upon an old analogy between the thickening of milk, and inversely the quickening of thought, language and inspiration in the mind. And now we’ll let these strands develop and mature over the contexts still unplayed.
II. Minuet
I may have cheated a bit (or even a lot!) in my choice of contexts in the first movement — I thought I had enough to grapple with without also randomising the contexts. But in the Minuet movement the cards are randomly drawn from the unused remainder of the pack of context cards. So I have three random contexts (questions about how to act, touch/ green/ floral/ breasts, questions about what’s the point), and I try to mold into each context some solid ideas, still on themes of milk/ inspiration/ (non-)meaning. I do this in three interweaving strands:
· in white, using Calvert Watkins identification of a poetic ‘formula of Indo-European antiquity’ in his 1978 article, Let Us Now Praise Famous Grains, about ritual preparation of a mixed drink (e.g. the milk-soma mixture of the Rgveda (Jamison, p.24)) associated with poetic inspiration.
· in green, going beyond a well-known phrase from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry about poetic inspiration uncovering connections between things through metaphor, to propose how the recognition of such relationships grants some (perhaps comforting illusion of) purchase, contact and grip on those things.
· in gold, using phrases which in themselves mean little or nothing but are nevertheless somehow significant in the context: ‘how now…’ is a meaningless phrase used in English elocution lessons where only the exact way you say it is meaningful, ‘jug jug’ is the incomprehensible phrase repeated by raped and mutilated Philomela transformed into a nightingale as told by Ovid in Metamorphoses and T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, and ‘milkless utters’ is a nonsensical near-homophone of ‘milkless udders’ which hints at pointless/ meaningless/ incomprehensible utterings. ‘Jugs’ and ‘dugs’ are also used in English to mean breasts.
You may find the minuet second movement is more difficult than the opening movement, though it’s much shorter. I like its compactness. It makes me think and wonder. What does it mean, in total? It’s mysterious in its playfulness, and though its materials are scant, it gestated slowly and organically almost by itself, with less direction and agency from me than the first movement, so that I can’t quite consciously take it all in at once.
III. Scherzo: A Plastic Bagatelle
1.6 Applied Sciences.
The earliest alchemists’ dreams have come true in a sense. We can synthesise and manufacture chemicals in the lab, and make objects we require in the workplace and household with 3D plastic printing. Our plastic here, galalith, makes gemstone imitations that look surprisingly real and attractive. It was also produced under other names such as Aladdinite (in the USA), Casolith (in the Netherlands) and Lactoloid (in Japan).
4.7 Anger. Rage.
Plastic passion is murdering us, and many of our cohabiting life forms. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an island in the Pacific, currently three times the size of France, in which 1.8 billion pieces of floating plastic are bound together by the North Pacific Gyre. It makes The Raft floating off the west coast of the U.S. in Neal Stephenson’s otherwise dystopian future (‘makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and slabs of styrofoam… a good fifty percent of it isn’t real boat material at all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy,’ a mere ‘several miles across’) look positively utopian in comparison. (Stephenson, p.250)
4.10 Social awareness.
In The Graduate (1967), Mr. McGuire told Benjamin, ‘There’s a great future in plastics,’ using plastic as a metaphor for the phoniness of (adult) society.
4.2 Contempt. Disgust. (Scorn)
‘Naturally the gendarme [in Jean Genet’s play, Screens] does not like galalith, does not like the ersatz, is in favor of the authentic and cannot make anything out of it at all: “It’s galalith, or it’s marble, you can bet it’s galalith. The stuff that’s sold in the villages and at fairs and markets nowadays! Nothing’s like it used to be.”’ (Derrida, p.123)
4.4 Enjoyment. Joy. (Aesthetic appreciation)
If Coco Chanel’s 1926 ‘Little Black Dress’ was like Henry Ford’s 1908 ‘Model T,’ intended to be accessible for all social classes, then the striking art deco costume jewelry by Jacob Bengel and Auguste Bonaz in materials such as galalith was Chanel’s equivalent of the cars’ chrome finish.
IV. Variations on a theme
3.1 Earth. Connection. (Life and Death. Sense of smell. Earthy/Woody.)
Midwinter froze the river to the sky,
a wheel of silver. Spring is far behind;
the westron wind returns but leaves us cold.
The dried-out laurel leaves are blown around,
like whispering tongues that pass dead metaphors
to a world of wished-for correspondences
by now discredited, epiphanies
revealed too soon, already busted bets,
a world of close connections monetised.
Shall nobody arise to make afresh
the associations thus disorganised?
3.6 Intuition. ESP. (Licorice. Fennel.)
If I told you the suffix -agogue (from the Greek for ‘to lead’) means ‘inducing, promoting’ then maybe by now you should know what ‘galactagogue’ means, and might even appreciate why I should find in its name inspiration.
The licorice, aniseed, fennel are galactagogues of this ghee-covered game of intuitive insight. (after Rig Veda 1.2.7)
No longer believing in gods who had previously brought inspiration, for us this game is a source and excuse for inspired meditation.
1.7 The Arts. Recreation. (Games)
After Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, ‘we are no longer astonished at the substantial similarity of the two forms [of ritual and play], and the question as to how far every ritual act falls within the category of play continues to hold our attention. Formally speaking, there is no distinction whatever between marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes of sheer play. If we accept the essential and original identity of play and ritual we simply recognize the hallowed spot as a play-ground, and the misleading question of the “why and wherefore” does not arise at all.’ (Huizinga, pp.20–21)
So the ritual/hymn/game is often identified with the cosmos, and any movement in them is implicitly compared to a vast journey across or around the cosmos. The celebrant/poet/player must be alert to, and open to, this overall substitution principle, and also recognize that these homologies are not mere sacred/poetic/ludic embellishments, associations for their own sake, but an implicit statement about the way things really are, the pervasive underlying connections unifying apparently disparate elements. (after Jamison, p.24)
Knowing/speaking/seeking the hidden connections between apparently disparate elements, particularly the equivalences between cosmic and ritual/poetic/ludic elements, gives the knower some power to control the cosmic by manipulation of the ritual/language/play. These two systems meet in and focus on the sacrifice/hymn/game, a controlled and orderly sphere of human activity, as a way of modeling the complex web of relationships that obtain in the two other realms. (after Jamison, p.23)
The context cards are sacrificial fires;
The theme the soma of the sacrifice.
I put in play some beads of galalith.
Just simple substitutions, doubt now put
aside, to see what may then be believed.
The subject matter warms under the touch…
4.5 Distress. Anguish. (Anxiety)
‘I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts.
Not so; Pygmalion loved, — and whoso loves
Already believes the impossible.’ (Barrett Browning, p.177)
The celebrants/poets/players crave this epiphany and are anxious about its potential failure to materialise, and more generally that the sought for connections don’t exist, or if they do that they aren’t sufficiently effective and meaningful. (after Jamison, p.27) They’re anxious that the milk and ideas won’t gel, that the needed connections may not congeal.
Against apophenia, a tendency to find a pattern where none exists (false positives), stands randomania, a tendency to miss a pattern when it’s there (false negatives). But failure to recognise either case leads to a failure to guard against the patterns’ subliminal work, and given that these patterns can always be anywhere in our environment we leave ourselves wide open to their subtle and insidious programming, anxious that what we like to think of as our subjective experience of reality is merely a cross-modally woven Proustian sensory con trick, and all we can hope is that it doesn’t deceive us to our detriment.
‘Under the right conditions, your ears — or eyes — can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine.’ (Stephenson, p.369)
3.5 Ether. Space. (Sense of hearing)
Some of the best poetry includes language work at the machine code level of human sonic and linguistic experience. It persuades subliminally, bypassing any need for argument, reasoning or proof, and I wonder sometimes how much control the poet can claim over its effects on the reader, or even the extent to which the poem sometimes writes itself, and actively persuades the poet.
It’s standard craftsmanlike practice to use similarity at the level of representation/form to (often subliminally) suggest a (stronger than strictly warranted) semantic/functional coherence/connection between ideas, whether by rhyme, alliteration, rhythm or other rhetorical techniques in language, or by supplying a governing structure, like my earlier use of a well-known phrase to suggest an overall semantic arc for the first movement to anyone familiar with Joyce’s original.
It is owing to the similar sense of words derived from the same root that ‘semantically related signifiés in the poem tend to be expressed by means of phonetically similar signifiants’ (Gamkredlidze, p737), or at least that’s what we come to expect. And as a consequence, the use of alliteration can make things appear more related than they really are, through a kind of linguistic apophenia which connects them semantically, actually adding a connection in meaning, when they would otherwise be unrelated, if not for their similar sound. ‘Phonetic repetition has the effect of joining such phrases into a single whole’ (ibid., p.735), ‘glacial Galatea’ being such a trick played here at close quarters, alongside other glosses played at longer range throughout.
3.3 Fire. Expansion. (Sense of sight)
And also identifying through a visual rhyme a homology between spilt milk and the galaxy — how homely! How mistaken as to the true nature and cause of this spillage in the sky: an edge-on point of view, 28,000 light years from the centre, across the plane of a disc of 500 billion burning suns, many of them having planets with a not dissimilar view in their own night sky.
How harmless and inconsequential our interpretation, in the end. Poignant, delicate, and beautiful.
3.2 Water. Contraction. (Sense of taste)
Ingredient substitution in the culinary arts can be motivated by physical intolerance, unavailability, or choice. Milk choices are legion, and follow different associations and sensitivities: lactose-free mammal milk for the majority of the adult human population who cannot properly digest the complex sugar; vegetable milks to also avoid the protein casein found in mammal milk; camel milk to specifically avoid the A1 beta-casein protein in favour of A2.
Some people like the taste of dairy milk, and others don’t — another vector of substitution which plays out differently across the available options, whether to trick the senses into sensing similarity of taste, or aiming for a different taste entirely. After all, who would substitute coconut cream with mango sticky rice for dairy cream? Not I, nor seventy million Thai, nor billions of others past and present.
1.4 Social Sciences. (Anthropology)
Surface similarities within a particular culture and environment can give rise to chains of cultural associations: ‘The mudyi tree or milk-tree, which is the focal symbol of the girls’ puberty ritual of the Ndembu people of northwestern Zambia, at its normative pole represents womanhood, motherhood, the mother-child bond, a novice undergoing initiation into mature womanhood, a specific matrilineage, the principle of matriliny, the process of learning “women’s wisdom,” the unity and perdurance of Ndembu society, and all of the values and virtues inherent in the various relationships — domestic, legal, and political — controlled by matrilineal descent… At its sensory pole, the same symbol stands for breast milk (the tree exudes milky latex — indeed, the significata associated with the sensory pole often have a more or less direct connection with some sensorily perceptible attribute of the symbol), mother’s breasts, and the bodily slenderness and mental pliancy of the novice (a young slender sapling of the mudyi is used.)’ (Turner, p.1100)
Surface similarities across cultures can also lead to associations, and sometimes the explanation is mistaken: the cattle lore of African Maasai, South Indian Toda, and North Indian Vedic societies are not explained by monogenesis, or contact, but by being an independent shared human response in different cultures to shared elements in the environment. Likewise, the similar practice of pilgrimage during the winter solstice at the Saraswati in India, and the Vilcanota in Peru. (Witzel, §2.2 and 3.1.7)
That said, distance in time and place between cultures is not always a constraint for influence by contact. An illustrative example given by eighth century Arabic grammarian Sībawayhi (‘do not eat fish and drink milk’) passed from grammar to grammar via West African Timbuktu to nineteenth century Mauritania (Silla, p.614) to wherever you are now.
In another far flung example, American poet Robert Duncan compared his own poetic practice with the dietary practices of the African Maasai in a seemingly spontaneous comment during a filmed interview in 1966: ‘My poems are filled with passages that may come from here and there. […] And I certainly think of myself as a derivative poet. […] When we… [Duncan searches for inspiration and catches sight of a picture on the wall of his study, bearing the word ‘COW’] Well, “cow” is the word on the wall back there. […] These people [the Maasai] live on milk and blood and never kill the cow […] I derive myself from all of these people [gesturing at his bookshelves filled with earlier poets, writers and artists] who are in no way diminished by my derivation, from the milk and blood of other works of art.’
1.9 Geography. Biography. History. (Prehistory)
Carri (2000) reconstructs the prehistorical motivation for the Vedic link between the milky sacrificial soma and the gift of human inspiration through a visual similarity between the cloven cow footprint and the bi-hemispheric human brain: ‘The hemispheres are in the cerebrospinal fluid, but the hoofs are dry. But the cow’s hoof could be made wet and its footprint filled with ghrta [ghee], as it is done… This could be understood symbolically. The ghrta is a substitute for the fluid around the prototypal cerebrum with the cleft in the middle.’ (Carri, p.86) According to Jamison’s (2003) review of the book: ‘The presentation is not systematic but associative, and the reader experiences his progress through the book as alternatingly elating and baffling. When the associations work, the result is often a quite unexpected insight, which could only have been generated by the unpredictable collection of materials. In the contrary case, the materials assembled can seem random and kaleidoscopic and the argument out of control.’ From such a fate, good Lord of Games, deliver us.
4.3 Fear. Terror. (Fear of the Unknown)
Do you think that by now we’ve sufficiently established our galalith theme as a nexus of ideas on clotting, connecting and gelling? Or is there still more to be done to bind them together?
Oliver Sacks’ The Lost Mariner is the story of Jimmie, a man with neurological brain damage arising from alcoholism, whose day-to-day existence was ‘unconnected and unconnecting.’ He could function adequately in certain contexts, but experienced reality as a ‘mere succession of unrelated impressions and events… a meaningless fluttering on the surface of life.’ ‘Only connect,’ Sacks prescribes. So also might a differently adapted creature say to all of us — not just about our sensory limitations, but also our ability to connect it all together. And like Jimmie, we sometimes lack a starter culture to initiate the connecting within the streaming milk of our consciousness.
We all, to find meaning, we need to connect. But what chance do we really have when we have only just begun to perceive a hitherto unknown 95% of the universe we now call dark energy and dark matter, which is not only beyond our normal human sensual perception but furthermore on the outer edges of our current scientific instruments and theories. What can we really hope to say about patterns and connections that may figure in this bigger scheme? They may be relatively few and weak, or else they could make the regularities and homologies we currently perceive seem narrow, chaotic, fleeting and futile in comparison. Though connecting may itself bring horrors: ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ (Lovecraft, p.1)
Sacks suggests that David Hume missed something in his description of human nature as ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity.’ In fact, Hume may rather have overstated the case for human nature in missing the seriously impoverished scope of our perceptions and conceptions. Jimmie’s grip on our reality by far exceeds our own grip on this great unknown. Yet we fear more keenly the loss of what little we already grasp, the disintegration of even our limited connecting capacity, through the various forms of agnosia and dementia which can afflict us.
4.11 Self management.
‘Only connect,’ Sacks prescribes, like Margaret Schlegel in E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End (1910): ‘Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.’ Forster was a humanist, and his work emphasizes the moral importance of human connection and sympathy across boundaries of race, class, and nation. The phrase as used by his character Margaret Schlegel is not about social connection, but ‘the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires’ (Kirsch), an expression in which Forster joins cause with Freud.
‘The aim of [Eros] is to establish even greater unities and to preserve them thus – in short, to bind together; the aim of [the destructive instinct] is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things.’ (Freud, S., An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1940, in Laplanche, p.52)
In the language of psychoanalysis, binding is a relation between several terms which are linked up, for example in an associative chain (Verbindung), a whole in which cohesion is maintained, demarcated by boundaries, fixation in one place of energy which can no longer flow freely, uniting and binding, in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego. (Freud, S., Ego and Id, 1923, in Laplanche, p.52)
1.2 Philosophy. Psychology.
‘A paradigmatic experience is that of feeling warmth (like warm milk) flowing from the mother’s body into the child’s. The gestures of raised hands to be found in many representations of Egyptian deities and in hieroglyphics are interpreted by [Hungarian psychoanalyst] Hermann as unconscious symbolizations of clinging. And today we know that even the oldest cave paintings, dating back some 30,000 years, have hands (both with and without fingers) as a theme.’ (Berner, p.191)
Imre Hermann’s book The Filial Instinct (the word ‘fil-ial’ being derived from the Latin ‘to be nourished by motherly milk,’ from the same Indo European dhi (suckling) which you’ll remember gave us dadhi in Sanskrit, by regular consonant change from dh to ph/f) links the primal drive to search and connect through our love of knowledge and wisdom (phil-osophy) with our clinging at the milky breast of the mother.
I thought (again) of the E on the Sopron pot. The dancers with hands held high in ecstasy, accompanying the ancient weaver/poet and musician.
Are their hands held there in clinging position, ecstatically suckling on the world/mother all around them?
Clinging — clutching — clotting — cleaving —
4.1 Shame. Humiliation. (Disappointed expectations)
And just as the breast (and warmth, and attention) is given and withheld to the suckling child, so too the world gives and withholds inspiration. In Melanie Klein’s ‘object relations’ theory this early experience of frustrated satisfaction is formative in the infant’s development, is internalized, ideally also worked through to some extent, and then played out again and again throughout our lives.
4.12 Relationship management. (Developing others)
Our game aids ‘mental digestion.’ What it does is the mental equivalent to what other species do with food before giving it to their offspring, what the mother does in offering and withholding the breast. As reverie is an unconscious activity of the mother, so it is with the game. The game holds within the matrix of its cards the stimulus for the connections, and in playing it becomes a container for the player’s experience, wherein their emotions, sensations, knowledge and uncertainties are projected into a good game, where they are felt to have been modified in such a way that the complex of ideas that is reintrojected is reacknowledged by the player. The player takes in (unconsciously) not only the modified version of the experiences that have been projected into the game, but also the possibility of connecting further that is at the heart of the game. (after Riesenberg-Malcolm, p.165, Bion, p.90)
2.7 Questions about materials, space and time needed.
‘This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognize it by means of another interpretation. It has not occurred to any one of these players to inquire into the connection of… their game with… reality, the relation of their play to their own material surroundings.’ (after Marx and Engels, p. 41)
There are indeed many questions about the material prerequisites for the creation and playing of such a game as this. Ignorance is not a good excuse. We do have a duty to ask… like an observant believer properly concerned about the provenance of the materials used to make his cheese, or the provenance of the materials (in Islam, the list of authorities (isnād) who have transmitted a report (ḥadīth)) used to guide his choice. And as with the question of cheese also in the Talmud, there are no easy answers here: ‘Rabbi Ishmael again put forward an objection, and Rabbi Joshua changed the subject, leaving the issue unresolved.’ (Cook, p.464)
4.6 Surprise. (Exceeding expectations)
‘The drive to attain some realm of unchanging essential truths beneath phenomena is also, necessarily, the positing of human reason as the capable bearer of such a timeless stance. Is this, Heidegger would ask, a denial of our mortality, and of the historical nature of our existence?’ (Clark, p.11)
Variations is a game that brings forth worlds of phenomena from unchanging themes through the players’ individual and collective human reason, sensations, passions and uncertainties. I hold it out not as a denial, but an exploration and celebration of our mortality, the necessity of our contingency, and of the historical nature of our existence.
A game of putting, putting putting into play: the sacrifice into the fires, the form into the contexts, the breast into the mouth, the starter culture into the milk, the inspiration into the poet/player. Putting connects.
And connections make things happen. (after Jamison, p.8)
‘“A representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (Berthold Brecht, cited in [Suvin, p.374]). This permits a new cognition of the now and creates a moment which is potentially liberating. Placing [*DheH-] familiar objects (or subjects) in unfamiliar settings allows us to see differently [*DheH-]. Our old and tired perceptions can thus be revitalized and transformed.’ (Sargisson, p.19)
‘The semantic change [in *DheH-] from “to put [a thought] into someone” (e.g. by the gods) to “inspire, reveal” is unproblematic.’ (de Vaan,p.180)
2.3 Questions about doing the right thing.
‘A man sits in an attic room engaged in a subtle work of scholarship. Suddenly he becomes aware that fire has broken out in the house below. He will not consider whether it is his function to see to it, or whether he had not better finish his tabulations. He will run downstairs and attempt to save the house. Here I am sitting in the top story of our Castalian edifice, occupied with the Glass Bead Game, working with delicate sensitive instruments, and instinct tells me, my nose tells me, that down below something is burning, our whole structure is imperiled, and that my business now is not to analyze music or define rules of the Game, but to rush to where the smoke is.’ (Hesse, p.326)
These days, the populist radical right claim that politics is downstream of culture, a cliché presented as a truism which may not even be true. But if it is, then alongside the media, publishing, academia, competitive sports and other trades and activities that form our habits of mind without our knowing it, we will find the conceiving and playing of games. Furthermore, if we agree with Huizinga’s analysis in Homo Ludens, we will find play (a primary and necessary condition of the generation of culture) to be located upstream of culture itself and, with not much else further upstream from there, all our future games still waiting to be conceived and played, like glacial milkwater flowing from the ice. Nice dream: Elizabeth Magie’s redistributive motive in designing The Landlord’s Game (1904) misfired spectacularly to become a game that glorifies the crushing power of commerce and land ownership: Monopoly. (Donovan, Ch.5)
‘E.M. Forster’s motto — “only connect” — is as valid for the naturalist at the philosophical level as it is for Forster’s characters (and us) at the moral and personal level. […] Having given up the unreal project of wholesale validation, the naturalist philosopher will embrace the real project of investigating the connections between the major structural elements of our conceptual scheme. If connections […] are really available, so much the better.” (Strawson, p.17) If they are…
In his introduction to C.G. Jung’s Red Book, Sonu Shamdasani cites Jung’s realisation that one without myth ‘is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.’ (Jung, p.14). In playing the Glass Bead Game, which is ‘my’ myth, I can have these beliefs without holding them. As a true old believer recently said to me: ‘For you, everything is a game.’ ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘you could say there are two ways of looking at everything. And you are certainly entitled to that opinion.’ (Resnick) ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I wish I had said to him, ‘let’s flip a coin for it,’ and proved him wrong.
Because remember, though it’s a game, its aims are humane. Just like a mirror can be used to see things not normally visible, the Glass Bead Game can be used to search, explore and process things we can’t yet quite see or understand… physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. It’s a good thing for us to be more aware of, and to be able to control, this process of finding and analyzing patterns, connections, causes, and seeing how even bare facts can change depending on context.
Meanwhile, though the pack of context cards is by now exhausted, the theme is not by any means, not having even touched on Krishna, Radha and the gopis, or Big Milk and the consolidation of the global dairy industry, or the controversial case of the cow that jumped over the moon…
For according to an early scholar of Basra, Abu ‘l-‘Aliya (Cook, p.459): ‘Milk does not die.’
1.1 Fundamentals of knowledge and culture. (Documentation)
Bibliography
Anderson, R.B., “The Younger Edda, also called Snorre’s Edda, or the Prose Edda.” 1879
Barrett Browning, E., “Aurora Leigh.” 1857
Berner, W., “Hermann’s Concept of Clinging in Light of Modern Drive Theory.” In Ferenczi’s Turn in Psychoanalysis, ed. Rudnytsky, P.L. et al., 1996
“The Bible. King James Version.” 1957
Bion, W.R., “Learning from Experience.” 1962
Carri, S.J., “Gavesanam: Or on the Track of the Cow And in Search of the Mysterious Word And in Search of the Hidden Light.” 2000
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Jamison, S.W., Brereton, J.P. “The Rigveda: the earliest religious poetry of India.” 2014
Jamison, S.W., “Reviewed Work: Gavesanam, by Sebastian J. Carri.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 123, no. 3, 2003
Kirsch, A., “The Prose and the Passion.” The New Republic, July 2010
Gamkrelidze, T.V., Ivanov, V.V., “Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: a reconstruction and historical analysis of a proto-language and a proto-culture.” 1995
Heine, S., “A Medieval Japanese Monk Well-Versed in Chinese Poetry: What he Did and Did Not Compose.” in Dogen and Soto Zen (ed. Heine, S.), 2015
Hermann, I., “L’Instinct Filial.” 1972
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Hume, D., “An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding.” in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, vol. IV, 1854 (1748)
I Ching, “The Pocket I Ching: The Richard Wilhelm Translation.” (transl. Baynes, C.F., ed. Boardman, W.S.) 1984
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Joyce, J., “Finnegans Wake.” 1939
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The Rigveda, see Jamison, 2014
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Sacks, O., “The Lost Mariner.” in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985
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Stephenson, N., “Snow Crash.” 1992
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Zhang Ruoxu, “Spring. River. Flowers. Moon. Night.” in Classical Chinese Literature. Volume I: from Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty, (ed. Minford, J., and Lau, S.M.) 2000
Sounds
Mancini, H., Mercer, J., “Moon River.” performed by Hepburn, A., on Music from the Films of Audrey Hepburn, 1993
Nyro, L., “Time and Love.” 1969
The Cure, “Plastic Passion.” 1980
Visuals
Moore, R.O., (dir.) “USA: Poetry, Robert Duncan and John Wieners.” 1966
Nichols, M., (dir.) “The Graduate.” 1967
Resnick, S., (dir.) “The Maidens of Fetish Street.” 1966
Sketch of Sopron Pot figures, in Bonfante, L. “The Etruscans: Mediators between northern barbarians and Classical Civilizations.” in:
The Barbarians of Ancient Europe: Realities and Interactions. 2011
Sopron Pot details, Natural History Museum, Vienna ( Austria ). Hallstatt culture pottery ( 7th century BC ) from Sopron ( Hungary ), accessed on Wikimedia Commons
Comic strip pictures (in order)
Vintage carved galalith bead necklace, manufacture and photo: Unknown, https://www.pinterest.de/pin/755971487431486088/
White fig (ficus infectoria) tree, photo: Unknown, https://www.exportersindia.com/prabhat-nursery/ficus-infectoria-tree-2715712.htm
Pygmalion and Galatea, by Auguste Rodin, modeled 1889, carved ca. 1908–9, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
“Rupin pass — Rohit Singla — Milky way panorama at Udaknal campsite” posted to indiahikes.com by Swathi Chatrapathy, 2016
Kamadhenu, The Wish-Granting Cow Made in Rajasthan, India c. 1825–55 Artist/maker unknown, India, Rajasthan, Jodhpur or Nathadwara
Buddha meditating under the Bodhi Tree, 800 C.E., Brooklyn Museum, USA, photo by “Opal_Art_Seekers_4” via Wikimedia Commons
Fountain, 1917/1964, by Marcel Duchamp San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp
Ymir Suckling the Cow Audhumla, by Nicolai Abildgaard, 1777
The ancient Egyptian cow goddess Hathor, photo: Unknown, https://www.ask-aladdin.com/egypt-gods/hathor/
“Source of the Arveiron.” Artist unknown. Popular Science Monthly, 1874, p. 411
Ten context cards played in the first movement, photo: the author
Tastes
Ethiopian Sidamo 100% Arabica Medium Roast Coffee, spinneysFOOD
Fresh 100% Cow’s Milk, Al Marai
Yoghurt, mon grec à la française, Elle & Vire
Alshifa Acacia Honey, Sunbulah Group
Sugar Free Sweet Liquorice Flavour Lozenges, Fisherman’s Friend
Thai mango sticky rice (Khao Neeo Mamuang)
Vanilla ice cream, Haagen Dazs
Touch
The coldness of half-frozen full cream fresh milk brought in from the frosty doorstep on a cold Lancashire winter’s morning melting in the mouth
***
‘So there it is,’ said Pooh, when he had sung this to himself three times. ‘It’s come different from what I thought it would, but it’s come. Now I must go and sing it to Piglet.’
…
‘Did I really do all that?’ [Piglet] said at last.
‘Well,’ said Pooh, ‘in poetry — in a piece of poetry — well, you did it, Piglet, because the poetry says you did. And that’s how people know.’ (Milne)
