Sketch of an EPIC POEM
for a multimedia CD-ROM©
STORY involving a dolphin and an ancient pre-Vedic tribal woman. The initial scene is a water-birth delivery in a lagoon where the woman is midwifed by dolphins. THEME: the emergence of spoken, verbal, single-valued languages and the simultaneous rise of patriarchy. Prior to this phase transition, OneLanguage was holographic, an m-valued, synaesthetic, music-sculpture psychically transmitted, a topological universal generative form-grammar-semiosis -- such as is attributed to Sanskrit and Hebrew by Vedanta and Cabala. Corruptions and degenerative forms of OneLanguage, we, in our collective amnesia, currently know only as whale and dolphin song-speech, Bushman sound, Hottentot click-sounds, and Aboriginal song-lines. With the simultaneous rise of spoken verbal languages and patriarchy, there is a constriction of consciousness back from the Bicameral mind, back from superposed m-valued logics and identity transparency down to a decomposed single-valued logic, a rise of the specialized shaman(ess) and resultant hierarchical role stratification, a loss of interspecies communication, and a degenerative superconductant to semiconductant transition in nuclear neuronal DNA of the vertebrate brain: emergence of a kundalini buffer.
METAPHYSICAL CONTENT: correspondence between the Paine-Pensinger interpretation of modern physics (non-probablistic, m-valued, quantum-relativistic cascade theory) and the schemas of the Tantric Agama Shastra, as well as principles of Tibetan Tzog-Chen (this will be an expansion of content of the tympanum-of-drum discussion in MOON, with its discourse on the nested triangular gird matrix).
Acoustical/musical/prosodic analysis of dolphin speech patterns (accomplished with the recordings and acoustograms in John C. Lilly’s archives, which I catalogued for Stanford University acquisition in 1994) establishes the basis for the meter of dolphin testimonials in the poem. A klong-son (Indic-Thai) verse form, modified by adaptation of the durational foot-length classic (ancient Greek and Latin languages) heroic forms, establishes the basis for the meter of the tribal woman’s testimonials. Poem written in hypertext, where one of the CLICK-LEVELS has the poem (or section) read out loud -- sometimes with whale song in the background, like a basso ostinato. Another click-level has the poem in graphical scansion notation; another in musical scansion; another in acoustographic scansion. Each of these scansion versions may force different metrical readings of the same words (different accents, durations, et cetera): m-valued prosody.
WRITTEN IN three cantos and an epilogue: the idyllic matri-system period; the Velikovsky-ish cataclysm; the rise of patriarchy; the epilogue. SCENES CHOSEN so that the poem can be set to dodecaphonic music; sung as a stacked, m-valued Sprechstimme fugue; and choreographed for dance.
Canto I begins with new forms of VERSIFICATION derived from dolphin speech patterns and proceeds to devolve through forms characteristic of the Romantic Era and on to contemporary free-verse forms, which dominate catastrophic Canto II; Canto III recapitulates, via STYLISTIC ALLUSION, the history of English prosody, ending with the most controlled forms which were prevalent in the Classical (18th century) Period. There is an epilogue in dolphin-speech versification, with a brief re-glimpse of the idyll (suggesting that this is the proper way to the future). Real-time in the poem is the brief period before, during, and after which the cataclysmic bicameral phase transition takes place.
PLANNING STRATEGY: diagram each aspect of the epic: (a) prosodic evolution; (b) the transposition -- using cryptanalytic techniques -- of the linear array of prosodic elements [like the basic shape of a tone-row or grundgestalt in dodecaphonic music] into a 2-dimensional graphic roll-out display [like the composition matrix in dodecaphonic music], as mantra into yantra, as musical bar/prosodic-foot unit-of-linear-measure into 2-dimensional choreographic dance-floor grid done as a nested triangular maze; (c) the stylistic allusion sequence; (d) the story line; (e) the march of the metaphysical meaning discourse. Put these diagrams on acetate overlays with symbols, like Takemitsu’s idiosyncratic musical notation. This is actually to be done and used as graphics on a given click-level of the CD-ROM, and also to be worked with in the imagination. Then adjust and revise the content of the overlays relative to each other. Practice write in the various styles. Practice write the poem over and over. Then set it aside, set all the planning materials aside -- and write it cold when the time is ripe and it begins to emerge spontaneously.
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