THE JOURNAL OF SOCIOPHYSIOLOGY

00903 : March 2002 : Udidi’s absolute book : Devi et al.

An organ of ISOCPHYS.

Founded in 1992 by a “sestina of polylexical exiles.”

A Finnegans Wake for the common man: Appreciating Dado Udidi (Hamiltonian)’s absolute book entwining schizomythia and taboo in be(com)ing ludict

Kiko Devi, D. I. Swopes, Arnaut Raymond, Chester Kidjaki, Ouida Willoughby Johnson, and Hope Flamingo

Institute of Sociophysiology (ISOCPHYS)

Institute of Lexical Ecology (ILE)

Center for the Analysis and Clitalysis of Altarity (CACA)

Château Methuen

Owlstain, FZ 23632

Communicated by Prof. B. Vighdan, February 2, 2002.

0.   Introduction

Most novels today come across as the bloodless rough drafts of writing school inmates taught by spry bunglers; The Compass of That Sea (1, 3) strikes one with such sheer delicate intricacy of immense artistry — a full nine years of intense crafting went into its workmanship (4) — utilizing high-wire techniques begged, borrowed, bought or stolen from masters as diverse as Beckett, Celan, Cortazar, Joyce, Schmidt, Simon, Stein and Woolf (5), that the reader veritably shudders, stutters to describe it. In a word, profound (6)!

1.   Methods and Materials

This “absolute book” (1, 3, 7) reads more like a long prose poem than a novel (8). And so plainly is Udidi’s debt to Wallace Stevens everywhere in evidence, that The Compass of that Sea (1, 3) might well have been subtitled The Man on the Dump Taking Tea at the Palaz of Hoon (3, 9, 10). “Where was it,” mullah Stevens asks, “we first heard of the truth (9)?” Bright talib Udidi mimes in unison, “The the (9).” The palace, in ruins, is the dump where Udidi’s creature, Michael Sean Strickland (1) — perhaps only nominally, or, rather, noumenally — walks and marches and crawls and runs and trips on a bone or an Afghan blue fragment of Fatimid tile, and falls, collapsing in a heap in what once was a sumptuous courtyard. We enter that courtyard on our knees, through a tight archway inscribed explicitly with one of mullah Stevens’s fatidic ghazals (3, 10). Two preceding archways, with pendant courtyards concentric, have conducted us hither; but whither a neemom-shaded tea stand, a Norlian cha’abran plush with tapis and kilims (11), upon which to rest cross-legged and refresh ourselves before tackling the sinuous task of retracing our steps out of the labyrinth? Udidi’s here, along with Strickland, and Stevens himself, a haggard shade, and together they’ve tracked us all the way, gathering the thread we so carefully laid behind us, shearing it, knotting it, tangling it, and now they toss the useless mess at our feet and, with a smiling wink, serve us cloudy tea (12). Beneath purple vaults of a sky constrained by the prison-blank bounds of our own imagining, we turn and pivot, and continue turning. For we ourselves are author, and author’s creature, and, in an infinite sea without poles, all compasses lie (13).

2.   Results

Attention, long overdue, to an author who is surely this century’s Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett and, yes, Stevens all in one, is paid (1, 14). A hint of Thoreau as well, though a more obtuse Waldeneer to be sure, is perceived (15). The author’s work, from the very inception, has been followed (8, 16). While understanding by some critics (his own father, Tony Hamiltonian, for example, notable founding faculty member of the Institute of Sociophysiology) may not have been properly accorded him, what has been said, when read at dusk, is quite clear, the sky an orange-purple-blue, much like the Sno Cone or creamsicle of collective youth consciousness (17). His words read aloud have been known to imbue with a happiness and surefootedness not, for some time, felt (18). Sound sleep is followed (19). Disagreement, however, on one point of Raymond’s assessment, must be maintained: “All compasses lie (13, 20).” In fact, as both bearer and burden towards true north always are borne, they, compasses, are — inevitably, infallibly, inexorably, ineluctably — correct (21). Reality, through a forest thicket or meadow-lark wicket of Boy Scout laughter, has been whispered; on broad scratched faces the mark of utility has been worn (22). In this regard, to the bone closely has Udidi hewn, and, as what is authored is indistinguishable from what is read (as in ludict), lies must not, in fact, cannot (much like parabolic divastigation) be told (23). Truth and its fiery scepter — the compass — have led to a final blessed rest (13, 24). Graceful again; be(com)ing still (25).

3.   Discussion

The world, for each of us, is constrained by our conceiving it. Through the unique rhythms of experience and perception, we are each our own bold author of season and tide that turn and pivot beneath purple vaults of sky. So implied Hamlet; and so passes today for common sociophysiological sense. Dado Udidi (Hamiltonian)’s unique contribution to the field, however (and one hopes this initiatory sally bodes an extended campaign), is to have invented, in the medium of his be(com)ing epileptic modernism, The Compass of That Sea, a set of constraints (see Fig. 1) allowing us to apprehend a world typically beyond conception; to have invented an author, Michael Sean Strickland, possessing rhythmic and perceptual talents uniquely attuned to the expression of the peculiar world of his character’s experience (1, 3, 8, 10, 25, 26, 27, 28).

Heir to that strain of epileptic modernism of which Nabokov is perhaps the most singular instar (though ultramimetic avatars of various Flaubertian or Dostoyevskian species, or even the aposematic mimicry evinced by certain plump moths of Nietzsche, would not be invalid attributions), author Strickland begins to trespass beyond what’s probably the catastrophic limits of his inventor’s tradition, and in so doing, brings it to be(com)ing. So treacherous does this écriture seem at times, that it verily crumbles beneath the reader’s eye, like that friable yellow sandstone, time-hewn and cold-worn, which shatters at the touch of climbers daring the most rarefied of Tagmic peak-stones. Swiftly and boldly, nimble Strickland has scaled those heights, and now he makes rapid his saltatory rhythm of staccato descent, brief breathless catch between slide and jump, pause and plummet (8, 11, 28).

Whereas Nabokov was content to let flat-footed pet Humbert remark in passing “a man having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park;” or allow rotund Shade wanly to recall a childhood fainting fit (sunburst, blackness, wonder, shame); or, alternatively, present a pathetic Person’s plagiary by anticipation of gross Althusser’s convulsive pansomniac uxoricide — Strickland, ever restive, charts a vastly different course: the text is, itself, an epileptic fit; Compass is, in its very be(com)ing, the corpse of that seizure. Past membrane of aura posing as cover (yellow-white flash in a field of electric blue) and liminal antiphonies of conception’s arc, we plunge, at the very first words —; Don’t know never knew never will — into the fierce tumult of untempered seizure which one yet persists vainly in trying to resist — the backward fall striving up — vainly hoping it never comes back I tried to move such sharp stillness bewildered use free of the absolute it was the one that gets out that gets help something radiant hidden there (8, 25, 29, 30, 31).

No help is at hand, and no way leads out, and seizure would persist regardless. What Strickland portrays so remarkably, in the convulsive space of Udidi's mind, is the paradoxically banal unicity of seizure. (Readers with a hyperveristic slant may pursue case by case confirmation in the literature; Udidi's author, less cowed by the inflated claims of verisimilitude, invents his own.) In seizure, as in dream, does schizomythia reign; common to all as anatomy and physiology is common; unique as individual configuration of physiological instantiation is unique. And so intense does seizure seem already be(com)ing by first section's end, we think the shifting patterns of motivic sand must needs abide; the ceaseless breaking and unbreaking of schizomythic tide, subside (see Fig. 1).

But we enter, in section two, that singing consistency of seizure almost lucid in its pitch of detachment; that state which Ouida Willoughby Johnson has termed ludict, in which mind, however fearfully willful, is unable to control body, and must simply lie back, as in dream, and marvel. Here, conventions of falling, tumbling, shaking no longer seem apt; here, we soar, we glide — illusorily, of course, for gravity governs all. Here, we rave, voices pouring forth in glossalalic ululus, refined be(com)ing, a devout fit of shriving flares from skull to knee like a wave of depolarization coursing the length of a squid's giant axon (23, 25, 32, 33, 34, 35).

Such perfection would seem impossible to improve upon, yet section three — prophetic, poetic, mysteriously terse — plunges us back into seizure, primed, as it were, by the tumult of what came before. And at the end of this Finnegans Wake for the common man, we are left — having slightly embarrassedly embraced an unratified pleasure beyond artifice or nature — exhausted but contented, slightly ashamed, and, above all, wondrously, abidingly, amazed (36, 37).

4.   Conclusion

Anent the associative faculty’s perennial dandist having chosen to publish his senimalist memoir, The Compass of that Sea (3), under an assumed ophidian pavonym of dubious pedigree (1), erautist sorites, whether hyper- or hypolectorially, need not necessarily be committed — though no law (38) need abjure them, either. Masks of ornithicity and wordism (OW), of toxophile aerolexist (TO/AE), are no more ungracious than their wearer is generous (38). Udidi’s contribution has been never to let us in the field forget a pivotal fact, all too easily turned away from, of sociophysiology: stage and stand are one in the stadia of ritual. Heuristic cleavage, though perhaps as ineluctably necessary to the organism as dreamless sleep (19; see also Results, above), stunts, stutters, stultifies and, ultimately, strays straining to irredeemable paperist conjunctivism. Despite whatever heterolexical rookbeds of schizomythic dream it fains pluck and strum, ritual is unitary and real (10).

Recall that theory’s fourfold posts, homologous to the tetragonal octave of lexical ecology (39): schizomythia, taboo, ritual, mythia. Udidi constructs the nut-hobbled (taboo) oinkus (schizomythia) of his absolute book (schizomythia plus taboo by definition equal ludict) (23) by constraining, through a discipline of spiral retrogression (taboo, see Fig. 1), the thematic quanta of literary blood, elevens and nines, interatomic jest of that accent, etc. (schizomythia) which the ritual (ritual) of reading (ritual) transforms into tertiary ludict (taboo and schizomythia together again — hi!) (23) such that myth (mythia) roars (ritual) code (taboo) to shade (ritual) watch (mythia) load (schizomythia) with terror in the same nut-hobbled oinkus of this absolute book constructed by Udidi. What could be simpler? Yet nothing's more profound (see Introduction, above), more singular (see Results, above), more lexically liberating (see Discussion, above): an extended riff in three-four (2), with polyrhythmic overtones in five, totaling a nine-part Compass not confined by its covers. Consider them, rather, twin skins of a double-headed drum. A drum of drums, in fact, for each page is doubly stretched, doubly tunable and struck, and-but this metaphor flags: the stadium awaits.

Ludict, of course, need not be strictly ternary; nor a tree’sbranches fixed in number (23). Udidi braids his tertiary threnody temporally tripartite into five locales spanning nine years and three books encompassing the following pattern (Fig. 1):

Book one, years nine, one and seven, Owlstain, where Udidi lately (section one) assumed the same nut-hobbled, separately double, semi-detached position (p. 26) he currently holds on our associative faculty; latterly (section two) lifted his arms, the epileptic postulant, to shade watch load with terror (p. 37) during his junior year internship at the Institute of Sociophysiology (ISOCPHYS); formerly (section three) bit to steal unwifely in the interatomic jest of that accent (p. 41) at the new Institute of Lexical Ecology (ILE) at ISOCPHYS in fulfullment of the lexical requirements preparatory to conducting fieldwork in book three, section one.

Book two, years six and five, Gertrude, where on that prodigal morning (section one) he lived open and cheerful while the other side was surprised by the long hand (p. 42), and closed what quality foreign, prophetic, walked time to look already straight, knobbled the impersonal look of it (section three, p. 94), the less not more of a let go and thrown away; year three, the harsh autumn sky of deceitful Beulah, where he conceived the discipline of spiral retrogression (see Fig. 1) by which he would tame his grief with the fetters of this art, this futility (section two, p. 82) (8).

Book three, year eight (section one) in Iagip, Upper Engush, where, following completion of the necessary lexical and sidereal studies in book one, section three, he was conjoined to expound unless language had become so flaccid that being on occasion patronized would begin to equal death for the sake of an ideal (p. 98) which qualified him for book one, section one; years four and two, Agua Prieta, where, following active duty in Beulah, he read as fast as possible (section two) axe, mirror, window, characters, isolation ward, something, too late literary blood, the backward fall striving up, and dared oppose (p. 104) traumatization of his senior year (section three) at Tiliar High School in the suburb of Tixpu where he torpedoed that double-cross of elevens and nines already something about sex (p. 116) which, according to a proposal by Raymond and Kidjaki (39), achieved consummation in the lupanares of book two, section two, but that theory is open to discussion.

A so-called “chronological” reading of Compass (and it is testament to the senimalist strength of Udidi’s ludict that neither schizomythology nor sociophysiology are in any way reduced thereby) (40) would thus proceed in the order (see Fig. 1): (I,2), (III,3), (II,2), (III,2), (II,3), (II,1), (I,3), (III,1), and (I,1), where the first, roman numeric, term in each of the ordered pairs represents the appropriate book number of Compass; the second, arabic, term, section number. One cannot emphasize too boldly that such a reading, emphasizing the temporal aspect of Compass (though in no way diminishing of the threnodial braid of schizomythia and taboo) (40), would, as a sort of coda or envoi, be most appropriately brought to closure by a repetition of (I,2) (41).

5.   Notes and References

1. Michael Sean Strickland, The Compass of that Sea (Xlibris, Philadelphia, December 2001, ISBN 1401031625, trade paper, 133 pages, $20.99). Order from your favorite book dealer, or directly from the publisher for the discounted price of only $17.84! Check out also Editions MSS for a free online version.
2. This abstract, by Ouida Willoughby Johnson, originally found its way into print as a blurb in Tiliar Boarding School’s traditional “Journal of Things Cultural, Artistic and Philosophic,” Tiliar Tracks! (March 2002); also, as a sort of short riff running rampant among various rhapsodic ludicts comprising Ms. Johnson’s own Divastigations.
3. The “same nut-hobbled oinkus of this absolute book” (see note 7), The Compass of that Sea, is lifted straight from Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (1921), the relevant lines of which appear as the epigram to book three (p. 111 of the print-on-demand version; see also note 10 below).
4. Owlstain, Beulah, Gertrude, Iagip, Agua Prieta: 1989–1998. M. S. Strickland (2001), p. 133.
5. Mary Beckett, Give them stones (Beech Tree Books, New York, 1987); Paul Celan, Atemwende (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1967); Lucas Cortázar, Un tal mundo para Julio (Alfaguara, Agua Prieta, 1984); Brenda B. Joyce, Dream promise of the rose house (Avonova Books, New York, 1993); Ettore Schmitd, La coscienda di Deno (zall’ Oglio, Milano, 1966); Laura Simon, Dreams of paradise (Barnett Books, Berkeley, 1991); Garth Stein (?), Raven stole the moon (Pocket Books, New York, 1998), Harry Stein (??), Infinity’s child (Delacorte Press, New York, 1997), Michael S. Stein (???), Probabilities (Permanent Press, Sag Harbor, N.Y., 1995), Sol Stein (????), How to grow a novel: The most common mistakes writers make and how to overcome them (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999); Douglas Woolf, Fade out (Grove Press, New York, 1959).
6. Chester Kidjaki eagerly penned this introduction which first appeared as a short critical appreciation of The Compass of that Sea in the appropriate notices section of the relevant issue of the Owlstain SCAT and was politely begged, borrowed, bought, or stolen back from that publication as a matter of course.
7. M. S. Strickland (2001), p. 26.
8. The author fondly recalls a conversation he had with the author at a Sunday afternoon luncheon in late April or early May on the Institute’s grounds at an open-work forged-iron table the white enamel of which was streaked and stained with oxiferric roux beneath the early bee-loud blossoms of a grand bigarreautier near the banks of the river D’Laumes the slow waters of which rolled slowly towards the Arathu Sea while schoolboys celebrated semester’s end by braving the heights of the yellow sandstone cliff across the river en face de l’Institut and plunging into the breath-abating chill between burly bouts of laughter and fits of witty banter deftly severed cubes of steak au poivre shed their amberous veils atop the author’s tongue and slid to their gastric demise among cherry blossoms, pink and orange, tumbling tableward like splash-laughing boys hurtling waterward between deft ingurgitations of luscious tranchées of pepper-buttered boeuf while the author fondly recalled how Compass’s inception owed its conception to the desire to compass within the span of a slight cento-leaved livre the sensual aesthetic poetic effect and impact which the rapt gaze some years before before a lush painting of the nine-petaled blossom of a bigarreautier had had upon him.
9. Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump” (1938).
10. M. S. Strickland (2001; after Stevens 1921; see note 3 above), p. 111: “I was myself the compass of that sea://I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw/Or heard or felt came not but from myself;/And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
11. In Into My Grave: A Memoir of Norlia (n.d. mss.), Velasto Prastier reports that the natives of this region, sometimes confused with Nuristan or Narnia (e.g., Asa Hłzts, Nörlihöz s környékhez utazás [A journey to Norlia and environs]. Buda: Kossuth Kiadó, 1964), enjoy taking tea, crosslegged, on mats piled upon the sharpais-like cha’abran built among the trunks of the neemom (Gnetum gnemom var. norliana Strick., 1840) the cordate leaves of which, occurring in trifoliolate bracts, are valued, especially when rubicundically immature, in an aphrodisial decoction imbibed during the yazdehanity of Glo Bersh, the Norlo-Tagmic ‘ball year’ (for which see also B. Vighdan, Globarsç : A ritual Tagmic physiological philosophy. JSocPhys 00103, March 1993).
12. Tea, in Norlia, is taboo when taken with milk, sugar, honey, cardamom, cinnamom, mint, cloves, yak butter, salt, or other such adulterants; a fact of which the otherwise astute voyageur might be ignorant (A. Hłzts, op. cit.; V. Prastier, op. cit.).
13. Modified but slightly from Arnaut Raymond’s glowing review of Compass which he sequentially submitted unrequitedly to the Owlstain SCAT, the Agua Prieta Piste, the Gertrude Glebe, the Beulah Blessing, and Tiliar Tracks! under the rubric of “All Compasses Lie,” this methods and materials section appears here with the author’s blessing.
14. Edward Hubert Faulkner, Plowman’s folly (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1944); Virginia Faulkner, Roundup: A Nebraska reader (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1957); David Michael Joyce, Topiary othermindedness: The emergence of network culture and the art of training plants (Firefly University Press, Toronto, Michigan, 2000); Lucy Beckett, Wallace Stevens (Cambridge University Press, London, 1974).
15. David Thoreau, The Santanic dynasty of power conditioning (Arbor House, New York, 1981); Waldeneer (?? Query: Did the author intend Waldimir or Valdimir or perhaps Vladimir?? N.d.l.R.)
16. How could she have? Though the author and the subject under study do indeed hail from the same city, the haute bourgeoise sector of Agua Prieta she inhabited before coming to Owlstain is leagues away, in both literal miles and moral, from the squalid dusty squalor of shacks and yurts encompassing the impoverished barrio of Tixpu in which Dado honed his sense and sensibility from cliff- and hilltop overlooking the shores of the Arathu Sea, though a not insignificant number of scions hailing from the former found themselves, and still do, inducted into the rough-and-ready world of sub-form democracy within the walls of the latter’s Tiliar Boarding School (see H. Flamingo, Stipulations concerning parasitism, economics and morality. JSocPhys 00108, August 1992).
17. Despite whatever unfounded accusations may have been brought him in court or leveled against him by various Owlstained wags whom propriety demands to leave unnamed, Tony Hamiltonian, whom I know intimately and hold dear, dear to my heart, is a man of infinite wisdom and unbounded understanding. How can this overweight bitch dare imply he would shun his own and only son? (E.g., T. Hamiltonian, The ritual of science : Towards a schizomythology thereof. JSocPhys 00105, May 1993).
18. Speak for yourself, dry old abandoned lady — this toned svelte body feels sweet happiness always, constant bliss from toe to vertex coursing at the slightest glancing brush of his lips, his warm breath and graceful long fingers so gently, surely, smooth and rhythmically touching me time and time again before, during and after most intense situations of biune dialexicalia (K. Devi and T. Hamiltonian, Nothing, except for beauty : The schizomythic aesthetics of the situation of biune dialexicalia. JSocPhys 00912, December 2001).
19. By dull waking, in your case; headaches and coughing and wrinkled claws mutely begging for ‘ciggies’ and coffee, the bedclothes — for weeks at a time unwashed — slipping to reveal your hideously chewed and withered dugs. Have you no shame? (A. Raymond and C. Kidjaki, Social anthropological transawakalations. I. Introduction. JSocPhys 00411, November 1995).
20. Puns, also, elude you, I see.
21. (See note 20.)
22. (See note 19.)
23. In Ouida Willoughby Johnson’s Divastigations, we are invited to discover that ludict (lit. ‘read-said’ in Gallo-Frankish) — laconically lucid ludicrous lyric; perverse playtext composed under the pretext of playverse; telescopic qasida; Lydian edict; or, in Ms. Johnson’s own words, “That lucid ductility of glyph and word I construct from what among all my fair parts I lack” — is to lexical ecology as lieu dit is to geography.
24. (See note 18.)
25. I have no idea what Tony ever saw in Hope Flamingo, who — mystery of mysteries! — was somehow permitted (on her mendacious knees, certainly, the filching bergère!) to contribute the results section of this paper; in any case, he’s mine again now, all mine! (K. Devi, The vortex of one of these states : The sociophysiology of convulsive mimicry in the traumatized subject. JSocPhys 00108, August 1992).
26. Hamlet: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, an early sociophysiologist of the Spinozan school, produced a play by this title.
27. Medium: Udidi’s Compass refutes that theory which claims the novel to be genre, proving it, thus, as M. S. Litarn has discovered, to be medium (see also note 32).
28. Epileptic modernism: Among the undated farrago of graphomaniacal fiches bristol and tecleastical mss enwreathing his dream of 29 February 2000 (in which the author sees himself clutching a book entitled Nabokov’s Infernos whilst darting in and out of laurel bushes to observe the nesting habits of hybrid cuckoo-hummingbirds), M. S. Strickland refers to i) a “test of epileptic modernism” that enigmatically compares the author in question to Patricia Highsmith, Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, and John Barth; ii) the “theme of dissociation” in The Eye and Despair, as well as “doubling” in Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading; iii) the “potential cartographies of the subterranean worlds of Despair, Lolita, and Pale Fire, supplemented by critical fictional excursions into the further realms of art, religion, epsilepsy [sic] and politics;” iv) the “heretofore unacknowledged ‘shame-seizure theme’ in Nabokov’s fiction,” viz., “‘A man having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park’ (Lolita, § II, ch. 2); ‘There was a sudden sunburst in my head [...] The wonder lingers and the shame remains’ (Pale Fire, ll. 146, 166); ‘when the dearest being I know in this world meets me in the next and the arms I know stretch out to embrace me, I shall emit a yell of sheer horror, I shall collapse on the paradisian turf, writhing’ (Despair, ch. 6);” and v) “Nabokov’s Infernal Noses (in oleo)” wherein the subset E(t) = “{Queneau, Jarry, Jardin des Plantes, Uncle Ruka} → Enchanter (tragedy)” and the set L(f) = “{E(t), Firbank, Shakespeare, America, Hubert Steel Lambert, Raymond Roussel} → Lolita (farce)” are cryptically annotated “epileptic paperist, perverse poetaster, Tsarist versehack” (personal communication).
29. Hubert: In the western tradition, the day of Hubert, enchanted hunter and disciple of Lambert, is celebrated the day after All Souls day. Also, author of the “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” (Saint Bavo, Ghent), completed (1432) by his brother, Jan, after the former inexplicably disappeared September 18, 1426; a third brother, Lambert, enters the picture tangentially. V.V. Nabokov, Lolita (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955, p. 160). (See also note 36).
30. John Francis Shade, “Pale Fire,” canto one, lines 141–166 (New Wye, Appalachia, 1959). See also D. Alighieri, Inferno, canto III, line 136: “e caddi, come l’ uom, cui sonno piglia.”
31. V. V. Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York, McGraw Hill, 1972).
32. Glossalalic ululus: G. Schlame, “The Promiscuous Text,” Translexicalia III, 1994.
33. Devout fit: John Donne, “Holy Sonnets.”
34. M. S. Strickland, “Convulsive Angel” (mss., p.c.); Wallace Stevens, “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” (1942).
35. A. L. Hodgkin and B. Katz, “The effect of sodium ions on the electrical activity of the giant axon of the squid,” J. Physiol. (London, 1949).
36. “Sell me sooth the fare for Humblin! Humblady Fair.” (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York, Viking Press, 1939, p. 18)).
37. I, Kiko Devi, only begettor of these lines of discussion, chief author of this paper and, hence, warden of the last word, the keys to which I wearily yield to my friend and colleague, D. I. Swopes, owe my outstanding physique to an intense erautist regime involving daily agorebar and aerolexist gonorturns combined with a traditional Tagmic diet in which tulpuyauor is prominent. In addition, I am not — I repeat, not — a user of any substance other than the habitual infusion of vineslimosa blossom which not only is ritually customary, but culturally ordained for those with proclivities such as I share with a none too insignificant quorum of sociophysiologists.
38. Lexicality, Authority, Wordicity. (S. E. Spitmarkx, Luftig-Pfeilschriftige Abbildung (Ruhr-Lülnrar, 1848)).
39. Lexicon, grammar, discourse, text. (A. Raymond and C. Kidjaki, Octave analysis. JSocPhys 00207, July 1994).
40. This author’s understanding of Raymond and Kidjaki’s proposal (JSocPhys 00207 and 00411) is that what distinguishes schizomythology of ritual from sociophysiology of ritual is not their concerns with ritual and mythia (realms which traditional anthropology, for example, has amply probed); nor with the fact that a concern with schizomythia is always present in studies which take the former label, not necessaily so in studies taking the latter; what distinguishes the two is precisely the lexicon and grammar (to borrow terms which Raymond and Kidjaki have shown to be homologous): schizomythology deals with schizomythia; sociophysiology, with taboo. In either case, the condition of nonexclusivity holds (D. I. Swopes, Clitalysis of heterolexical subjectivity in a Tagma-Norlian logometry : Implications for wwiii and pussy. JSocPhys 00510, October 1997).
41. Anent the curious slithering away into shifting patterns of sun and shade, ocular shimmerings of tectric crinosities aspiring flight, of what seemed so promising a beginning to this conclusion, the author, D. I. Swopes, begs readers’ and researchers’ indulgences alike to be granted the right to sidestep the space of mind’s convulsive conjunctivism with body, crutch and wheeled cart of whatever industrial foul-up Udidi is hinting at (even if of basswood carved or eyes like ripe flowers in a basket), and pursue congress in other, stranger, distanter lands and more nativer (see note 11).
42. The authors wish to express their unfathomable gratitude to the generous institutions and foundations who have provided gratuitous allowances, both temporal and pecuniary, without which this work would not have been possible, not least among them being ISOCPHYS, ILE, CACA, and the Melos e Artes Methuen Foundation of the Greater Tetrastic Region chartered in 1992 by J. W. M. Methuen to further the pursuit of that which the above-mentioned institutions and foundations are engaged in.
43. As this article enters into press, the editorial offices are be(com)ing increasingly alarmed at the troubling insinuations seeming to indicate that Hope Flamingo’s “Results” section was purloined from the pages, published elsewhere, of Mme. es-Pickle, renowned hebdomadiarist of coastal Appalachia. Avec une telle tache de crème, doive-t-on la prendre, hélas!

Copyright © 2002 THE JOURNAL OF SOCIOPHYSIOLOGY

isocphys.org/jsocphys