TLex

"Esto libro," I heard a smoke-maculated male voice intone, "es," and exhale a beery haze of cigarillo fumes into my left elbow, "mi vida." I looked up from the Ficciones of Borges. The canary yellow hulk of the Aseli-Abenaseli ferry was rounding the jetty to enter the dull harbor of the Porto Vecho. Backgrounding my intrusive sinistral terrace mate's Mesopotamian nose, the aquamarine diamond of the Arathu glinted in late afternoon sunlight. "Esto," he repeated, dunking for emphasis his jet black Yazidian mustache into a dahlia head of Ebeyl, "libro es mi," he swallowed, "vida." "How do you mean?" I inquired politely. "I (but not, evidently, the germanic), Norlian exile. Vacation." "New Orleans?" (A city I'd never been to.) "No. Owlstain. New institution. I suck fizz." "Man, he's terse," I thought and, shivering with a slight frisson, almost bent back to my book.

But no matter how orphic, delphic or manic that discourse-ultimate trisyllabic he'd uttered, that enigmatic potential terminus of the subway of our public intercourse and, thus, nipping in the bud of this book, — yes, his provocatively deictic words begged for some sort of appropriate vocal response on my part, and so I, not being cruel, said, "I can see." And now you, too, dear reader, will see just what imaginary picture, framed by empirical fact, had shivered me so, and checked my impulse to retreat from the almost lunatic glint of those bice-flecked eyes of espresso into the labyrinthine sanctuary of Borges.

Frame: a conjunction of beer foam and maxillary crinosities. Picture: a possibly more fruitful conjunction between that thick top-lip brush of maleness (rhymed by a single brow) and my own more nether coils of womaninity.

I kept my head up, and angled my knees encouragingly.

Lee See (or was it See Law? I never could tell those twins apart) gracefully unloaded from her top-heavy, though artfully balanced, tray a tall glass of refreshing local brew, handed it to my table while onto that of my optimistic prospect she let flutter down from her slender fingers a wan leaf of haiku invoking date price time, and, bare breasts bobbing, turned to simultaneously bus my dextral table qui venait d'être libre and take an order from celle d'à côté where a trio of boisterous Huerta-Fukari had just seated themselves. The ferry, it was evident, had docked. We clinked and sipped. Yes, yes, possibly quite fruitful. . . .

It was summer. And sunset on the beach with wine did not make his syntax any more supple, but in bed, the picture pleased. (I have rarely been disappointed by older men.) "My language. You must learn. I recite. Poésie."

What follows should be a transcription of the most mellifluous harmony of vowels I had ever before heard in my life, the most dreamily impossible clustering of consonants which was pure music to my Norlian-ignorant ears, a most magnificent manipulation of syllable and tone, dentals, interdentals, labials, gutturals, pharyngeals, surds and sibilants, — but I could not then, of course, put sense to this marvelous welter of sound (more beauteous even than the Tlaatlaata croonings I'd been privy to on dark-moon nights in Iagip), for I had not then, of course, acquired either "the interdisciplinary outils demanded by the thriving field of sociophysiology," as Bernard's ISOCPHYS brochure deemed them, or the direct schizomythology of language, culture, history I was to imbibe straight from the source, beginning, of course, with this masterful man athwart the plum satin sheets of my four-poster, thence other exiled Norlians in person and, extemporaneously, on native soil proper, that is, Norlia herself, and so for the sake of verisimilitude, I'll save transcription, translation and elucidation of this magnificent poem (a cobla, actually, from the epic of Anim û Kali) for a more appropriate place in my Bildungsroman à clef.

In bright counterpoint to the decrescendo, then rubato, of this bed-bound foretaste of his delightful facility for oral performance, a warm swelling graced my thigh. "Bernard!" I gasped. "Do you. Think. We could," he nibbled my ear. "No se — sin oleo. . ." "Yes. I know. Without oil hat. . ." "No, no, you silly, I didn't mean that," and reached over his bearish chest to withdraw a small blue bottle of the orange-scented stuff from my bedside cupboard. We began to lube each other adequately to our purpose and perhaps here I should interpose the exact passage of what I'd been reading when this wonderful man approached me at Ecadence. It is not, I think, without import to all that will follow in the rest of this book and, without it, you would have absolutely no more understanding than I did of what this hirsute specimen of virility meant when he said, "Esto libro es mi vida."

Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar. El espejo inquietaba el fondo de un corredor en una quinta de la calle Gaona, en Ramos Mejía; la enciclopedia falazmente se llama The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (Nueva York, 1917) y es una reimpresión literal, pero también morosa, de la Encyclopaedia Britannica de 1902. El hecho se produjo hará unos cinco años. Bioy Casares había cenado conmigo esa noche y nos demoró una vasta polémica sobre la ejecución de una novela en primera persona, cuyo narrador omitiera o desfigurara los hechos y incurriera en diversas contradicciones, que permitieran a unos pocos lectores — a muy pocos lectores — la adivinación de una realidad atroz o banal.

From far off down the passageway, the mirror watched as, well-oiled, we worked the hinges free, completely removed the door from its frame, and entered the secret depths of a more private form of transport.

On the one hand, thus, airy words tend to inhabit a world of air, and, while buffeted by the semanticity of wordism, maintain equilibrium through the formedium of epic formalized orality (EPO); in the twiggy nest of the resultant ILE, one cerulean, ovoid work in particular gleams: the Odyssey of "Homer" (more on those quotes later). Flat words, on the other hand, would prefer nothing more than to crawl in the mud of a flat world, where the dull semanticity of paperism besmirches them, and the plot-driven formedium of roman traditionnel (RT) goads their misty slither-slather; Bleak House by Dickens may be considered to be the ophidian work of such a murky ILE. And now, from behind the crimson curtain of collaboration, a third hand comes into play! It is to a round world that round words are drawn, lured like so many pulsating shoals of glittering fish; and, buoyed as they are by the semanticity of senimality, and bathed in the formedium of serious novelistic encounter (SNE), I can direct your gaze to no more thrilling a work spawned by this nektic ILE, no more enthrallingly piscatory an exemplar than this one by — you guessed it! — ME.

Which is why, in addition to négligé and oil (the sheets were my own purchase, bought at discount in Calle Obrádav, Agua Prieta), I also borrowed a bit of, shall we say, style, from two of my more womanly colleagues at ISOCPHYS, Kiko Devi and Gennifleur Schlame. Although each is author of her own uniquely seminal contribution to the ISOCPHYS research program — Devi opposing her strikingly sociophysiological strut to Schlame's voluptuously translexicological moue (their respective obras have pleased critic and consumer alike throughout the Tetrastics) — I prefer to treat you to the languorous tang of their more furtive, though no less joint, foray into the heterolexical interstices of senimalistic rhapsody, "Be(com)ing: The resonance of character" (Translexicalia VI, 1995). Two paragraphs discussing works by the Parisian Tagma, proto-senimalist and much less conventional contemporary of Alfred Jarry, Karl Daubigny, should, I think, suffice to shed light on my own fancy technique — always confident, always on the mark — and thus clue you in to how, as Bernard and I crossed the threshold from ardor into bliss, their two characters became resonant in mine.

The epigeal impertinence of Karl Daubigny's Wrath on the throat of mandrake (1893, collection privée) descended from, but far transmigrated, its bisexual folio. The work of which Wrath is but a fractional, though no less pivotal, component, Daubigny's seminal collaboration with Jarry, The Ornithology of sperm, knitted emulsions by its champerty of Tagma, condensing the gens of mandrake and annelid; but the ligule gibbeted in Tagmaism immobilized a venatic tetany of humoresque intricacy. Daubigny, and, to a lesser degree, Jarry, in ego ipsis egestam, cultivated the proclitic proclivity of cursorial character [my emphasis]. A cerement, lawless, we chalk the ramtils of his convalescence in all sederunts of kudos, from atavism and chemotropism to linnets and the stumbling blocks of cuneiform. For each ecclesiastical sabbat — whether Molotov cocktail, cellophane or induction; galingale, sockeye or speck — previews aspersions of the beamy, sapphic Processional of be(com)ing.

At any mongrel, or crown of tint, an orifice (mauve sacrament) powers some studio or injunction. Certain changeable aspirations of this reek evocatively uncouth in diligent tint-mongrels and contest the enraptured arithmetic, or be(com)ing, of entropy. Into this be(com)ing impregnates the epicure and his turpitude, the stoats and lobworms ("strokes") against which the orifice retaliates. The retaliations to any pasty epicurean insemination are devolved by the argument at that pasty tint. Mousily, retaliations are ad hoc (homophobic) and transverse (rheumatic) and contend the be(com)ing of the sacrament. But rheumaticism is perhaps never compressible; and, under arbitrary confections of interconnection or repression or mediation, the retaliation to exposure behaves malignantly itinerant. This seductive or curvaceous resonance of character [my emphasis] in the lovely "tint-seed" contends the dharma or hobgoblin or excision of the sacrament — its be(com)ing. Daubigny chided Throat with the Processional of be(com)ing, a fatefully more winsome opus than the Excision of Tagma.

Perched wordism is the semanticity employed when airy words adapt to a flat world. Two disparate, though related, formedia are required to facilitate this adaptation: the formedium of epic poetry (EP) conducts to an ILE resulting in a work such as Dante's Commedia Divina; the formedium of epic (w)riting (ER), a work such as Bocaccio's Decameron. Airy words successfully adapting, on the other hand, to a round world, employ the semanticity of nested wordism; the two facilitory formedia are either epic interminable (EI), in which case the Mahabharata spills from the ILE, or epic iterative oral poetry (EIOP), in which Orlando Furioso obtains.

As for the mixed types of paperism, we have the following. A work such as Don Quixote represents an ILE in which, by the semanticity of kafkaist paperism and the formedium of roman allégorique (RA), flat words have successfully adapted to a world of air. Gargantua and Pantagruel, however, is a species of kafkaist paperism wherein flat words have opted for a formedic strategy of roman didactique (RD) in order to adapt to what otherwise would be an inhospitably airy world. Likewise, when flat words, seeking to abandon the comforts of their flat world for the exhiliration of a world of air, and become, thus, by force of the formedium of roman intellectuel (RI), a third species of kafkaist paperism, a bone fide rara avis raises not just its hands but its head: Nabokov's Pale Fire.

Which brings us to the heretofore and hitherto undescribed morphologies of erautist (descending, through the female line, from ειρος, 'wool' and ειρω, 'to say, speak, tell' (this latter having a maternal uncle, ερεω, 'to say; to ask, inquire, question), and, through the male line, from εραω, 'having to do with love' and (my personal favorite) εραω, 'to vomit, pour forth;' a second patriline also managed to insinuate itself when, ερευγομαι, 'to spit, spew out, disgorge, belch; to surge, break in foam; to bellow, roar,' the paternal uncle of ειρος, incestuously dandled his elder sister's daughter (by his brother ερεω or εραω), ερεβος, 'a place of nether darkness,' on his knee) paperism, which is the semanticity that obtains when flat words descend into the liquid world of round. Three formedia are possible — roman arborescent (RA), roman expérimental (RE) and roman interminable (RI) — encompassing ILEs that express, respectively, works such as Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake and Bouvard et Pécuchet (or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften).

Despite the bitriadic nature of the formedia (resulting in a total of six) employed by flat words adapting to worlds in which otherwise one would expect them to fall and flounder, to drown and deliquesce, it is actually the case that round words taking to wing (in air) or leg (in flat) have produced by far the most fertile solutions to the problem of lexical adaptation to world (LAW), and it is precisely my colleagues at ISOCPHYS to whom we owe gratitude for granting us varied and various proofs of such fertile solutions to LAW as touching upon mixed ILEs involving round words. For example, two species of hypersenimalism have been achieved by, on the one hand, McLaughlin, Methuen and Sagarch, and, on the other hand, the six founding faculty members of ISOCPHYS, Devi, Flamingo, Hamiltonian, de Queiros, Turbo and Vighdan. Each of these two species of hypersenimalism (we use semanticity, remember, as a generic term of discussion) have been achieved by successfully adapting round words to a world of air. The solution posited by McLaughlin et al. employs the formedium of serious ballistic inquiry (SBI), and the proof of their work at this ILE may be gleaned from Town City Plain (1993 to the present). Devi et al., conversely, employ serious tracheal (e)xperiment (STX) as a formedium conducting their round words in a world of air to the hypersenimalism of the Sestina trials (1992–1993), a scaly work that soars forth like a moanzy from its rarefied aerie of ILE.

Getting down to earth, however, Dado Udidi's absolute work, The Compass of that Sea (1989–1998), veritably commands its round words to walk march crawl run slip fall get up fall again across and through and in and atop the flat world of be(com)ing epileptic modernism. This spectacular achievement, combining a lucid economy of means with a lurid extravagance of expression, is brought about by the semanticity of hyposenimalism and the formedium of serious banausic (from βαναυσια, 'handicraft, the practice of 'mere' mechanical art') itinerary (SBI). Likewise, hyposenimalism may be combined with the formedium of serious toponymic divastigation (STD), as has been and is still being shown by Ouida Willoughby Johnson's serial publication, beginning in 1999, of Divastigations (in Agua Prieta, before the instigation of my encounter with Bernard, and owing, perhaps, to cognitive dissonance deriving from the ubiquity of Tagmaism, I had conflated divastigation with diaspora and divagation; once across the Arathu at ISOCPHYS, however, Georges Perec revealed to me, through the Traumgewebe of his Disparition, that divastigation is actually an 'avatar d'un noyau vital dont la divulgation s'affirmait tabou;' a designation which Ms. Johnson has been employing with great effect to explode the received denotations of the term such as I had been suffering from in Agua Prieta) in which round words prove, once again, the alacrity with which they adapt to, and thrive in, a flat world.

To help clarify our dicussion, I include a table (which I intend to submit with my article on "Mixed Constellations of Lexical Cladistics") summarizing all the possible islands of lexical ecology, below (and by the time you peruse this table, Translexicalia, the journal of the Institute of Lexical Ecology, may already have, one can always hope, accepted and, who knows?, even published my article!): Table 1.