Editions MSS
Editions MSS
MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND
Goldbarg’s Variants
§ 16.
Like polymeric murderers who dislimn the social skein — like polygynous pillagers who derange the generational gamut — like polyploidal plunderers who disjoin the polycyclic round of polyphyletic groups spanning the entire Tetrastic region, so Goldbarg’s polydactyl descendants have put the polymathic field of polygenetic altarity — or at least everyone who works in it — into polymorphic disarray.

I wonder how many generations if ever or any of susurrous rings of suspicious bands it would take to become the conspiratorial space of susceptible murderers your meandering sursum corda will inspire to treat that innocuous polymorphism (which really so very few of Goldbarg’s “children” ever bear) as the ominous stigmata of the surrogate despoiler of maternity, the sinister symptom of the surreptitious plunderer of paternity.

Unthinkable victory for Goldbarg’s buried portents, alas! Unsuspected onslaught of the Tetrastic bard’s triune poetry wherein, like that lovely neral “snow” (aromatic white blossoms of lemon verbena) he describes — in one of those unthinkable (because charged with the daily social transgenerational praxis del corpo propio) amuse-bouche of turbinated prose, one of those seemingly slight literary victuals the pungent influence of whose very whorl and whirl from a form so ostensibly compact make even infinity swoon and yearn: swollen volutes voluptuously lay unsuspected siege to the mystified ramparts of the canon on I forget which page of O jardim quai viottoli si bifurcam — the high Tixputo llano newly overstrewn with in May, the cortical masque of myth both conceals and congeals, both distills and instills the pontolimbic asperities of schizomyth!

No merely imaginary stress seems to have besieged the purely imaginary victuals — a lone wry novella surrounded by a gaggle of urbane prose ditties — you seem to have plucked in Pyrrhic victory from Goldbarg’s prophetic garden of schizomythia — should we not call in your pert subordinate, Noruda Tibreteps, the newly vernal solo assistant editor (AE) of our SCAT? By the way, the prior débutante’s vernal yellow snorter of a printer’s boutade, if you recall, nearly knocked us from a weekly to a bi-ditto and of whom, à propos, you seemed as newly lovelorn as a lower sylvan Nolettia umbrosa (overshadowed aster) would be of a treetop sunbird gilding, like a snowy bridal gown’s vellón y real, a proud tenebrist’s murky landscape — what was her name? Something like Norlia, Nirusa?

I’m baffled by the singularly obscure manner Goldbarg discusses Mountain Fukari grammar as well as the suspiciously offhand way he introduces a rare species of curious psammophile into the scientific literature with: “Discordant variants chart an unexpected course through discordant patterns of phonotactic output allowing irregular proximal or distal word-roots to be discovered, analyzed, and understood (the principle of discordant altarity). For it is the case that if such variants did not display discord in their root structures, then the discordant course of grammar would provide no outlet, no expressive unity of sound and sense, in the living language. That is to say that, what I have called the ‘verbal volatility’ of such discordant variants of species-word concordances, will vary to such a degree, that a plurality of variants will come to occupy a single root class, as for instance the Fouqqari roots at, gat, gut, qat, and qit, all denoting discordant variants of larval instars of a hitherto undescribed species of antlion I herein designate Formicophagus maa after the Fouqqari word, maa, ‘firing-pin,’ my informants of said tribe employ to refer to the loud ‘Pop!’ certain well endowed instars of this sand-loving falciform-jawed Neuropteran produce when capturing prey, all fall into that root class Wainwright (1925) dubs ‘anomalous,’ while the discordant variants denoting the larval instars of a previously described antlion species (F. tlaatlata Strick., 1845), , it, qid, id, and idg, paradoxically inflect according to the word-form paradigm that same author has referred to as ‘human’!” (O. X. Goldbarg, Psammophilology, 1933, p. 76).

Goldbarg’s “incredible” way was simply to show that words that seem to have identical referents (antlion larvae) can have wildly variant grammatical outlets (human vs. non-human root-class structure), and that this “discordant principle of grammatical altarity,” as he also called it (pp. 86–87) and from which, methinks, prodigious Ouida derived her not at all unorthodox notion of a “discordant concord of things,” corresponds to a cultural norm: the grammatical variants of a language, rather than all too predictably going up in the phonotactic flames of fanciful myth or defunct paleologisms or quaint superfluous survivances, encode the marvelous social practices of daily life, specifically, in this instance, the production of antlion silk, and the weaving of shawls from that silk, by Mountain Fukari women.

That is precisely the extemporaneous elephant crashing through the prepared (in the piano sense) whalebone apparatus of Goldbarg’s lexical ecology avant la lettre! For as Ouida’s series of papers in JSocPhys shows, the distribution of words for “antlion” in Coast Fukari, Huerta-Fukari, and Mountain Fukari proper does not at all, contra Goldbarg’s opinion, match the distribution of antlion species in those speech communities’ respective regions, but instead, variants of both F. maa and F. tlaatlata occur throughout the Tetrastics, yet is is only among antlion silk–producing communities of Fukari in the Viridian Mountains that the extemporaneous whale of idiomatic opulence vis à vis doodlebugs — including, naturally, Goldbarg’s variants — insinuates itself into the prepared howdah of roots and root-classes strapped to the ecological back of the lexical elephant!

Goldbarg’s critical whale of a failure to cultivate in his Tixputo garden linearly viable silk strands fro any of the variants he had brought there from Iagip and Iaqip was due, no to “the multicursal contingencies of eclosion” (O jardim quai viottoli si bifurcam, p. 95, my translation), as he dismissively dispenses with the issue at hand, but rather to the critical elephant of lochastic ecology he had mistaken for dispensable and which had been staring him in the face (and I don’t just mean his nubile informants’ “coming into confirmation,” as Ouida would put it!) throughout the entire course of his fieldwork there, namely, the peculiarities of the food the prey his eponymous variants fed (and still do) upon!

Slick man works the slick might of himself into me. With my slick tongue in advance of whatever might follow, I lick the slick gratitude of it.

Whatever might be the external signs of gratitude the external man or woman shows — gasp, grimace, tongue rolled back or protruded, nostrils flared, pupils dilated, sweat glossing croup chine rump chest, tender earlobes charged with those overtones of arousal thrilling in harmony to groin nipple scalp, and so on —

Each convulsive playtoy of bliss confused with wrath at the confused middle crushing breasts against chest to accelerate rhythmic self against melodic other till the convulsive shock as if curare confused with light stuns both he and I lordotic.

Gluteal wrath de ton rare cul convulses the herky-jerky of playtoy pleasure, your globular breasts stiff with the exquisite poison of it like globular light accelerated from the gluteal pulse and spasm of my other, more primal body’s convulsive middle.

Master me with the wonderful wound of love. I love him. His wonderful brow opens, clear, sans toile ni voile or whatever it is that could bandage over this wonderful —

Her orphic forehead masks her from me, as if, to master love, she would swaddle it, an orphanal sore.

Duty, no matter how golden, plucks tenderness from love. No son should be his father’s puny blond slave.

Yet both father and son pluck from their steady bland love’s puny duty to each other, a shaky reverence for firm fondness.

Reader, I too find it slower going than I’d like at times to catch the drift of slow words — speech? thought? abstract intellectual jousting? the pure calando fugue of écriture? — we trade, con amore a poco, he and I, Skid and Mona, decrescendo, ritardando a capriccio. Je le(s) trouve si traînard(s)!

Toi, tu t’y trouves itou! Warm words, reader, warm words.

That the redundant pucker and hug (vid. S. E. Spitmarkx’s system of “Wellen und Wellen und Wellen miteinander verbunden und gebrodelt [waves and rillets and fardels with each other interlinked and seething]” within one stanza) required to eke out a living rhyme so tautly with our callous maker’s or makar’s clawed pun called “love” — the squeeze, pinch, crush, astringent clutch of it, the clenched wisdom and rapacious jest of its adamant justice such that life’s delirious altarity and ever drunken path devolve, according to Velasto Prastier (loc. cit. NDR: n.b. the allusion to Larbaud or Baudrillard or Baudelaire), into the gauche frippery of some clenched form of importunate virtual virality that leaps out at the most inopportune moment (“pend à l’envers de la voie, le délire, l’écart d’être toujours ivre et part attifer à l’impair du quêteur qui surgit viralement: surprise!”) and — oh, squeeze me silly, pompous tongue!

Yes! The vicious rédacteur has stymied and stigmatized the infamous will and arrant power to live as a vile love’s base justice, reducing all to some shameful wisdom’s pearl of a shabby acrostic qui s’enfle là où the cyclic scandal of work intersects with the tumescent sin of sex!

Your mad neck you’ve snared again in the mad Fates’ noose! At least a cobra advertises its mad fright by lifting its head and spreading its hood. But you, d’abord, cavale au bocard vaseux de la folie venimeuse! And your mad chin wags its broad cavil. Bravo, cad, bravo!

The Fates fork their rhapsode’s pneuma into at least two contrary natures mixed and united in a single soul (think of Proust’s Palamède or R. Roussel’s Ludovic) capable of both ridiculing and exalting in the same breath, so to speak, such that, while “la vénération la plus sincère” chants a broad cavatina in Occitan, “le bavard coupable” spews out “la médisance la plus cruelle in some hard vocabulary such as Algonquin. It is the difference between, say, several notes in one syllable and several syllables in one note.

Or like how infinite grief tempers (as in mitigates) the finite power finite fasting tempers (as in anneals) our finite days with.

Arbitrary power of arbitrary fasting. Arbitrary grief for the day’s temper.

Enslaved by the rath clutches of his erstwhile fortune’s tyranny, did the past master fathom the untimely world of premature wealth?

In the old grip of old fortune, all the Old World’s old goods as painted by the Old Masters.

Ere I coerce drollery from a slack-hung cudgel of some hundred or so slack-hung works of obscure pantology, il est en train d’écrire ce redondant roman de mœurs he’s intent on illuminating our readers with in the form of ten or so slack-hung feuilletons hebdomadaires.

I prefer to couch mes actions littéraires in the fruitful prose herbacée — buoyant, verdant, sequacious, prehensile — of frivolous fiction rather than les mettre sous la matraque à corde récriée of herculean erudition.

Strip off the astrological shape that shrouds him and truth (le dieu Vrai) stands naked and other.

In that case, she (la déesse Vérité) takes on a long form.

Couched in boring meter, even that treasured strain of melody still lacks — something.

I’m still amused by it.

Opposite words, opposite speech.

Sad words, sad speech.

The round master molests each round hindrance.

The simple mates or else his simple hackles steal Eros’ emollient.

A recessive coup from Trober’s fistular portal scorpion. Recessive pain wracks the bones.

Girtablullu rbelagae Trober, 1893, is an important blow against certain important pests of field and forest. And though its fistular sting causes agony in the important bones of the human body, it is rarely fatal.

A state stripped of tyranny — would it still be a state? Freedom stripped of wisdom — that stealthy leap from stripped mountain flank to the stripped and stippled stave of the llano estacado — would it still be freedom?

No sé, si no leo,” quoth the wobbly wise one, secure on the wobbly cime of freedom’s tyranny, wobblingly outflanked by the wobbly plain of the wobbly state.

I fend, with my paranoid arm, him off, the paranoid master.

He will not be gainsaid, the legalistic master, nor the legalistic arm impugned.

I remember those wonderful parties on the wonderful lawns in the midst of wonderful goats of wonderful fate, the satyrs of necessity, so to speak, that might, at any and all moments, milk out of me, as it were, the wonderful hunger to midwife — the only word for it — this wonderful honor I felt just to be with you.

Stiff destiny on the stiff grass. Your honor, I’m hungry. The stiff goatish implied cogent stuff of all those stiff parties I’d rather forget.

Happy sage in his convulsive world. You reminded me of that happy duke in A Tara T. Dirty™ I saw — what was it called? Not even death could discompose him in his happy world in the — ATD Den!

Fiery spasms of fiery death fiery Duke Atta titillates his fiery world with. Fiery oracle of something, perhaps, but — wiseman? sage? I jeer and chortle at the mere suggestion of such.

Young loins young hands. Young tail young head. Young snakes young love.

Leash-blighting serpents love the leashed and blighted crotch of it, the blighted tail and leashed and blighted head and hands of blighted love.

Dare I pluck the thorny star of virtue, the trembling star of thorny virtue, from that thorny boon, that trilling trembling trivial — thing?

Virtue is absolute or relative depending on which good that theory claims as absolute, the absolute origins of that theory, of course, course back into and glean a relatively cosmognostical quiddity vis à vis the absolute stars which, of course, are nothing if not relative.

Au plus profond des hémisphères septentrionale ou australe, Hamlet’s grievous mill or Odin’s bathyculpous vortex or Io’s entangled eye of peripheral obscurity seems to flow, as it were, in a constant gyrating current of unfathomable wind blowing from the deepest mists of boreal space, tandis qu’aux régions plus méridionales, voire plus tropicales même, the apparent contrary natures of stellar motion at both axes can be observed dans les deux hémisphères at once, and there we find the dizzy churning of the cosmic snake, with the abysmal gods yawning at one pole, the recondite demons snoring at the other.

Such that à travers the virtual fog of the patulous phenomenal galactic mill of Venturi’s Pleroma, the virtual hemispheres splay their twain —

Brindled flame of the iridescent eye and checkered cheeks of the protean pilot of the Pole Star(s) churning within its or their spectral hub(s) above the cymophanous march of living reality (la déesse Réalité) —

Fulcral reality (le dieu Réel) of the fundamental flame of the elemental eye and critical jowls of the structural steersman des étoiles (circum)polaires underlying the intrinsic axe(s) of the vital marsh, the primal swamp, the basic bog of living punto.

Strict eyes beget the delusive nerve. From the strict foam of vision, phantasmagoric vapors proliferate in the mind.

But insanity is not just some nonsensical flux of phantasmata dreamed up by angry eyes, mad visions, damaged nerves of the deranged scum of the earth!

My father, Dr. A. G. Oman, will surely be able to shine the soothing light of solid day on the temperamentally and temporarily seething shadow of your usually so solid feet.

Temper me — tame me, you mean! Your rational feet (la déesse Rationalité) ! Your rational day (le démon Rationaliste)! Your rational father (le dieu Rationnel)!

Like some queer chorus of ancient tragedy, they form a strange circle round him, contracting weirdly from all sides to a single monstrous point.

Wide hands the wide circle points, to measure me, master me, arms wide.

Another western chance. The white one lights it.

I, the unshadowed one, light the unsentimental chance. Another unsentimental name for them.

The periodic dross of family just proves to me the truth of the old saw: A New Lexican carat is not worth its weight in Flouzianian florins, but — I forget the rest.

As matters stand, as facts fall out in the (un)alloyed household of truth — I’m guilty of a Flouzianian florin’s worth of guilt, I’m guilty of a New Lexican carat’s worth of guilt, I’m guilty of an Intrussyan babur’s worth of guilt!

Goldbarg posed the positive question of species identification only — which antlions did the Fukari identify, and from which could they draw spinnable silk. He described his variants, but did not explain them. What do you think?

I think the usual — let’s query Ouida.

The curious heart of the matter is that what others who’ve applied their curious good minds to the lexical ecology of the matter have missed, is that, it is not just that, as Ouida states in JSocPhys 16(7), “Mountain Fukari initiation follows a ritual path of instars that schizomythically mirrors a natural history of antlion transformation, such that instars of womaninity conjoin with instars of F. tlaatlata,” but that the terms for ditto also refer to curious variants of what we might call cunnilingual praxis or technique. In her latest research, for instance, informant F euphemistically states that qok means ‘eggs for sex,’ and informant J considers t’h’ok a cryptotextual reference to ‘conjunctivism’ (which, Ouida hastens to add, has nothing to do with conjunctivitis, but rather with astral conjunctions and the equinoxes). Likewise, informant AR reports that pwo’k refers to what he or she deems ‘ordinary reinsertion’ [NDR: of what?!], while TO glosses the same term as ‘tubular heat.’ Conversely, in informant M’s experience, both and g’a are most adequately rendered with a semantically complex Intrussyan word alternately pronounced mustig or muštig and conveying the combined senses of ‘racy, juicy, rich, face, poke, pilfer, blood, milk.’

The final gist of which Ouida’s hearty mind was getting at in her “Total draft of a final calling to accounts,” wherein her final hand tenderly responds to and ardently clamors for “divinity’s invocation to vaginal things.”

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Copyright © 2015 Michael Sean Strickland