ARDENT PARTICLES #9
-
Ted Pearson (U.S.A.)
An
immensity. This fictive sea.
Which we call language. Talk
about that. “All hands lost,”
sang
the Sirens. A prophecy of
doom to come before the hero
returns to his island, which
occasions
further slaughter.
The upshot was that it never
happened, except in the words
of
the poet, who sang
for his supper of gods and
heroes and settings to dazzle
the
assembled guests. This, then,
is the immensity of language, vast
and wild as the wine-dark
sea.
The
old Surrealist had a theory regarding Homer’s epics. Each epic has twenty-four
cantos, and the Greek alphabet has twenty-four letters. The theory was that the
keyword in each canto began with the corresponding letter of the alphabet, in
order from Alpha to Omega. This, of course, provoked a search for the keywords
and much debate over which words were key. That being said, he also opined that
the Kabbalists were proto-Surrealists and their texts were models for
Surrealist research. In the
final canto, after twenty years, the hero returns to reclaim his throne and
rescue his queen from her suitors.