abstract
Swope’s
ludict charts lexical operations unraveling being from body. In that pain does character reside. Author’s blade lifts fold from glistening fold, flake by sifting flake. In any direction no end and, here, Swopes cuts deftly — start’s as good as finish, wordslice lays bare the stuffing beneath the buttons that button as they read bleeding infinite twist of braid. Each zip unlocks further horrors or treasures depending on yo
u readers’, est
id, Swopes’s, aura presently. Despite any
word’s
lacuna, preterist or glebe, one reads always futurely. Rhyme is
ludict’s whetstone. Aura buckles aura infinitely, accelerates in accord with angle and angle’s precipitate speed. What Swopes sees is what Swopes is. Cracks in the
word harbor
lares, innumerable antlike deities of gaps and
poésie who scramble when they don’t frankly swarm, aligning tile to tile with
bucolic craft and stratagem. A soldier, a
Poldevian prince, perhaps, travels to
Upper Engush, on a journey financed by savings gleaned from meek
enlisted man’s pay, accrued over years spent battling
Medoi in vast sieges spanning
sub-Borainizy to
pro-Sarstium. S/he (re)arrives there on the
side on the
ides on the
eids. What is told is, as said,
bucolic: descriptions
glommed from various sources chivalric, picaresque, historic. Swopes’s
ludict charts from Tixpu where s/he’s born to — any start’s as good as finish, recall. Yo
u readers read presently. That is, Swopes buttons this
Poldevian prince’s voyage to his or her own
ludict, a smock one wears in
coal pits. [Card missing.] Did I, that is, d
id Swopes, not mention that being unfolds from body infinitely in all directions and in that pain does character reside? A half-truth made safe by skips and gaps in which author stops now and again to breathe.
Coal pits block
Tixpu in at north and east. Rest of city
sprawls across that vast abyss. Not in, as read, but far opposite that black emptiness [illegible] now puddly gray and weedy. At
Tixpu station you stand near the tracks and, without even boarding the train, travel as far as
Norlia in
Upper Engush with a turn of the page. Like
Tixpu, a border town. Forget what it’s called, anciently, in Idanistan. Between
Upper Engush and Hamiltonia hedged and hemmed.
0. Prolusion : From lucid ductility to divastigational laboratory
By charting the
cloven drainpipe of
Ouida Willoughby Johnson’s “lucid ductility of glyph and word I construct from what among all my fair parts I lack” that sluices the utterly lush “lucid flow of fact and fabulation” from the
lipid provenance of that libellu
loid, numinous author’s “flyscript body of allusion
molding form from form’s omission” into the orphic textwork (
OT) of her meticulously
planned epic virolai of sorts, her deceptively
plain-voiced, pernicious, and
panicle-prone Divastigations wherein (and from which the relevant citations have sprung) the s
nide corvine palpability of her “cynical tract of gushing lusts” cascades in a “focal point of maximal fiction” such that the
ondine, pelvic, rapacious thrust of “form [...] outspills function with a frivolous construct’s lack” leading the voluptuously wanton waterfall of the
ponce-driven palimpsest of the lur
oid luminosity of her “catoptromantic striving for things lost” to luridly splash and circulate back into the “laconically lucid ludicrous lyric” of the inci
pial cervine pond of my own
ludic tex
t, I propose that we — we da
ppled oneiric vanguard of the read and the said, we sociophysiological schizomythologists! — construct, in the
moduli interstices of our senimalistic field, no less, a less metaphorical and more concrete
moulin discursif, so to speak, a more
durchführbar Übung (feasible praxis) where the lexical
ludion immergé dans le f
luid nominative of the “perverse playtext composed under the pretext of playverse” (my words) can, well, more freely meld with, dissolve into, and explore whatever “strict constraint of form which through arbitrary picturing can bring lost things back to light,” allowing such “literarily utopian divastigational innovatively contrived textwork,” as I prefer to call it, to literally flourish in something like a
Laboratory Undertaking Divastigations of Insouciant Contorsions (or
Inosculant Convolutions)
of Textuality (or
Textwork) located on the grounds of some well a
pportioned ranch, for instance, possibly
provincial, pendent perhaps to some argil
loid municipality where the dead
pan, indocile, perverse scion of some s
olid, munificent, b
old manufacturer of nitrocellu
loid munitions,
barbu to boot, sirote un
porto, picore des pistaches, bécote le philtre éthéré, the so-called “va
por optimum stu
por potion” (
nirvanic, peopled with bdel
loid Numidian wraiths, arredato con a
pporti onirici) d’un narguilé (a luxurious practice,
Ouida lusciously reminds us, lustily engaged in and luculently recounted by a lugubrious
Poldevian prince during the illustrous coronation ceremony of
Babur, c. 1505; cf.
Divastigations § 251) et fulmine contre un geometr
oid luminary (
Acidalia ludibunda Prout, 1915) that keeps vivaciously caroming against the screened-in sang-fr
oid, luminous sanctuary of the echt buen
tipo porch of his pied-à-terre près du vieux port.
1. Interlude : Clitalysis of the avatars of ludict
As rediscovered by
Ouida [
1],
ludict
assumes the form of an
Ityalian lexeme (‘
word’) possessing an inherent senimalistic
gamaka (गमक) —
et je pense qu’il est très peu de mots qui, même lu, dit tant bien que mal ce qu’il veut dire than the very sense it itself so ably conveys (das was es heisst, meint, bedeutet sich), which is the whole manicarnic gamut [
2], gambit, game, gallimaufry, and gallimatia of semantic-pragmatic fluidity —
such that its earliest attested avatars in the
Ionis Astra, a court lyric ostensibly penned by the
Poldevian prince Patrolius in
On c. 1517 but containing moult distaff
scats traceable by our author (
OA) to the epic lucubrations as recounted to that diplomat by (a) lubricious courtesan(s) in the Lucullan
sara-pardeh of
Babur in Kabul c. 1505–1506 variously known to posterity as
Nirusa da Norlia and/or
Norlia di Nirusa,
while bearing the core tonal values of ‘lyric, song, chant’,
also express catoptroman(t)ic shades of ‘taboo’, ‘music’, ‘play(fulness)’, ‘(obscure) mirror’, ‘birth’, ‘liquidity’, and so on,
that is, giving rise to the happy accident that, in modern usage, various species of
ludic text(work) and
ludic textuality can readily be made to insenimalate themselves into it, the term being able to withstand functional strains of a dual nominative-adjectival nature to such an extent that
Ouida can both claim “to unsnap, unhitch, unzip, unbutton and unfurl my
ludict unpacking of lyrical glyph” [
3] and complain “Why do I find writing this
ludict so difficult?” [
4] —
which happy accident, so to speak, nonetheless, leads many a critical literalist in the field allusively astray along that via dolorosa of subdolous “etymology” which can nought but end most dolorously in
the dolose delusive pitfall wherein the elusive
ludict ludicrously presents as a mere duliostic “interlude” (!) in lexical ecology, a ludibrious septentrional sport illusively “deriving” from more disillusively meridional variants involving the whole humdrum collusion of
ludi-,
ludo-,
lus-,
ludere,
ludicrum,
ludus, etc., yawn.
In a ludibund scholium to the ludificational marginalia of her dulcifluous “Multivocal foundations of transformational
womaninity” [
5]
Ouida ludibly disabuses such delusional “ludologists,” laudibly rescues them from the discorporate illusions they’ve fallen foul of:
“Just as a tight skirt molds a woman’s form, linguistic construction highlights that construction’s bodily origin such that ritual actions and classifications brim with subconscious motivations as that tight skirt sways with a woman’s walk, and notions of purity and pollution cling to body as sopping patola silk to hip and thigh and ass.”
Which reminds me that a detached fraught fragment of
Ouida’s own impeccably dulcet
ludict reads,
“Mais par quoi qu’un mot faict d’un mot tu, vaut plus qu’un mot lu d’un mot dict?”.
Take that, Alcofribas!
Since our itinerant Appalachian colleague from Dirna via Gertrude, Owlstain, Lutèce, Barkeno,
Agua Prieta, Shatsbrook,
Chanabra, Minxburgh, and countless unnameable, unmanageable, unmentionable hierodules, hierophiliacs, hieromants, and hieronostics know where else,
M. S. Litarn, limns, in a guest editorial in this instar of our
Journal, fellow “derivations” [
6], I will seek secure refuge (
abri bien) from this dolorific dulciloquy, and indolently apply the appropriate lexicogenic dolorifuge ad partes dolentes (dolor capitis, dolor vagus, hallux dolorosus, dolor coxae, dolores praesagientes).
Ille dolet vere, qui sine teste dolet [
7].
2. Conclusion : Towards a Laboratory Undertaking Divastigations of Inosculant Convolutions of Textwork
On the grounds of Château Methuen, on the model of Glamporium’s
Playground of Taboo,
there is ample room [
8], and funds [
9], and precedence [
10], and motivation [
11], for us to establish
LUDICT, a Laboratory Undertaking Divastigations of Insouciant Contorsions of Textuality.
3. Postlude : Scholia, works, and whatnot
- As rediscovered by Ouida. — See Ouida Willoughby Johnson’s “Transcription, translation, annotation, usw. of Ionis Astra by Patrolius.” In Translexicalia VIII, IX, X, and XI, 1999–2002.
- Manicarnic gamut. — Vid. Ouida’s “Do not ask, How am I to act? but, What should I not do? : Towards a manicarnic paradigm of schizomythology,” in JSocPhys 00907, July 2001, as well as her “Atta’s Gift and Ishtar’s Hand : Comparison of cyclic parasitism by Oosdoli urvysc, a polar cnidosporidian protoctist, of human, avian, portalid, and gastropod hosts in Hamiltonia and Babylonia,” JSocPhys 00901, January 2002, and her “Total draft of a final calling to accounts” in this issue.
- “Ludict unpacking of lyrical glyph”. — Op. cit., VIII, Third Canto.
- “Why do I find writing this ludict so difficult?”. — Op. cit., X, Seventh Canto.
- “Multivocal foundations of transformational womaninity”. — JSocPhys 01104, April 2004.
- Fellow “derivations”. — M. S. Litarn, “On ludict.” JSocPhys 01703, March 2010.
- Ille dolet vere, qui sine teste dolet. — Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi. Moreover, “Oculum non curabis sine toto capite, / Nec caput sine toto corpore, / Nec totum corpus sine animo.”
- Room. — My own in the CACA wing of the Château, par exemple, to start with — “between Upper Engush and Hamiltonia hedged and hemmed” indeed!
- Funds. — Hello, Monsieur Methuen? Monsieur J. W. M. Methuen? (Wink, wink.) (For you readers not affiliated with our Institution, our City, our lovely Tetrastic Region, Our Resident Lectuers, our Globular Glebe, même, Johnson Willoughby M. Methuen, is the scion of the Messalina-Methuen shipping and steel dynasty [hence the allusion in my prolusion!], who facilitated,
not only the instauration of our Institution on his family’s quondam demesne,
not only the establishment of Glamporium in the defunct Methuen Ironworks in our City’s Vieux Port district,
but who continues his prolific participation in, and profligate expenditures anent, the vivacious social sciences scene on both sides of the Arathu Sea in the form of the publishing and cultural institution of Melos e Artes, all the while being a fellow inmate — mon voisin même! — inhabiting, when he’s not out hobnobbing and gallivanting and divastigating, but one small room in his own erstwhile maison de naissance — talk about “un richard qui s’habille humblement pour ne pas faire aiguiser la rancune des pauvres”!)
- Precedence. — I’m thinking, viz., of Our Founding Faculty’s first “Founders Colloquium: The Solvay Solution.” JSocPhys 00108, August 1992.
- Motivation. — Need I say more? Well, since mon homologue appalache déjà cité [12] aime citer à l’instar de moi des Gallofrankish allusions attributable to my own luditragical lectures pendant my (meaning his) Lutetian estancia, allow me to round out this note avec une citation semblable (i.e., his, meaning my): “Miser sur le ludique pour rompre le quotidien, c’est probablement jouer un jeu de dupes. On se masque ainsi la dureté du système d’équivalences. Pourtant, en des moments intenses de risque, de passion, de poésie, le quotidien se brise et quelque chose d’autre passe avec l’œuvre, acte ou parole ou objet” (H. Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, III, p. 95).
- Homologue appalache déjà cité. — M. S. Litarn, op. cit.
