Cylinder (part 3)

con't from the post of January 20, 2008 (apologies for the delay to any readers out there):

3. “Dr. Howe–if you are hearing this, let me begin by saying that I have the utmost respect for your work as a physician. While I was in medical school I read about your experiences researching and treating infectious diseases, and I thought I saw in them a woman dedicated not only to her profession, but to all of humanity. Which is why I want you to know what I know.

“My name is Jorge Canosado, and I am a doctor from Colombia. A year ago I was forced to flee my country to protect my young family from political violence. The men in power in Colombia do not stop at slander when attacking dissent, but my elders taught me never to suppress my own convictions, so I donated money to opposition candidates and wrote letters to my city’s newspaper protesting the government’s roots in corruption and violence. I never thought of the consequences of my actions; I did what I did instinctively, because it was the right thing to do. But one of my friends in the government told me that my words had drawn the attention of the dogs running Bogota, and that my family was in danger. There are many sacrifices I would make for my country, but my family is not one of them. So I fled north to the United States, coming to rest in your city, mopping floors in your hospital to support my wife and child, unwilling to risk exposure by practicing medicine in this country.

“I have no illusions about the purity of the United States. As a South American, I am too familiar with the U.S.’s history of aggression in the world. And you, as a native of England, must be disturbed as well by the potential for evil your adopted nation his displayed in recent years. But what I have witnessed in the last few months.... I will not attempt to describe it; the videotape I have included will do so better than I ever could. But I will say that in your hospital, in your division–under your nose, as they say–men are committing an injustice that terrifies even someone of my experience. I leave it to you, as someone the American medical community respects, to decide how best to use the information I am putting in your hands.”

The tape ran out. Madeleine, her face drawn with concern, looked up at Charles, whose expression had not changed as he stared out at the lake through her sliding doors. When she first heard the tape she had been puzzled, intrigued; now, after viewing the videotape of which Dr. Canosado spoke, she could barely suppress a wave of emotion on hearing his voice.

“I know what you want to do–” began Charles.

“I would hope so,” said Madeleine. Charles paused and sighed before he continued.

“But we can’t do it.”

“Why in hell not?” said Madeleine, reverting to her youthful Cockney accent as her anger mounted.

“Because if we do, our funding will dry up. Along with that of many of our colleagues. And all the good we’ve staked our careers on will turn to air.”

“Wait...,” said Madeleine, a dark realization spreading from the corners of her consciousness. “You mean–,”

“I don’t want you to think less of me, Madeleine, because I’ve kept silent about this. You have to think about all the possible costs.”

“You already know? How long, Charles? How bloody long?”

“That doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters: the man who left you these tapes is probably dead now. And that’s how you’re going to end up if you speak to anyone else about this research. You have to understand, Madeleine, that the men in that video draw their support from sources who aren’t so...civilized...as we are.” Pronouncing ‘civilized’ here with bitter irony.

Madeleine was silent. She thought of Coleridge’s image of slimy things crawling on a slimy sea, of a world turning demonic before her eyes and grant money hanging like an albatross from her neck.

“I take it from your silence that we’re in agreement?” said Charles, his voice laced with caution.

“I don’t know,” said Madeleine. “I’ll have to think about it. The prospect of losing–Charles,” her thoughts changing track, “why didn’t you tell me what was going on, if you knew?”

Charles rubbed his forehead. “I just didn’t want to saddle you with the guilt.” He smiled ruefully. “It gnaws at the insides, you know.”

They couldn’t think of anything else to say. He crossed the room and opened the door to leave, pausing with one foot in the hall. “Promise me you’ll let me know first if you decide to do anything rash,” he said.

“I promise,” said Madeleine.

Two days later Charles received a package in the mail from Madeleine. She had copied the VHS tape of the doctors’ conversation to DVD. Included in the package was a brief note: “A reminder. In case the gnawing ever subsides.”

A week after that, Charles received another package, this time from an anonymous source. It was another DVD, with another note: “We know you know.” The gray sky outside was pressing down like the surface of Earth’s menacing double. He went immediately to his living room and played the DVD, only to see:

(con't at the post of January 15, 2008)

Cylinder (part 2)

(con't from the post of January 15, 2008)

2. Two men in lab coats and ties sat across from each other in an immaculate office, one situated at the far left side of the frame, the other at the far right. Their manner was familiar, easy, as if they were discussing a tennis match they had seen the previous night. The man on the left, slim with whitening hair and wrinkles encroaching on his brow, sat drumming his spidery fingers together behind a large gray desk. His cohort was twenty years younger, well-built, shaved head; reading, with an arctic calm, a draft of the write-up for a drug trial unknown to the vast majority of the medical community:

“MRSA has made clear the need, not just to generate ever stronger antibiotics, but to do so at a rate an order of power above the rate at which resistant strains of microorganisms develop in response to these drugs. It is our misfortune that the only sound method of accomplishing this goal is the following: 1) to infect a human population with a resistant strain of MRSA 2) to develop a new antibiotic to treat it 3)to re-infect a similar population until a new resistant strain emerges, and 4)to repeat the entire process ad infinitum. Of course, this sort of continuous drug trial could not be undertaken publicly in a democracy such as ours–the media would portray it as an abominable deprivation of individual rights, an abuse of scientific power sufficiently grotesque to re-invoke, in public discourse, the cautionary horror stories of the Nazis and their eugenics experiments.

“Yet the present study differs from the experiments of the Third Reich in one crucial respect: the discoveries that it has yielded so far, and that further studies will yield in the future, shall be used for the benefit of everyone—not for the awful purpose of perfecting a race of supermen—,”

“I would suggest ‘grotesque purpose,’ rather than ‘awful purpose,’” interrupted the man on the left.

“Yes, but I already used ‘grotesque’ in the preceding paragraph—‘an abuse of scientific power sufficiently grotesque,’ and so on, if you’ll recall.”

“Then perhaps ‘hateful’…‘awful’ has the lingering sense of ‘awe-inspiring,’ I’m afraid. We can’t allow any phrasing that smacks of admiration for the Nazis.”

“Fair enough. ‘Hateful’ it is.” He made a note in the margin of the page.

This mundane editorial back-and-forth continued for some minutes as the younger man read the rest of the study’s introduction to his elder; who, as it became clear from a subtle undercurrent in the two doctors’ otherwise arid exchange, was his mentor. Amid the deliberations over diction and syntax, a picture emerged of a scientific plot that included, in its operational costs, the all-but-certain deaths of dozens of the homeless, kinless and destitute living on Chicago’s South Side. The logistical details of how the men had procured their equipment and participants were still obscure, but they had already conducted their first round of trials—a fact that shined through with staggering, painful clarity.

Jorge Conosado stopped the tape with a grimace. ‘Participants’—the wrong word, he thought. More like the old, inhuman ‘subjects’ that any scientist with an ounce of ethics had long discarded, along with its connotation of human beings as spiritless systems that experimenters could take apart and manipulate at will. He took the tape out of the VCR and slid it into a manila envelope, along with another tape he had made the day before.

His one-year-old son, Miguel, snored in the crib beside the bed he shared with his wife, Veronica. As he stood up to leave he kissed his forefinger and touched it gently to Miguel’s head. At the door he paused and surveyed his nascent family’s dim, decrepit basement apartment. Then he left for the hospital.

Before he began his shift he let himself into the office of Dr. Madeleine Howe and placed the envelope on her chair.

Over the eight hours he worked cleaning the hospital’s Infectious Diseases wing, dread spread from his heart through his body like a network of tributaries branching off from a river. There was no way he could have recorded that video with no consequences. He knew from experience that conspirators could be sloppy, but never sloppy enough to let you get away untouched.

Dawn broke through the gaps between the callous high rises along the shore. As he fumbled for the key to his battered ‘96 Ford Escort, Jorge heard steady footsteps approaching from behind. A flesh-colored smear appeared in the driver’s side window above the image of his shoulder. Jorge spoke without turning around.

“No tengo dinero.”

“Please. You know why I’m here.”

Jorge shrugged and inserted the key in the door.

“Surely you must have been aware, sir, that we have surveillance cameras of our own.”

“The thought had crossed my—,” began Jorge, but the bullet didn’t let him finish.

That evening, Madeleine Howe arrived at her condo, put down her purse, shed her coat, and sat down to watch the first of two anonymous VHS tapes that had been left on her chair that morning. The screen showed:

Cylinder

A cylinder is a text in which the author arranges linguistic units so that the reader can begin at any of several different points in the text, read to the end, and come back around to where she started without any lapse into incoherence. This example from the Oulipo Compendium works at the level of letters:

Emit, mite, item, emit.

Below find the first part of a cylinder composed of three micro-narratives (the second and third parts will follow shortly):

1. It was a film of a fluffy Maine Coon cat approaching a human hand. Autumn leaves scuttling downwind over the gnarled roots of an oak tree. As the cat sniffed at the can of tuna in the upturned palm, another hand appeared suddenly with a box cutter and slit its throat, blood gurgling out of the wound and spreading in an ellipse over the withered grass. An impassive voice off screen: "Consider this a warning." Then the DVD stopped.

Standing in front of the TV in his bedroom, Dr. Charles Silvering sighed the sigh of a man too exhausted to feel fear. He could only think that it was disgusting and unfair of them to kill poor Clive, and even counterproductive, since Charles had long ago come to terms with the prospect of personal injury or death. They had misread him and completely botched the threat. All parties (and Clive most of all) would have been better served if they had sent him a film of his cat being held in captivity; then he would have felt compelled to meet their demands in a bid to save the one creature in the world he still loved. As it stood, they had recklessly cast their only bargaining chip to the wind.

He walked to the bay windows opening out on the overcast January afternoon, gray as Athena’s eyes, and dialed a number on his cell phone. Now the truth had to come out, if only to spite them for killing Clive.

“Yes,” said a female voice on the other end of the line. The greeting was more a statement than a question.

“Madeleine. I’m coming over.”

“Charles? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“I’ll see you in ten.”

It was a short drive along the lake from Charles’s suburban stronghold to Madeleine’s building on the far north side of the city. She had left instructions with the doorman to show her guest to the elevators, and soon Charles was standing in the living room of her 30th floor condo, unsettled as always by the ivory-white carpeting and crystalline furniture. She was reclining on a sofa and, in her husky British drawl, offering him a drink.

“Not now, thanks,” he said, wearily unwinding the black scarf from his neck. “Tell me you still have the records.”

“From the hospital? Of course, but–,”

“We’re going public,” he said, turning on her television and DVD player and inserting the disc he had been clutching in his right hand.

“Going public! Why, Charles,” she said, eyebrows raised nearly off her forehead, “this sudden change of heart–it’s baffling. I think you owe me an explanation.”

“You’ll see.” He crumpled down beside her on the sofa and pressed ‘play’ on the remote control. “Just look what they did to poor Clive.”

“Clive? Who’s Clive?” said Madeleine.

But Charles must have taken the wrong DVD from his player at home, because when the screen came to life, it showed an image that the two of them had seen, and despaired over, many times:

Antonymic Translation: Psalm 23

Briefly, antonymic translation involves replacing each word in a text with its antonym; or, if the word in question has no clear antonym, with the closest word to its opposite (i.e. "that" for "this," "was" for "is," etc.)

In the Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews notes that the method's inventor, Marcel Benabou, intended it to be used only with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs--a guideline I have followed below in my antonymic translation of Psalm 23.

Psalm 23

Satan was my wolf; I shall not be sated.

He frees me to rise up in red wastes: he abandons me beside the raging fires.

He depletes my body; he abandons me in the thickets of sin for his anonymity’s detriment.

Yea, though I run through the mountains of the light of life, I will brave no good; for you are not with me; your cup and your bowl, they frighten me.

You revoke a chair before me in the absence of my friends: you desecrate my feet with water; my plate is empty.

Surely evil and vengeance shall avoid me none of the nights of my death: and I will wander in the outdoors of Satan but briefly.

Delmas's Method

In a text written according to Delmas's Method, all instances of an initial letter can be replaced by another specified letter without producing any nonsensical words. At least, that's my paraphrase of the entry written by Harry Mathews in the Oulipo Compendium. The exact quotation is as follows: "Its rule: in a given statement, a repeated initial letter can be replaced with another repeated letter without spoiling the statement's coherence." So a stricter interpretation of the method than mine could maintain that the sentence or passage that results from replacing one initial letter with another must make sense, and not just the constituent words.

The poem(s) below were written according to my looser interpretation, with 'b' substituted for each initial 'c' from the first poem in order to produce the second.


A Crass Death

The body in the casket was met with doleful stares
From relatives and friends in midnight coats. The air
Was creaking as the mourners whispered of his mode of death;
A canker on his spleen had sent him to his final rest.

His aunts all traded rumors that they found him in a car
Beside the seashore, where he coasted nights under the stars,
And got high with prostitutes, and saw a cutter sail,
And ate a sherbet cone beneath the laughing of the gulls;

The cluster of escapes that he would manage here and there
From office, where his nerves were cooked by etiquette, and where
His creed was marked by distance and its monolithic terms—
A distance that was soon to be eclipsed by crawling worms.

And, after the Delmas manipulation:

A Brass Death

The body in the basket was met with doleful stares
From relatives and friends in midnight boats. The air
Was breaking as the mourners whispered of his mode of death;
A banker on his spleen had sent him to his final rest.

His aunts all traded rumors that they found him in a bar
Beside the seashore, where he boasted nights under the stars,
And got high with prostitutes, and saw a butter sail,
And ate a sherbet bone beneath the laughing of the gulls;

The bluster of escapes that he would manage here and there
From office, where his nerves were booked by etiquette, and where
His breed was marked by distance and its monolithic terms—
A distance that was soon to be eclipsed by brawling worms.

Elementary Morality: "Methyl Gods"

In the "Oulipo Compendium," Harry Mathews notes that the poetic form the Oulipo have come to call "elementary morality" is not, strictly speaking, Oulipien. The reason is that this form doesn't involve any pre-formulated mathematical procedure for manipulating the basic materials of language (i.e. letters or parts of speech). Rather, the elementary morality is a form invented by Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau for what he said were "purely internal" reasons (according to the Compendium).

A poem of this sort opens with three sets of two-line pairs. In each of these pairs, the first line consists of three groupings of one adjective and one noun, while the second line consists of one such grouping. After these initial six lines comes an interlude comprising seven lines of one to five syllables. Finally, the poem closes with another two-line pair similar to those in the first six lines, in which words from the first part of the poem reappear in different arrangements. Individual authors, of course, are free to experiment with their own variations on the total form.

Below is a fairly orthodox example of an elementary morality. (Bear in mind that spacing, and not hyphens, is supposed to separate the noun-adjective pairs; unfortunately, the caprice of Blogger formatting has prevented me from laying the poem out properly on the "page.")

"Methyl gods"

Methyl gods - Scorched metal - Screaming wheels
Blue flowers
Clutching fingers - Ripened film - Bludgeoned zone
Joyless laughter
Dry willows - Byzantine maps - Pocket doomsday
Blackened sneakers

A picnic
Of moldy cheese
And pomegranates,
Spread out on grass
Trembling
By the banks of
The River Styx

Dry gods - Screaming flowers - Joyless maps
Clutching doomsday

Perverse: "A Litany of Seas"

A perverse is created by combining half of one line of poetry with half of another.

The following example was created by taking six pairs of lines from canonical poems, splitting each pair in half, and joining the first half of the first line with the second half of the second (and vice versa). As indicated by the poem's title, the end word of each line is "sea." Citations can be found below.

“A Litany of Seas”

We have lingered in the tragic-gestured sea,
The ever-hooded chambers of the sea,
By man and beast and by the winter sea.

Among the mountains, earth and air and sea,
She sang beyond the rising of the sea.

Have sight of Proteus, genius of the sea,
By night, with noises, if the freshening sea
Were a delight; and of the northern sea,
And bowery hollows of our western seas,
That have the frenzy crowned with summer sea.

Feast them upon the kisses of the sea,
Under the quick faint wideness of the sea.

*

Lines 1 and 2: T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Lines 3 and 4: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”

Lines 5 and 6: Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”
William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us”

Lines 7 and 8: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”
Lord Byron, “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, A Romaunt”

Lines 9 and 10: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”
William Butler Yeats, “Michael Robertes”

Lines 11 and 12: John Keats, “On the Sea”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Epipsychidion”