J. H. Prynne

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william_kent

Well-known member
Benny Bunter said:
"to gut" also makes me think of an owl gutting its prey.
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also, another form of divination

from wikipedia entry on Haruspex
In the religion of ancient Rome, a haruspex was a person trained to practise a form of divination called haruspicy the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals
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see also Anthropomancy

Anthropomancy (from Greek anthropos (ἄνθρωπος, man) and manteia (μαντεία, divination)) is a method of divination by the entrails of dead or dying men or women through sacrifice. This practice was sometimes also called splanchnomancy. In ancient Etruria and Rome, the usual variety of divination from entrails was haruspicy (performed by a haruspex), in which the sacrifice was an animal.
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Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Lol

I think there is a danger of reading too much into these poems and going off down the wrong track, like yyaldrin was saying earlier, but I think we've all done some pretty good work here, and I applaud the tarot card collector for his contributions (especially that Chaucer thing, sounds very plausible)
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
it's not very dangerous though. in a way it's the only way to engage with them, given they are in fact, just a stream of random nouns.
 
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william_kent

Well-known member
I thought I knew what "flicker" means, but today I learnt the original Old English meaning: "Of a bird: To flutter; to hover. occasionally To flap the wings; to move by flapping the wings."


c1405 (c1385)
Aboue hir heed hir dowues flikerynge.
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G. Chaucer, Knight's Tale (Hengwrt MS.) (2003) l. 1104

beforehand I was associating the word with the title of one of my favourite novels, Theodore Roszak - Flicker, which is about a Gnostic secret society using the medium of film, specifically the interplay of light and darkness, to convey the battle between the Demiurge and the true bringer of light represented by the flicker of film in a projector

it also reminds me of the light produced by a candle

so in one word we have intermittent light and darkness, cinema, and flight....
 
mvuent

mvuent

Void Dweller
tried to consolidate a bunch of the observations made over the last few pages into a very rough "diction palette" of the poem...

Vision/illuminationBirdsWaterDivinationBabies/parenthoodAlchemy/assembly
Eyes Burning
Filmic attention
Head warm
See more
Lights burn
Candor (shine)
cryolite
Lucid (luminous)
Iodine (film)
Trim ("keep your lamps trimmed and burning")
Mounted in socket (eye)
Lucid plane
Flicker
Alembic clip (animation clip)
opt
partition
Plumet capture
filament (in electric bulb)
wield in front (binocular vision)
shadow
Dark
Night		Owlets
Plummet capture
Quick-quick
Brief plume staying
Flicker
inaugurate		surge
Wave
Hold fast
Gut
foreshore
Brim		inaugurate
Gut
Plume (smoke)
Now then (?)		Owlets
reaching (?)
Lovers both wrapped
Iodine
heart temper to gut
Cry
cartoon
alembic
assembly​
Temper (proportionate mixture)
slot marks
 
mvuent

mvuent

Void Dweller
yyaldrin said:
photosensitive-678x446-compressed.jpg
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with babies and really young children there is something fascinating about watching their eyes. this sense that their interior perception is just as rich as yours, but to them the sights flashing by are unknown/undefined/protean. stan brakhage's notion of the untutored eye. and it does seem like the poem invokes that together with a sense of parenthood, a sense of watching this perception-process sparking to life before you through some alchemic process. (iodine facilitating image-recording/feeding the child.) so yeah, as mentioned, a doubling of the child's eyes and the parents' eyes. and all that ties in with the more eerie mystical allusions to divination, and maybe to sex bringing the future into being or something. and that's not even getting to water or bird imagery... but at any rate the clues gathered so far make the poem more resonant than it seemed at first. thanks lads.
 
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william_kent

Well-known member
plummet / mounted

  1. 1742
    Like Birds, whose Beauties languish, half conceal'd, Till mounted on the Wing, their glossy Plumes Expanded shine.
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    E. Young, Complaint: Night the Second 37
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today I learnt that "mount" can mean "To fly upwards, to soar, to ascend"

plummet can mean to descend, but there is also the rarer use of "To determine the depth of with a plummet" ( I suppose the modern use would be a "plumb line", something I associate with nautical stuff )

up / down movement
but also "hold fast", trying to remain stasis amidst turbulence
 
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william_kent

Well-known member
okzharp said:
And OO is a sonic simulacrum for the owl's hoots.

I think this is something that frustrates me in a good way about his stuff. When I see it I want to listen to it. When I listen to it I want to see it. It feels like resists its own delivery system lol
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yeah, in that poem the similarity of plummet / plume is visual rather than sonic but I'm guessing it was deliberate
 
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