Poems backwards reading

This shouldn't work, and I keep expecting to hear ghostly phrases about Paul McCartney being dead, but I've discovered that some poems can be read backwards.

This happened one night when I was reading before bed, barely able to keep my eyes open, and sleepily started at the bottom of a page and worked my way up to the top of the poem. Maybe because I knew the poem well, its intrinsic sense remained. How could that be? Isn't language dependent on order? Not perhaps. Latin roots our language of dependent on order not (Yoda notwithstanding).

The above may be one of the oddest sentences I have ever written.

Nevertheless! With some poems, such as Tennyson's The Eagle, which seem to rely on an accumulation and sequence of events, it doesn't quite work:

Like a thunderbolt he falls.
He watches from his mountain walls
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
Close to the sun in lonely lands.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands.

But with Yeats's shivery The Second Coming, something strange and awful remains:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
The darkness drops again;
all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while
but
a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The best lack all conviction,
everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Turning and turning in the widening gyre

It's a rough copy-and-paste job, but how is it that any sense of the emotive strength and imagery remain? Because I think they do. I'd be outraged if someone suggested reading in reverse something I've written, and this is utter bowdlerization of these fine pieces of art, but I offer them up, vivisection-like, from which to learn.

To learn what, I do not know. But I can't explain why this works so well.

Boat dreams

Schoolkids dream of summer; the boat dreams of water. Inside the child sleeps the man; inside the wick sleeps the fire. Inside the marble sleeps David; inside the cloud sleeps lightning. Does the acorn dream of the oak it will be or the oak it was? Does the wood dream of the boat it will be or the tree it was? Do the words dream of the story?

Warm thoughts after a cold day of boatbuilding, followed by splitting firewood (fun), a roaring fire (delight) and tasty new beer (coziness triumphant!).

The in-between

The idea of liminal or in-between spaces has been discussed in anthropology for a hundred years. The basic idea, first outlined by Arnold van Gennep and then expanded by Victor Turner, is that rituals tend to go through three stages: a “before,” and in-between, and an “after.”

This originally described rites of passage such as the transition from child to adult, but what excites me is the idea of applying liminality to other things: locations, people, states of awareness. (This is triggered by the interesting discussion on D. M. Cornish’s blog.)

I should point out that although once I was an aspiring academic, I have long since come to my senses. So it may be that there exists a whole body (or “corpus”) of work (or “text”) that studies this phenomenon (or text. That’s right, you use texts to study texts. How glad I am to have escaped that Ouroborean madness.) Point is, this may not be an original idea.

A liminal space or moment exists in between two normal places, or normal periods. These liminal spaces are places of danger, ambiguity, potential, uncertainty. The normal rules that govern everyday behavior and our expectations ... have shifted. The world pauses, power crackles in the wings.

Look at a passage from Tennyson’s Ulysses, one of my favorites. We’ve just spent several stanzas reading about the narrator’s quiet and boring home life, the looming threat of old age and weakness, and the wildness of the world outside his door. A thought tickles his mind: “Some work of noble note may yet be done...” And then the poem pauses from the narrative.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices.

Something is about to happen.

In the next line we learn that he’s decided to leave the comforts of home and return to the wild. He’s leaving, and that liminal moment is when he made the decision. The in-between moment when anything is possible.

A frontier on the edge of an empire is a liminal place. Beyond here be monsters. Something that looks mostly like a person but which is not quite human: liminal.

It is the moment of freefall as an acrobat goes from one trapeze to another. Tidal pools between ocean and rock. The quiet whispered exhalation just before a thunderstorm.

When I stand in the bookstore and get pulled into a book and lose all sense of time and place and who I am ... and then straighten up, rub my eyes, and look at the shelves of books and the world I knew and they seem completely foreign: that “book madness” as I pause between the book and returning to my own world, is liminal.

Like almost everything, this can go too far. My pencil is dull, so it’s in a liminal state between sharp and unused. My liminal sandwich is half-eaten, hovering between existence and non-existence. Come on.

But the idea that these in-between moments (or places, or people, or anything potentially) have special significance, special power, fascinates me.