[Newspoetry] Python speaking

[Donald L Emerick]

The authorship of the piece I forwarded as "Python Speaking" may be other
than that which the cold type of my source quite ostensibly attributed to
John Cleese.  I owe this insight to a possible authorship dispute to David
Moses Fruchter, who kindly points to the claim by Andrew Marlatt at
http://www.satirewire.com/news/jan02/axis.shtml.  Absent a sure
jurisdictional decree, to decide which facts are to be treated as
authoritative because better authenticated, in the ears of whoever has power
to decide such questions.  My preference is that sound types of things,
including music and texts, should be authenticated in the ears, even when
they are unsound alarming decibels (microbels? millibels? kilobels?
megabels? yes, yes, belabor the point, oh fellow tachyonbels, tacobels and
nachobels, and hellsbels (hezebolans in eastern Mediterrorania?) can not be
naturally heard).  Apologies, then, are surely due someone, if someone has
been offended by conduct that has proven to be unreasonable, in restrospect,
when it could not have been known in prospect -- surely a denial of any
intentionality to a harm is almost as good as never having caused any harm,
at all, except for the person(s) of the harmed, eh what?  This is the kind
of exculpatory self-defense that excuses, when taken a hair farther (to
scalp someone), collateral damage of innocent by-standers.  As if
self-defense were ever excuse for harming innocent others.  Indeed, as
innocence is not something that man can see, very easily, that is why he is
always forced to presume the innocence of others, even in the face of
damning allegations by the state prosecutors to the contrary.  This standard
for facts, I keep complaining, has often been ignored in recent days by this
government, in finding ever new foes to fight, both domestic and foreign, to
keep the country from thinking about critical other parts of the same oath
that are not being fulfilled: such as preserving, protecting, defending the
Constitution of the United States: a small matter of elision and ellipsis.
By dropping the object of the verbs (preserve, protect, and defend), the
President and his criminal gang ignore the law, flout the law, scoff at and
deride the law, overturn and violate the law, to be an outlaw in the name of
the law, a thug, a vigilante running a posse, a man in holy white sheet
running a lynch mob, to become a terrorist-in-law.  And, please note, I am
not mis-calling the President and his criminal gang by mis-names.  I am
properly calling the person according to the proper names of the improper
deeds that he does.  I am merely saying those names, as they fit the cases.
This took me a long time, to learn to distinguish between naming and
name-calling.  To accuse another of name-calling is to allege that the
person has mis-applied the name in question, so far as the object of that
naming is concerned.  An unresolved issue of name-calling, then, is simply a
matter of question begging, if the person who accuses you of name-calling
refuses to proceed to the evidence that warrants, or not, the names that
have been called.  For example, I would be a piratical plagiarist if I took
from others their peculiar sounds (even of farting, belching, breathing
(heavily)), without some attribution, when it is an (ordinary) courtesy to
cite such sources. And, inadvertent violations, as I allege mine to be,
would be plagiarism in the second degree, perhaps, if we must grade the
offenses by some categorical scheme of gross and rank measurements (the
so-called eye-ball theory of measurement, the short hand of which plays
tunes for an optical illusion, in making transcriptions from the panopticon
to the pandemic pandemonia (intuit a demonstration: put demon-strata into
it)).  Well, how much of what I have just freshly typed, here into this
e-mail, is (relatively) free of (prior) claims by others?  That's a deep
problem, indeed.  Let's face it.  I read or have read thousands (alas, never
millions!) of books, and countless other texts have my eyes seen, or my ears
heard (indeed, all the conversations in my head, to which I now and then
recur, listening to their oddly recurring refrains (for they all must have
potential to be repeated, even though many never may be)).  I might claim
anything is merely a sound I have heard before, or an imitation of those
sounds -- and I might try to repeat no sound, improperly.  I would not
mispronounce any sounds, no matter how imperfect my ears or tongue.  (It is
not clear whether it is my tongue or my ears that arrest my speech, stick up
the roof of my mouth, rob me or you of our thoughts, but I dwell in the oral
cavity, though I am not a tonsil or any other ogre of the cave (See, Hear,
Smell Cavell?  Touch him, tickle him, taste him, too; satisfy your senses as
I do).)  So, I always have to ask myself, when I write, how much have I
stolen (not how much have I taken), as if my theft could be only be known
when I display what I have taken.  I tried to say, after a section of
Wittgenstein on inner voices, on the sotto voce, the inward sayings, the
subvocalizations, how nearly impossible it is to listen to the words out of
one's mouth (cf, Philosophical Investigations, courtesy of an observation on
Endgames (by Cavell) by Beckett, among others.)  Indeed, how does one know
where a quote came from, even if, as I did above, one cites an ostensible
source, who lays seeming claim, by speaking, writing as he does?  It rather
presents the opposing end of the problem, this SourceGame.  Elsewhere, W
says, "Language is a labyrinth of paths", but his remark immediately
qualifies its sense of paths, to indicate that the paths are directed ones
(like vectors), for W then says that following the road from the wrong end
leads almost no where definitively.  And, then, shortly later, he says
"man's common behavior is a system of references by which we interpret an
unknown language."  And, then, he says, much later, "it will have been
necessary for me to take notice of myself, as others do," (a generous
presumption; reducible, perhaps, to the form, 'as if others were to take
notice'), "to listen to myself talking, and to be able to draw conclusions
from I say!  [But?,] My own relation to my words is [always already?] wholly
different [in how it appears to me] from other people's. ... If I listened
to the words of my mouth, I might say that someone else was speaking out of
my mouth!"  C says that W may have been skeptical of the very idea of
(self-)listening, which fits (of course) with C's bias for speaking and
making sounds (Must we mean what we say?  Indeed, in quasi-response, Derrida
disputingly seems to be saying, 'Must we mean what we hear?'  (See
Otobiographies pieces, for instance -- even to the level of a
circumfessional conspiracy.))  Both seem to agree, 'language is always
public', when it lies within an ear-shot of being heard, though the former
favor oral vibrations, the gestures of tongue, and its substitutional many
fingered gestures of handy writing.  (As pronouns are to nouns, so would
writing be to speech, said some, but said Derrida, of this, derisively,
decisively.)  I shall not have finished talking about this even after I
stop, as I must do now.  One must not mistake the physical end for one of
logic: physical things have ends, but logical things never end, they
continue on, forever, in much the same fashion as they now appear to pass
before your eyes...  (See Glas, last pages, how it goes on and on without
going on and on.)

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

(I would have liked to have run this all into one long sentence, but (even)
I am not that good at punctuation: I should have had to invent, use, and
teach many more punctuating symbols.  I did what I could to run as fast on
my fingers as I could, through these unyellowing pages, as thoughts sprang
at me, like wild beasts in jungles, like strangers in a strange land I was
invading, perhaps as strange as the people of Baghdad, who might be friend
or foe, or friend and foe, or significant unknowns, to be respected or
feared, and so on.  Alas, even I can not out-type my thinking, or even type
it, type it out.)

((Why write madly like this when there is no chance anyone will ever decide
to work hard enough to learn to listen to it?))

(((If I were to encounter a text, especially this one, I would do to it what
I (would) do to all texts, to all sounds.  I parse it, reduce it, chunk it
down: one can eat the whole hog, a byte at a time, if the bytes fit a
receiving orifice.  (And, let's not even dwell on the other end, of its
problematic subterranean passageways, siphons of usefulness, gateways of
waste.)  And, sometimes, of course, receptacles can be enlarged, or
stretched a bit, to admit, with(out) choking, an absurd bite.)))