This book, by Viola Sachs, should be back in print. It would sell. I keep trying to find an o.p. copy.

The game of creation: The primeval unlettered language of Moby Dick, or, The whale. (Published in Paris in 1982.)

As my faithful true-blue blabbophiles know, I'm struggling to get out of a writing block. Hope I'm not jinxing myself by saying that mathematics might help.

I'm going back to an approach I used in the long poems, only in a somewhat different order of steps.

It's curious how math & geometry infiltrated my writing, since I was never big on it in school.

When you have a set of themes or images or ideas which seem to be hanging around, waiting to be picked up... when you want to synthesize some material... well, sometimes there are geometrical aids-to-composition.

There's a poetry in numbers, & vice versa.

Formal harmonic properties are found in the way different numerical quantities interact. Thus, if you're interested in "part is the sum of its whole" (or vice versa) phenomena, math can help. There are curious & fascinating symmetries involved, when small quantities are mirrored or analogous to quantities on different orders of scale.

So say you have a theme or some subject-matter you want to interweave with something else, which may not appear immediately relevant : you can find ways to echo & balance or contrast things, geometrically.

Add to this the symbolic qualities which are or can be invested in numbers, and you're really getting somewhere. Because you can apply both your own symbolic values to particular numbers, and you can draw on traditional or other applications : you can combine them. Soon your art work will start to resonate with its own obscure & secret interconnections.

& this is all in addition to the rhythmic aspect (metrics).

Painters & architects & musicians, of course, have been doing this for a long time.

Right now I'm messing around with the mysterious number which pervades Finnegans Wake : 1132.

So why am I getting back to this? It's not just that math & geometry can help a writer organize material. Numbers, shape & symmetry can lead you along. The blank space can help you find what you're looking for, even before you knew you were looking.

As I've mentioned before, Alastair Fowler wrote a series of books on this subject, as exemplified in Renaissance poetry.

... bringing me to the diagram with which I began the previous post.

What might a "neo-medieval" reading of Stubborn Grew/The Rose (Forth of July) involve?

ut pictura poiesis. Most of my long poems have paintings all through them. (My mother is an artist - I grew up with the smell of turpentine & canvases.)

Think of poetry as occupying a middle ground between painting and the unrepresentable (God's name, Simone Weil's "decreation"). Ekphrasis : in two directions at once.

Chinese characters/brush strokes.

Stubborn begins and ends with "J". (Bluejay : the bird, the man; Juliet, Jonah ["dove", sister-dove], Julie, July, Jubilee, Jerusalem...)

"J", the letter, comes from "i", iota, jot, yhod : the smallest letter of the Hebrew script, maybe going back to Egyptian/Phoenician pictograph for "hand" or "arm". In Hebrew, it's the 10th letter, the smallest letter (jot or tittle), a little dot or black wing-stroke or swirl. A J-swirl.

The whole poem can be understood as an ekphrasis-expansion from the letter J. (When I was beginning to write it, I was heavily influenced by a particular Melville study, titled Game of Creation, by Viola Sachs, which goes into the scriptorial letter-symbolism deeply encrypted into Moby Dick.) A Book of J.

This practice is maybe a new-old kind of neo-medieval classicism : in which the individual imagination is not stifled by dogma, but tempered by the necessary impossibility of representing the Invisible, the Unspeakable.

When I was in Minneapolis last weekend, I went to the Art Institute & saw a special exhibit of this new Illustrated Bible which is being produced by a team of calligraphers in Wales, under the sponsorship of St. John's Univ. (in Collegeville MN). It's a very unusual project combining computer imagery with medieval book-production techniques (calfskin parchment, handmade inks, goose quills...). The pages are huge & the illustrations are beautiful.

On the very first page of Genesis, there is a scribal mistake. It's the only one visible in the entire exhibit. A phrase about God's creation of the "sea-monsters of the deep" was left out; the scribes added it in an elegant parenthesis in the margin.

I jumped when I saw that - was reminded of Viola Sach's monograph on Moby Dick(Game of Creation) : in which she develops a model of the novel's composition based on a sort of gnostic-numerological design of cosmic error (the substance & manifestation of which is "the whale" itself). According to Sachs, Moby Dick, Melville's "counter-Bible", is a labyrinth of intentional mistakes & misplaced attributions about whales & other matters.

& speaking of prosody, if you want to know why Herman Melville was one of the greatest - or at least one of the most technically-adept and ingenious - writers in English of the 19th-century, take a look at Viola Sachs' book Game of Creation.  Despite its eccentricities, Sachs's book makes it pretty clear that Melville's prosody in Moby-Dick involved a level of organization which is nothing short of astounding.  We are talking about symbolic values of syllable-count, numerology, esoteric sound-meaning & etymology, which rival or outdo Joyce.  The book is an immense cipher, a deeply-coded array.  Here is a prosody not based on strictly rhythmic pattern/variation, which nevertheless encrypts layer upon layer of meanings.  Such a "prose" prosody could also find applications in "free" verse.

In Stubborn Grew et al. I occasionally mention something mysterious called the "path P", which came originally from an old Rhode Island document signed by the Narragansett sachem King Philip - "P his Mark", but in my business also referred to the "path Pushkin" (following the lost black cat) or "path Petersburg" or, in July, the "path Phoebe".

Curious to find in Sachs book that (according to Sachs anyway) letter "P" in Melville's private Moby Dick code symbolizes "Word", and in Greek "P" is the letter rho (ie. "Little Rhody")..

I read lately :

Game of Creation by Viola Sachs. Riveting study of Melville's ciphered language in Moby Dick. Puns, gematria, magic squares. . . the book is an eccentric combination of amazingly acute deciphering & intuitive thinking, with a pretty simplistic, reductive set of conclusions. Maybe faced with the labyrinth of Moby, one is tempted to resolve its meaning(s) too quickly. But I love this book. I would buy a copy, but it's very hard to find.

I've read it before. There's a lot of Melville in Stubborn Grew et al.