T D Carroll

This post has been in formation, along with two or three others, for several months as I've gradually reintegrated office time into my schedule. I can't recall the origins of this post, but I'd been thinking about past fieldwork projects and ways to write about them. And for some reason, the Baltimore project — conducted in 1994-95 in that city — came immediately to mind. I think that the connection was between my work in port communities and the experience of displacement and marginalization, which had been rising there as elsewhere, discussed these days under the category of houseless, but the condition can take other forms. While I don't equate the displaced with the unhoused (the former produces a psychic condition, the latter a material one), this problem got me thinking. And it got me thinking especially about someone named Girlie Hoffman, whom I met while doing fieldwork in East Baltimore, in the port communities strung along the harbor. I'll return to her in a moment.

Meanwhile, I was reading A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers, a book of interviews, conducted by Kyle Schlesinger, focusing on artisanal letterpress printing and associated crafts (such as letter carving); reading this book out of a personal interest in the relationship between setting type and establishing the appropriate verse form for a given poem; crafting the poetic line. (A number of these printers are also poets; shades of Charles Olson!) The book is co-published by Cuneiform Press and Ugly Duckling Presse.

As Johanna Drucker expounded in her contribution to Threads Talks Series, a collection of talks on book arts (co-published by Cuneiform Press and Granary Books):

What would a descriptive language of the techniques of production add to our understanding of poiesis? How would an understanding of the technical and formal conventions of the graphic means of production in which we experience written poetry shape our understanding of what a poem is and can be? Do the expressive limitations and/or affordances of various graphic means inform the aesthetic qualities of a work through features of its actual production?

This very interesting subject of the relation of setting type (or other graphic technologies) to writing and its effect on the experience of reading poetry may inform the basis of a subsequent post, but for now, I want to mention that one of the interviewees in that book on printers, an Australian poet (and printer) named Alan Loney, spoke of a book called Carving the Elements, with essays by the artisans involved in that bookmaking project. That book was a new edition of Parmenides' writings, the ancient Greek philosopher who formed the subject of one of Plato's dialogues, and who was Zeno's teacher. Readers may know that Zeno was famous — or infamous — for his paradox regarding movement, and especially for my purposes here, his paradox regarding place. Zeno's paradoxes, four in number, were likely efforts on Zeno's part to disrupt the hegemony of common knowledge as it was constituted at that time — common knowledge then as now the bane of philosophers (not to mention mathematicians and physicists).  Zeno's influence has been considerable, as André Laks and Glenn W. Most, editors of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Early Greek Philosophy, Western Greek Thinkers, explain:

…the influence of Zeno's arguments has been immense, if only by reason of the refutations that philosophers have been obliged to seek for them (beginning with Aristotle, in the exposition of his doctrine of the continuous n Books 4 and 6 of his Physics), but it is due less to the philosophical positions that he defended than to the logical challenges that his paradoxes posed. Modern theoreticians of mathematics and physics have continued to find these interesting.

So, what does Zeno have to do with Girlie Hoffman? As I mentioned, I met Girlie while doing fieldwork in East Baltimore, in the Canton neighborhood (her bar and home were located at 1517 S. Canton Street). At that time Girlie had become something of a cause célèbre locally for refusing to sell her property — house and bar/lunch counter — to an oil company who were developing a tank field in that neighborhood. Girlie's bar was right next to the water, and from that place, she (and her mother before her) had served generations of merchant seamen who came ashore for food and drink as the longshore crews worked their ships. The site of the tank farm had at that time become the de facto preserve of the oil company, which wanted to expand and absorb Girlie's property into their tank farm. She refused, even as her business dwindled due to the shift in activity at the port (containerization was advancing at that time, and with it the dramatic shrinkage of turnaround time for visiting ships, leaving sailors with virtually no time ashore). When I met her Girlie was still tending bar, still preparing the homemade soups that she (and her mother) had become famous for. I visited her several times, whenever I was in the immediate area, and wrote a bit about her in my fieldwork report. Here's a brief excerpt (Girlie's friend Henry Erdman was present during this interview):

Girlie Hoffman has refused for many years to move from the site, despite repeated efforts by the oil company to induce her to sell. (Her sister has also refused to sell out. Ms. Hoffman owns the lunch counter and the property it's situated on, as well as another property nearby, and some empty lots and land off the alley that runs behind the store. According to Mr. Erdman, Ms. Hoffman "has tied them [Exxon] up" by refusing to sell her land to the corporation...Girlie Hoffman says that the oil company "didn't give much money" for the properties they purchased from local owners. "And all that money they got," she said. "People think you gotta sell but you don't have to sell." Ms. Hoffman refused to leave because she "grew up right here," at the lunch counter; the family's living quarters were at the rear of the store. "It (the store] feels just like home," she says.

The keyword here is "home", proposed against the powerful corporation's efforts to evict Girlie; she continuing to resist. I'd note that this process of dislocation was widening in Baltimore at the time, especially in the traditional port communities, along with the development of the Inner Harbor (Harbor Place) project, designed to attract tourists and tourist dollars. This development process would be consequential for the people living in those neighborhoods. At one point in our conversation, Girlie Hoffman told me that, "people say this place is like home, it's comfortable. Don't you think so?" I could only agree. Others, not so lucky (or as obstinate) had begun to experience dislocation and displacement from their ancestral port-side neighborhoods. As one resident told me:

I remember the port as always being very busy…You had the feeling that you were really living in a working port…being in the Inner Harbor was something you'd do every day…So today, the Inner Harbor isn't part of the port…and the kinds of people you see are very different. Everybody was there in the old days, for better or worse. Today you see a much more middle-class group of people. And the old working people are gone.

Another resident expanded on this sense of dislocation, locating it in the public domain. She recalled driving along Pratt Street and seeing the ships tied up at docks there:

You could almost reach out and touch them. It was an amazing sight…Harbor Place is okay, but the big ships were impressive.

In short, my fieldwork in East Baltimore at that time, encouraged the view that the people in those neighborhoods were increasingly being distanced from place, from the sites and locales where they'd lived and worked, and where they continued to live, then in the grip of "developers".

I'll conclude for the moment by appropriating Zeno's concept to my purpose here. Hermann Fränkel, writing of Zeno in Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, notes that:

Of his [Parmenides'] immediate pupils there are two of whom we can form some notion, Melissus and Zeno of Elea. Zeno sought to prove the homogenous continuum postulated by Parmenides by presenting with much wit and ingenuity the difficulties that arise if one assumes, on the one hand, infinite divisibility, or on the other, elementary quanta which are incapable of further division. On the former assumption, Zeno's contemporary Anaxagoras built his original system, while the latter led to the atomic theory.

Is "place" an elementary quantum, or is it infinitely divisible? The historical experience of the people of East Baltimore may have embraced the quantum, but their more recent experience has been subsumed by the divisible. More later...

An addendum to the previous post: When composing it I had in mind a sort of poem I'd seen somewhere, but couldn't figure out where seen. At some point I thought to thumb through the first volume of the American Poetry series put out by the Library of America. That volume prints a selection of the earliest poetry written here by colonists and other interlocutors, including a poem of sorts by one Benjamin Harris, who according to David S. Shields, compiler and editor of that volume, had published The New England Primer (c. 1690), which, he notes, "became the standard textbook for New England children for generations". That belated discovery might have provided an opportunity to supply an image from Harris's Primer -- exposing yet another angle on the letter Q. But it's also enabled me to mention that while looking for what eventuated as the Harris poem I at first vaguely remembered a poem by Lorine Niedecker that Clayton Eshleman had published in Sulfur 41 (1997), composed in a format similar to the Harris primer (as I said, my memory was vague). The Neidecker piece wasn't as I remembered, not exactly anyway, but was instead a set of poemed calendar sheets which Niedecker sent to Louis Zukovsky at "Xmas 1934" [sic]. The calendar was later found among Zukovsky's papers by Jenny Penberthy (who reprints the calendar entire, in Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works). The Letter Q was not featured there, but I've plowed ahead and reproduced a page from the Niedecker sequence, scanned from my copy of Sulfur 41 -- sidetracking the Harris "poem", at least for now.

Here I want to share something from John Jay Chapman, whose 1897 essay on Emerson is quoted by Christopher Benfey in a recent issue of New York Review of Books:

What difference does it make whether a man who can talk like this is following an argument or not?...People are not in general influenced by long books or discourses, but by odd fragments of observation which they overhear, sentences or head-lines which they read while turning over a book at random or while waiting for dinner to be announced. These are the oracles and orphic words that get lodged in the mind and bend a man's most stubborn will. Emerson called them the Police of the Universe. His works are a treasury of such things.

Helpful context can be found in First We Read Then We Write, Robert D. Richardson's expert gathering of Emerson's thoughts on the writing process. "I expect a man to be a great reader...or", Emerson adds, "there must be a serviceable equation at work within the writer: in proportion to the spontaneous power, should be the assimilating power." Richardson glosses this with some words from Goethe: "What is a genius...but the faculty of seizing and turning to account everything that strikes us?"

And so...as Kurt Vonnegut might say...it goes. I've plugged in Niedecker where Harris ostensibly was the better fit, stubbornly faithful to an early hunch that it was Niedecker, not Harris, I'd been looking for. With thanks... to RWE.

There's a blank key on my typewriter, which I'm calling the ghost key. Manually flicking it against the platen I discovered that the striker carries the letter Q, but note that this key is in the position on the keyboard where the numeral 1 appears in the QWERTY keyboard configuration. I've noticed that some typewriters, perhaps especially the portable models, have a blank key in this position -- a key that doesn't strike. But other typewriter keyboards – I think the standard models in particular -- feature a key in this position marked with the numeral 1, and interestingly, the exclamation mark occupies the upper case position. My typewriter lacks a key bearing the exclamation mark; instead, I strike upper case 8 to type the apostrophe, then backspace one space to type a period beneath that mark. For readers, it can be difficult to distinguish this laboriously produced exclamation mark from a colon! (Keeping in mind, however, that the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style advises that this mark "should be used sparingly to be effective"). But why was my keyboard set up that way? The key is physically present on my typewriter, is blank, doesn't strike, and harbors a ghostly form, the letter Q! It occurs to me that irrespective of whether I can make a good argument for or against the ghost key convention, I've been provided an opportunity to engage in some doodling.

In "What is a letter?", the opening essay of her book, What Is: Nine Epistemological Essays, Joanna Drucker writes,

When the letters became familiars of the nursery and schoolroom, their capacity to carry lessons within their forms was exploited. Pictorial images and small vignettes elaborated the precepts of good behavior. Moral tales and instruments of training, as well as the inculcation into that symbolic order which is language and law (ideological training of the young) letters served multiple purposes as they were introduced to the lisping tongues and clumsy fingers of the young.

Okay, perhaps this would make a nice riposte of a sort, to illustrate the demystification of letterforms in service to the education of the young. But there is the other view, with individual letters assigned a cosmological value. Drucker notes that,

Sacred origins and occult traditions have long posited the alphabet as a set of cosmic elements, comprising the full sum of the components of the universe.

And further:

…when we posit the form of letters in terms of their origin, we are prone to imagine their shapes as an index of those bird tracks, constellations, or arrangements of natural elements from which they were supposed to be derived. Iconographic theories of origin suggest pictorial analogy, so that the 'A','B','C' of our Roman letters are somehow to be reconciled with the elements of Semitic tribal camps from which Hebrew letters took their visual form. Such contorted sets of association and formal comparison include all manner of anachronistic or improbable histories, but the mythic strength of such assertions keeps a tenacious hold on popular imagination. To this day the notion that the 'A' contains vestiges of the ox-head, a horned aleph, persists. Once fixed in mind, such associations seem so natural that displacing them with mere historical argument and archaeological information is difficult indeed.

Yes indeed! And not entirely desirable to dissociate them, I would add. The ghostly (or redundant) letter Q on my typewriter keyboard may have been an arbitrary decision on the part of some uber-compositor – I suspect that it had been, until otherwise enlightened – but I've had to wonder why it's there at all. Regarding that particular letter, however, Peter Lamborn Wilson suggests -- in Abecedarium, his engaging account of letters and their associations -- that in the Ancient Egyptian system of pictorial writing, the hieroglyph for the letter Q was symbolized by the figure of an ape. As it turns out, this is suggestive (and productive). As Wilson notes:

The dog-faced ape cynocephalus…endemic to Egyptian temples, was believed to keep time…Keeping time not only resembles writing but requires it, hence the baboon embodies Thoth or Hermes Trismegistus the inventor of writing. The cynocephalus is a scribe. Writing is monkey business – a million typewriters.

It's especially gratifying in this context that Wilson imbricates typewriters and writing. According to Philippe Derchain, writing in Yves Bonnefoy's monumental encyclopedia of world religions,

Thoth is the object of a specific offering, a writing case… Thoth is the model bureaucrat: he knows how to write and perform calculations, is invested with the highest functions in governing the world beside the sovereign Sun, and is conscious of his duties of justice and precision. Thus he regulates the course of the moon, checks the balance of the scale at the court of judgment of the dead, inscribes the name of the Pharoah on the fruits of the tree of history in the temple of Heliopolis, and surveys the precinct of projected temples, except in those cases in which he assigns those functions to one of his companions. For all of this, he must know how to write, like any scribe; and the palette, which holds the ink holders and the brushes and is also used for quick notes, is the instrument of his function.  

(By the way, who are Thoth's "companions"? Might they be each and all descended poets down through history to our time -- and beyond? I like to think so.)

Moving on from Ancient Egypt, this ghost letter of mine appears in the Archaic Greek alphabet, in a different but still unmistakable form, then is carried over into Etruscan and thence onward to the Romans -- and Latin. But having lasted so long the letter Q did not translate into Anglo-Saxon. According to Amalia E. Gnanadesikan in her book, The Writing Revolution,

…Old English or Anglo-Saxon had a different set of phonemes than Latin. (They themselves called their language Englisc, pronounced almost exactly as it is today, except that the first vowel was pronounced as spelled… They dropped and added letters as needed. Z was not considered necessary, as the [z] sound occurred only as a variant of [s] between voiced sounds. The redundancy of C, K, and Q was reduced to just C.

[Note: Englisc is not a typo – the [sc] sound in Anglo-Saxon was pronounced [sh] – as in scip!]

As Gnanadesikan explains,

Vernacular writing had begun sometime before, but it had not yet settled into standardized forms. As the Roman alphabet came to be used for its daughter languages, the letters had to do different work than they had done in Latin. Where Latin had originally pronounced C as [k], the descendant languages used [s], as in French cinque before the front vowels [e] and [i]. Latin [kw], however, had become [k], reintroducing that sound before front vowels. To spell it, the letter k was retrieved from the dustbin, passed on to the Germanic languages (hence English king, kid, and kitten), and then replaced in the Romance languages with QU under the conservative influence of the humanists (and hence French and Spanish qui, "who").

And what of Modern English? According to the OED,

In ordinary mod. Eng. words Q is employed only in the combination qu, whether this is initial…medial…or forming a final consonant…There is, however, a growing tendency among scholars to use Q by itself to transliterate the Semitic kōph, writing, e.g. Qaballa… 

With that I imagine that we may now turn -- by a commodious vicus of recirculation, as it were -- back to Wilson...

Seeking to replace the image I'd used for the following post, I inadvertently deleted the post itself! I'm republishing that earlier post here, with the updated image. The "thread" mentioned in the first sentence refers to an earlier sequence of posts focusing on Johannes Kelpius and Christopher Witt. Jim Green has since retired from the Library Company. I've slightly amended the text of the original post.

I feel that this thread of posts has run its course for now, though I may decide to return to the subject in future posts. Frankly, I'd not intended to take the story this far, and in as great a detail as I've done here despite the fact that there's quite a bit more to write about Kelpius and the other distinguished members of his group, as well as the contemporary Kelpius Society as well.

That said, I would add one more thing here. I met about two years ago with Jim Green, head archivist at the Library Company in Philadelphia (an organization founded by Ben Franklin and associates, by the way). At that meeting, which was devoted to a discussion of Kelpius, Jim took a very old volume down from  a bookshelf in his office. That book turned out to be a copy of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. Jim explained that the Library Company had recently obtained a batch of books, and this volume was among them. And it appears that this particular book may have been the very first copy of the Principia to have been brought to North America.
 
But how did the book come to Philadelphia? Jim explained that Anthony Grafton, preeminent Renaissance historian and historian of ideas, had become interested in the book. Grafton's faculty profile on the Princeton University website notes that his, "special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance." According to Jim Green, Grafton has been investigating marginalia – the notes written in the margins of books by their owners – and along with that, has been doing close and careful analyses of that handwriting. Having examined quite a bit of material from the 17th century, he's often able to identify who might have owned a given book, and who might have written the margin notes. To the point -- According to Jim, Grafton believes that the marginalia in the Library Company's copy of the Principia were written by none other than Johann Jakob Zimmerman! This was likely Zimmerman's copy of the Principia!
 
Recall that Zimmerman was the erstwhile leader of the Kelpius group, but had died at London just prior to the scheduled departure for America. Tracing the provenance of the book, Grafton surmises that it was likely brought here along with a small collection of other books by Zimmerman's widow, who stayed on and sailed with Kelpius following the death of her husband. The Library Company has acquired those books.
 
Recall too that Zimmerman was a highly educated man, as was everyone in his group, but Zimmerman had a special expertise in comets, and in astronomy more generally. In his work, he combined careful observation within a framework of science, but translated his observations into religious or astrological terms. This wasn't unusual during Zimmerman's lifetime, which was a transitional moment in the development of modern science. In fact, looked at from the other side, Newton himself maintained an interest in alchemy, and is the author, alongside the Principia, of a number of alchemical writings and notes -- some of which, by the way, are held in the collections of the Chemical Heritage Society at Philadelphia.  
 
I've reconstructed my conversation with Jim Green from memory, and believe I've rendered it accurately. I should add that at this point I don't know whether Anthony Grafton has been able to definitively verify that Zimmerman was the owner of the book discussed here.