ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 94
Other obvious facts about this silliness I’ve concocted.
The poem is written using diction which is exclusively picked
from etymologically Germanic stock, going as far back as Old English in most instances, and Middle English in a few. Very probably,
this is another effort to reproduce the Anglo-Saxon, but the effort is
clearly also a limp stab at translating normal Modern English terms.
The word “rootish,” which appears twice in the first half of the
poem, wants to be the Latinate “radical,” for example, and, while no
other word draws such a clear line of criticism to itself, a sufficiently
rigorous reading of the poem reveals that this word is being used as
a kind of fundamental aperture into what it wants, and is failing to
achieve. I need not say that I think of Jesus’ claim that a rich (that is,
an overly plentiful) man (that is, idea) shall have as easy a time entering the Kingdom of Heaven as a camel shall have passing through
the eye of a needle.
Even disregarding the intended effect of the imitated Germanic
language and its attempt to push the reader into some archaic and
artificial frame of mind, we may ask, “What does it actually do?”
After all, neither you nor I have any privileged access to what I was
thinking, and, as Reader Response Theory tells us, we construct the
text organically as we read it. After consulting my etymological dictionary, I discover that the word “dog” derives from the Old English
“docce,” meaning “muscle” and obscurely related to the Proto-Germanic “dukkō,” meaning power, or force.
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“The rootish / door is a dog,” then, can be understood, independently of its author’s irrelevant intention, as translatable to “The
radical aperture is power.” But here my interpretive powers grind
themselves on a reasonable sandbar: What the fuck does that even
mean? First of all, it required a translation of English into English.
More than that, it required a translation of more radically English
into less. The idea that I could have intended such an incomprehensibly, and frankly insulting move is either incomprehensible or
