A postmodern abecedary.

My recent noise about philological congeries—which, like spring, must inevitably turn a young man's fancy to thoughts of fragmentary material and the means of arbitrarily arranging it—coincided handily with being reminded of the word abecedary. In its basic sense it means an inscription of the alphabet, used especially as a pedagogical tool—try telling your first grader that the two-zone print alphabet above the blackboard is a paper abecedarium, he'll win friends and influence bullies. More interestingly, though, the word applies to texts organized according to an alphabetical scheme.

This of course blew my windy intellect toward Louis Andriessen, who wrote a little suite of songs for the odd 1991 video festschrift M is for Man, Music, Mozart, a sort of euro-PBS celebration of Mozart's tricentennial. The first piece's vocal text was actually written by Peter Greenaway. It is, of course, the postmodern abecedary in question:

A is for Adam and
E is for Eve;
B is for bile, blood, and bones.
C is for conception, chromosomes, and clones.
D is for Devil.
F is for fertility and for Venus’ fur.
G is for germs and growth and genius.
H is for hysteria.
I is for intercourse.
J is for Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue.
K is for kalium, or potassium, if you like.
L is for lust—and lightning, lightning.

Clearly it's a red letter day (Ha! Ha! Good grief, forgive me.) I'll restrain myself, sincewe don't want a rehearsal of my Carson piece any time soon, and be brief. Now, let it be said that this is a vile text—all the little self-satisfactions of our crumbling civilization wrapped into one biologicized parcel; but I have come to bury Greenaway in exegesis, not to praise him. A couple of things are particularly interesting: for instance, the abecedary stops at L. Now there's the archaeology, which teaches us that ancient abecedaria were sometimes left incomplete for ritual or magical purposes; I'm reminded of the folkway of the ouija board that instructs you to stop the planchette if it begins to cycle through the alphabet in order. But putting that aside there's the element of the arbitrary: organizing a fragmentary text according to the alphabet presumes exhaustiveness, doesn't it? A place for everything and everything in its place, 26 things in places, to be exact. This text undermines it in three different ways, though: it's incomplete, there are more placeholders than positions, and some of the letters are out of order. There's the trick on the letter K, too, taking us from K straight out of the abecedary to P by mechanism of our divided naming conventions for the element—breaking out of the arbitrary organizing structure by sly conformity with it.

But stopping at L reminds me of the flexibility of this kind of arbitrary scheme—the series could start at S and cycle around to B, for instance, and still remain essentially the same in toto. I mean, it's a question of forcing relationships onto fragmentary terms, isn't it? We've got a gestalt of teeming biology punctuated by genius, electricity and chemical ignition, all of it related to masochistic texts and the human body. Once you've got your theme you can abecedize to your contentment—only the details change, and of course D and its placeholder are in the details. (D, by the way, is also for divinity. That's an important omission.)

Speaking of details, may I write a little commentary? Just the things that puzzled me.

Venus' fur. Yes, one thinks of the mons pubis also, but this is a reference to "Venus in Furs," the Sacher-Masoch text—apparently intellectually superior to
Justine, which, predictably, is a fairly repetitive "scrofulous french novel" by Sade.
Kalium is particularly important in the nitrogen/potassium pump which maintains the osmotic balance between animal cells. Its mention is of a piece with the passive biological material at B, C and G. Notable also: pure potassium explodes when you drop it in water—so vital to life—which suggests a connection with lightning.
Speaking of C and G, notice that the first and second item in each series is biological and passive, the third intellectual and incisive. (Though it occurs to me that there's a play between conception and genius, i.e. to conceive an idea/the Latin root of genius, genus. Wheels within wheels.)

A new hobby: perverse abecedaries.

L. Cranach, 1526.

Note well, my friends, that there is a fine difference in meaning between centennial and centenary, which I didn't know until I realized that I didn't know it. Second, in search of something to copy and paste for my purposes I happened to stumble across this useful profile of Louis Andriessen on The Detritus Review, a blog which was new to me but will now be new no longer. Have a look—it's a delight. Ah, one more thing. In an utter flash of coincidence, over the past few days I've been troubled by a stray line of the Psalms running through my mind, i.e.

Wherewithal shall a young man correct his way? By taking heed thereto according to Thy word.

which turns out to be line 9 of Psalm 119—itself an abecedary.