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?
