The use of the term CONVOLUTE?

 

Q. Why "CONVOLUTE"?

The use of this term is appropriate. Firstly, because the following Re:LODE Radio web pages accessed by your last "click" are necessarily "convoluted", as in the general usage of the term, especially of an argument, story, or sentence, that's extremely complex and difficult to follow!

Q. But why? 

A. Perhaps because it's a way to acknowledge particular and various uncomfortable historical truths that helps Re:LODE Radio illuminate the present state of things along the LODE Zone Line. 

The NOW of globalised realities found along the LODE Zone Line in 2020 THE YEAR OF TRUTH requires an approach that celebrates the fact that to every story there belongs another. In following through on every story, and the narrative valences generated, together with the intersectional characteristics of multiple realities, a linear structure breaks down completely. An alternative mode allows for these elements to be set out in a mosaic and graphic form, and so consequently they become necessarily, and positively "convoluted", or "difficult to follow". 

Q. How can a high level of difficulty function as an enabling method! 

A. When the method is "on a roll", as in rolling the dice, or as in Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) the poem by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

Its intimate combination of free verse and unusual typographic layout anticipated the 20th-century interest in graphic design and concrete poetry.

The term "convoluted" originally stems from the past participle of convolute, from Latin convolutus, past participle of convolvere meaning to "roll together, intertwine", and therefore explains why the term "convolute" has been applied to those volumes where a number of separate manuscripts have been bound together in a single volume. 

So, and secondly, CONVOLUTE as a term is therefore considered by Re:LODE Radio to be more than appropriate to the web pages in this montage of ideas, images and moving images, with and without sound, rolled together but conceptually placed in apposition rather than in a linear sequence. 

Furthermore, the echoland of manuscript culture is more than apt to point to as part and parcel of this introduction. Another introduction to the Re:LODE Methods and Purposes can be found on the LODE Re:LODE blog for the 25th anniversary occasion of the LODE project in the Bluecoat Liverpool exhibition In the Peaceful Dome (2017-18), curated by Bryan Biggs.

Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé is referenced in the article on this Re:LODE Methods and Purposes page quoting the English version of the poems title: A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance. 

Looking, creating, interpreting, speaking, seeing, hearing, reading, listening, when it was undertaken in the medieval library and the scriptorium was as complex a situation as the present creation of this web page. 

Reading (interpreting and thinking) aloud! 

The act of reading itself included voicing the written form of words from the into the multi-sensory auditory space of hearing and speaking. Better to hear and listen to the written word as it is voiced and therefore coming into existence literally as an "epiphany" (from Greek epiphainein ‘reveal’ and related to the act of speaking). Readers reading in the medieval library would have generated a multi-voiced and not necessarily discordant cacophony. 

Those responsible for "illuminating" the pages of these manuscripts "textura", "carpet pages" of words and images, were often engaged in a subtle critique of the status quo.  

The relationship of words and images in the creating of the page  was clearly expressed in the name for Gothic lettering in its own time, "textura", that is "tapestry". Another textile related term has become generally used to identify those highly decorated pages found in manuscripts like the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels and are referred to as  "carpet pages" 

In the novel The Name of the Rose, the 1980 debut novel by Italian author Umberto Eco, we find a historical murder mystery set in the scriptorium and library of an Italian monastery in the year 1327.

In the 1986 film of the novel, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud,  Sean Connery stars as the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, and where the name of the character clearly alludes both to the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes and to William of Ockham. The name itself is derived from William of Ockham and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Hound of the Baskervilles. Another view is that Eco has created Brother William as a combination of Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes. (William himself notes that Bacon was a mentor of his and cites his ideas several times in the course of the book.)

William of Ockham, who lived during the time of the novel, first put forward the principle known as "Ockham's Razor", which is often summarised as the dictum that one should always accept as most likely the simplest explanation that accounts for all the facts. William applies this dictum in a manner analogous to the way Sherlock Holmes applies his similar dictum, that when one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains — however improbable — must be the truth. Brother William is shown in this clip admiring the work of the recently deceased character in the novel, the "illuminator" Adelmo of Otranto. Brother William comments enthusiastically at the subversive, witty, daring and transgressive depiction of the pope as a wily fox embedded in the decoration of the illuminated text.

The novel, so much more than the film version, is an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory, and has been described as a work of postmodernism. A quote in the novel, "books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told", refers to a postmodern idea that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality, while also harkening back to the medieval notion that citation and quotation of books was inherently necessary to write new stories. Re:LODE uses a similar idea in the trajectory of links generated along the LODE Zone Line with the notion that to every story there belongs another, but these stories  are a reflection of the multiple realities of lived experience in an external reality. The valencies of all stories belong to all other stories, but we can only make the links, whether they are made back and forth, one at a time.

The novel ends with irony: as Eco explains in his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, "very little is discovered and the detective is defeated." After unraveling the central mystery in part through coincidence and error, William of Baskerville concludes in fatigue that there "was no pattern." Thus Eco turns the modernist quest for finality, certainty and meaning on its head, leaving the nominal plot, that of a detective story broken, the series of deaths following a chaotic pattern of multiple causes, accident, and arguably without inherent meaning.

When it comes to meaning, be it some ultimate or everyday meaning, for the medieval European reader, the scholar and the illuminator, the meaning to be assembled from the text, with its writing technology employing meaningless symbols of phonetic code, is revealed in uttering, or "outering" the word as "voiced", spoken and then as heard and experienced as a realisation/revelation. Marshall McLuhan has a chapter heading in his Gutenberg Galaxy; the making of typographic man that runs: 

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. 

McLuhan points out that today's "norm" for reading in silence divorces eye and speech in the act of reading. To associate lip movements and mutterings from a reader with semi-literacy betrays a de-valuing of the interplay among the human senses to an enriching of the interior life and understanding. He quotes the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins referring to his poem "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves", says "This sonnet should be sung: it is most carefully timed in tempo rubato." 

McLuhan quotes the poet again: "Take breath and read it with the ears, as i always wish to be read, and verse comes alright." And follows on with reference to James Joyce as someone who never tired of explaining how in the echoland of Finnegans Wake: "the words the reader sees are not the words that he will hear." 

McLuhan says: "As with Hopkins, the language of Joyce only comes alive when read aloud, creating a synesthesia or interplay of the senses."

A further observation McLuhan makes (and remember that the Gutenberg Galaxy was first published in 1962) is that: 

It is strange that modern readers have been slow to recognize that the prose of Gertrude Stein with its lack of punctuation and other visual aids, is a carefully devised strategy to get the passive visual reader into participant, oral action. So with E. E. Cummings, or Pound, or Eliot. Vers libre is for the ear as much as for the eye. And in Finnegans Wake when Joyce wants to create "thunder", the "shout in the street" indicating a major phase of collective action, he sets up the word exactly like an ancient manuscript word:  

"The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is rtaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy . . . " (p.1) 

The term "illumination" as applied to to medieval manuscripts, where the text is often supplemented with flourishes such as borders, and miniature illustrations, gains another facet of analogous meaning in the extraordinary insights and work of Marshall McLuhan. Another chapter in the Gutenberg Galaxy draws attention to the theme of "the letter and the spirit", a dichotomy deriving from writing. "The letter appears as the flesh; but the spiritual sense within is known as divinity." 

This theme, says McLuhan:

"enters into the very texture of medieval thought and sensibility, as in the technique of the "gloss" to release light from within the text, the technique of illumination as light through not on, and the very mode of Gothic architecture itself."

The title of this chapter, among the array of chapters, or sections, arranged as a mosaic rather than a sequence, is headed: 

Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through not light on. 

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Allforabit?

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