Ohaeng

a fragment of something longer if not greater

“Shijo poetry makes wide use of the conventional symbols of the Chinese tradition. ...the Korean poets took them and shaped them to their own purposes, often using them in an ironical way. ...This sort of irony is at the heart of the shijo tradition, and it goes a long way toward defining the Korean sensibility.” —Kevin O’Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo (2002)

Defined elsewhere as ohaeng.

“Milton was a true poet & of the Devil’s party, without knowing it…” --William Blake

“…it is in Socrates that the concept of irony has its inception in the world.” --Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1841; tr L M Capel, 1966)

Customarily, noncasual discourse is connected & consecutive; it has devices to mark where that continuity changes, whether to turn or to skip, parenthesize or footnote. A style of pure juxtaposition does not exist, but where the connections are left to conjecture we call this parataxis. And & and & and… In this, the valence of individual words remains the same. It flows, as a version of ongoing discourse; either way, one arrives at the expected “next”. In this context, an implied or expressed different-valence will be marked as ironic, whether at the word or sentence level--“Yeah, right” meaning “no”; an argument seemingly in favor of cannibalizing the children of the poor. Irony that can be paraphrased.

These usages are known & recognized by experienced readers (even children understand sarcasm). When the language of symbolism is tampered with, things get a little sticky. Poe & Melville dared to make White a negative thing: pure ohaeng in intent in execution. Of course, one of the most flagrant conversions of this sort, was taking the Winter Solstice & making it Christmas. (Also, turning 13—the number of full moons in a year--into an unlucky number.) Enough time passes, & this becomes the new normal. I remember the time I noticed all the samespeople in Neiman Marcus were wearing black. That color has come a long way from Beatnik days. Wearing a baseball cap backwards, ktp. You might say this is the easiest rebellion. (One glove instead of two, though, is ambitious, calling into question the rather more fixed concept of Symmetry.)

Many milestones of cultural progress have resulted from just such direct transpositions. Painting on unprimed (i.e. the “wrong” side) canvas. Duchamp’s art by fiat. The secular Madonna… These are ironies, you might say, with a shelf life. Negation has a double aspect, logically: not (the opposite) & other than (contrary—some more nonsequitur than others). There’s the Iron Butterfly, & then there’s the Gingham Butterfly. And what use is a serious triolet?

Thus we enter a different land of ironies, signposted by two neologisms, magnitevé: between ironic & serious; heterocrania: between a thread & not-a-thread. The Japanese art of Renga—perhaps more a game than an art—invented certain rules for juxtaposition, which could be used to decode an apparently arbitrary succession of small poems. (The most interesting rule for me, was the Shifting Frame: A, B, C where A +B is one unit, but B + C is a different unit. ) Socrates who never says what he means but only asks questions, that’s a singular game. (He did have his goals in mind.) –But if everyone were held to that rule? One time I invented a form of versification, based on Anglicized isopsephia, that would feature categories of word-pairings. But this proved altogether too abstract to be worth following. Not every secret architecture is worth discovering… I have come to believe that the flavors of arbitrariness can be cultivated but not embalmed. “The chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” happened only once.

Now it’s your move.