Part One
ON SEMANTIC SERIES, MAGICAL FORMULAS, AND POETIC ART
Chapter 1
IN FRONT OF THE DOOR
Any reader of poetry has likely encountered verses that, despite having seemingly neutral content or defying logical analysis, evoke unexpectedly powerful emotional responses. Such verses appear in the works of virtually every great poet, regardless of their literary movement or historical period. The mystery of their impact in many ways parallels that of incantations, and this justifies referring to them as shamanic verses.
Poets whose work consists primarily of shamanic verses are rare (notably, they typically emerge from moments of highest inspiration rather than being deliberately crafted). Osip Mandelstam was one such poet, creating lines like “I studied the science of parting / In bareheaded nocturnal lamentations”. These lines contain no rational imagery, yet they elicit a precise emotional response. Viktor Sosnora appears to be another such poet, whose recent collections feature profound shamanic lines of remarkable sublimity:[1]
My soul is simple as a death sign... (from “Continuation of Pygmalion”, 1969-70)
or
Snake chime! – for the earth of all brides
Mine and not yet mine – I drink the cup,
Hemlock of tears! I fear not the heavens
Their wrath is but a caress of our hatred... (from the cycle “Letters from the Forest”, 1965)
Even Bulat Okudzhava, known for his autumnal lucid clarity, produced the undeniably shamanic poem “A girl is crying – her balloon flew away” (“Blue Balloon”, 1957), which generates an inexplicably profound wave of sadness.
We will attempt to explain rationally the secret behind the impact of such verses by analyzing several poems and excerpts to identify patterns common to all shamanic-type verses.
Before proceeding with specific analyses, it's worth considering Yuri Tynyanov's observations from his article “Promezhutok” (The Interval, 1924):
“Verse as a system possesses its own coloring property, its own force: it generates verse-specific shades of meaning... Mandelstam's contribution lies in special word shades, in distinct semantic music... Words united by a single, familiar melody share one emotion, and their unusual order, their hierarchy, becomes inevitable... In Mandelstam's semantic structure, a single image or vocabulary series assumes a decisive role for the entire poem, subtly coloring all others – this is the key to the complete hierarchy of images... The shade, the coloring of a word in each verse, persists, condensing in the subsequent one. Thus, in his final poem ('January 1, 1921'), we find an almost inconceivable association between 'Underwood' and 'Pike bone.' This might appear nonsensical to those who seek to unlock others' premises, however accessible, with their own key”.[2]
To summarize Tynyanov's insights:
1. Verse creates new shades of word meaning.
2. These new shades or meanings can exist only within verse.
3. All words in the verse, whether used conventionally or in a new, unique to the poem, sense, share a common emotional coloring.
4. Attempting to find purely rational meaning in Mandelstam's verses would be similar to unlocking “others' premises, however accessible, with their own key”.
The impression emerges that everything Tynyanov said about Mandelstam's verses can be extended to all shamanic verses – with the following minor correction.
In linguistics, words are analyzed along two dimensions: the plane of expression and the plane of content. The plane of expression encompasses the phonetic reality of the word – its sonic structure. The plane of content comprises the concepts associated with its sonority. Within the plane of content, each word consists of various combinations of semantic quanta – the smallest, currently indivisible, units of meaning.
The nature of semantic quanta is dynamic; they tend to subdivide into smaller components while words simultaneously acquire new meanings. Due to our current limitations in scientific methodology, we cannot isolate individual semantic quanta; we can only verify their existence. Our analysis must therefore work with their combinations, as any possible word meaning represents a specific arrangement of semantic quanta.
The multitude of semantic quantum combinations exhausting the meaning of a given word forms the meaning field of that word. Each word possesses a strictly defined meaning field. However, this field can evolve when reality changes – expanding with the emergence of new phenomena or contracting with the obsolescence of old ones. At any given moment, however, a word's meaning field remains finite.
When a word appears in a phrase, it rarely activates its entire meaning field;[3] instead, only a portion becomes relevant. Moreover, we can never definitively state that it would be impossible to construct a phrase that would activate an even narrower subset of its meaning field. In other words, a word's meaning field is continuous (by Anaxagoras's definition, continuity is infinite divisibility).[4]
We shall term the portion of a word's meaning field activated within a specific phrase a seme. Whether in prose or poetry, when a word appears in a phrase, its meaning must belong to its established meaning field. In extreme cases we might encounter a word used with a meaning that, while belonging to its field, has an exceptionally low probability of activation in normal discourse.
The concept of Bayesian reading was creatively developed in Vasily Nalimov’s extensive and productive research on the probability of word meaning activation. Our analysis builds upon his conclusions, and readers interested in exploring this topic further should consult his illuminating work,[5] which we will refer to repeatedly. It may presumably be considered that fields of meaning are generated not only for words, but also for images.
Let us now attempt to unlock the door to the inner sanctum of shamanic verse, to discover rational meaning in what appears to lack it. Readers can judge our success in this endeavor.
We begin with Okudzhava's previously mentioned poem:
A girl is crying – her balloon flew away.
They comfort her, but the balloon flies on.
A young woman is crying – there's still no groom.
They comfort her, but the balloon flies on.
A woman is crying – her husband left for another,
They comfort her, but the balloon flies on.
An old woman is crying – she lived too little.
But the balloon returned, and it's blue.
First Plane: Surface Narrative
The plot of this poem is simple. As the girl's balloon escapes, we rise with it into the air, peering through windows as we drift by. In every scene we glimpse, someone mourns a loss of their own. Then, in the poem's last line, the balloon returns to the child. It is a simple consolation: don't cry, little girl, the balloon has returned, and it's blue.
What is the secret of that remarkable sadness that this poem evokes despite its generally neutral content? The glimpsed scenes are sad in themselves, but there is nothing unusual about them. The first plane won't help us understand the secret of shamanic verses.
Second Plane: Parabolic Interpretation
Generally speaking, the poem's plot can be interpreted in two ways. Above, we presented one interpretation – particular events occurring at a particular time. The plot, however, can be perceived as a parable. Parabolic understanding becomes possible due to the incompleteness of context. The context allows all that the poem says to be attributed to the same person. With such an understanding of the text, every two lines will correspond to kind of a photographs of the dotted-line episodes of a person’s life taken with a flash and snatching from the darkness. Each of the dotted line is a line of the verse containing the word “crying”. And at the end, where the dotted line ends, the person's life ends, too. Moreover, like any photograph, the pictures of the dotted line are static, and, since the poet doesn't specify those who cry, the person we see in the photograph is a person in general. The dotted line begins to acquire a universal character.
With such understanding, the plot of this poem remarkably resembles an ancient Eastern plot, known in all Buddhist countries. In one version, a magician comes to the raja and claps his hands. The raja finds himself in a forest and marries an untouchable to avoid dying of hunger. He lives a life full of deprivation and adversity, and, at the moment of death, he finds himself in the palace, where he sees the magician clapping his hands. They tell him that he was absent for the time between two claps.[6]
Another plot tells of a student who falls asleep in a temple, using a wooden headrest. He wakes up, goes to the capital, where he takes first place in the examination, becomes a minister, lives a life full of ups and downs, and wakes up. He slept no more than 15 minutes, as the porridge in the pot that was put on the fire before he fell asleep had not yet finished cooking.[7]
Two hand claps, a pot of porridge on the fire, a brief balloon flight – they all emphasize the ephemeral nature of passing human life. The mood evoked by the old parables and Okudzhava's poem is a mood of loss. Let's keep in mind this word – loss.
But why does the old parable evoke a sense of loss? After all, we all know that life is short and death is inevitable. The parables (and the poem) simply reminded us of things known as well as that two times two is four. No, the second plane is also not helpful for unlocking the door to the workshop of shamanic verse.
Third Plane: Semantic Structure
The poem is constructed on the repetition of the line “They comfort her, but the balloon flies on”. What meaning does this line have when it is used for the first time? A girl's balloon flew away. From a child's perspective, losing a balloon is an irreversible loss. The balloon has flown away, it cannot be returned. Thus, comforting her is futile. The loss is irreversible.
The next dot of the dotted line is a young woman. “A young woman is crying – there's still no groom. They comfort her, but the balloon flies on”. Why do we get the thought that the young woman won't find a groom? The repeating line is already associated in our minds with the sensation of loss. It has retained the meaning of its previous use, and in the text of the current line, nothing could change or destroy the meaning of the previous use. Thus, here, too, the repeated line means the same: “All is futile! Nothing can be returned” – the meaning of irreparable loss.
The next frame of the dotted line is a woman. “A woman is crying – her husband left for another. They comfort her, but the balloon flies on”. Again, we perceive the repeated line in the meaning of its previous use: “All is futile, nothing can be returned”. The same applies to the next photo frame of the dotted line: “An old woman is crying – she lived too little. But the balloon returned, and it's blue”.
Here things are somewhat more complex. From the repeated line, only one word is used – balloon. But this word in the repeated line has already acquired its special meaning (recall Tynyanov's article that we quoted above). And the line “But the balloon returned, and it's blue” suddenly also acquires the meaning: “All is futile, nothing can be returned”. This meaning is further strengthened by the last line of the verse entering into a relationship of inverse symmetry, or, as literary scholars tend to say, opposition, with the previous line. We saw above that the last line of the verse offers comfort addressed to the little girl who lost her balloon at the very beginning of the verse. And in the previous line, an old woman cries, whose life is coming to an end.
Note, by the way, that where the images of the verse enter into relationships of inverse symmetry, the sensation of loss almost always arises. The collision of opposite principles creates a situation of unstable equilibrium, which cannot last long. Such a situation is pregnant with loss. The images that make up the lines of our text also enter into relationships of inverse symmetry: “Lived too little” – the finitude of being, “and it's blue” – blue is the color of eternal sky, of eternity. At the same time, blue is the color of sorrow and sadness (“blue sadness”). In English, “blue” means both “blue” and “sad”.
So, we saw that the even lines of the poem functionally reduce to the phrase “All is futile, nothing can be returned”. Now, let's look at the odd lines. All of them are built according to the following model: “subject cries” – “reason for crying”. Crying is a sign of loss. The reason for crying is the same for everyone – the loss of something: a balloon, a groom, a husband, life. Moreover, each subsequent loss is heavier than the previous one. But for us, something else is more important. Namely, that all images of the verse reduce to one denominator, and this denominator is irreversible loss (Tynyanov also spoke about all words being colored by one emotion). Not only do all lines of the verse turn out to be synonymous with each other, but all images of the verse do too. It's time to look back and draw the first conclusions:
1. All images of this verse form one series – a series of loss.
2. All lines of the verse are synonymous with each other and speak of the irreversibility of loss.
3. The events of the verse (analyzed in the second plane) tell of loss.
4. The meaning of loss also arises because some images and lines of the verse are in a relationship of inverse symmetry with each other.
So, our perception of Bulat Okudzhava's poem reduces to the perception of a repeating phrase:
Loss. All is futile, nothing can be returned.
Loss. All is futile, nothing can be returned.
Loss. All is futile, nothing can be returned.
This pattern emerges at every level of analysis.
Through rational examination, we have traced the associative pathways our consciousness traverses instantaneously while reading the verse. While we cannot map every possible chain of meaning, we can identify the primary ones. The reduced form we've arrived at bears a striking resemblance to a hypnotist's incantation designed to instill specific emotional states.
Hypnosis? Perhaps here lies the key to unlocking the workshop of shamanic verse.