From “Anagrams” [xxv]
An extremely hubristic, unflattering, and accurate self-portrait, this episode saw Halberg in direct conversa-
tion with Cain, questioning his own methods. The passing allusion to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin appears
to reference Chapter 4, stanza XXXV: “But I myself read my bedizened /fancies, my rhythmic search for truth, /to nobody except a wizened /nanny, companion of my youth; /or, after some dull dinner’s labour, /
I buttonhole a wandering neighbour /and in a corner make him choke /on tragedy; but it’s no joke, /when,
utterly worn out hausted and
I take /a
beside my
get up; with
ing/alarmed by lay,/they leave fly away.” There able system of the show, which not discuss, appears to be the is a geometric
to Euclidean
by rhyming,/ex- done up, rambling walk lake,/and duck instant tim-
my melodious their shores and is an unfathom- numbers within Halberg will
but episode 25 key. An orthant term referring
n-dimensional
I could close the deal with my brattish coauthor, harry reputation’s toreador, or detonate the whole trenchant, un- fathomable bandwidth. Thumb-horned orthant. (The bits where Pushkin’s like: UGHHHH! RHYMES! and goes for a beer.) Can’t unread the footnote: Is this worthwhile? Am I? Oh shanghaied heart- throb, thirteenth dandy havoc-hound. Gentrify the favela runt or defend the loon; sod the chrome T-totum. Ever the bodybuilder, even in ghosthood.
space, the analogue of a quadrant (2D) or an octant (3D). Thumb-horned has the feel of an order of mockery /cuckoldry but may also be a reference to Cain’s mark, according to some scholars, being the gradual protrusion of horns. A T-totum (or teetotum) is a little metal Roman spinning top used for gambling. William Ernest Henley’s “The Double Ballade on the Nothingness of Things” opens with the lines: “The big teetotum twirls, /And epochs wax and wane /As chance subsides or swirls ... ” Triskaidekaphobia can be traced back to the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia where the 13th day of each new year is considered evil, or a day when the power of evil is particularly intense and can cause trouble, thus to this day people leave cities and camp overnight in the countryside. God has thirteen attributes of mercy according to rabbinic commentary on the Torah, and thirteen is also the number of nodes which make up Metatron’s Cube in Kabbalistic account. Metatron is an extraordinarily important angel in the apocryphal Book of the Palaces; it is suggested that Metatron is the only reason the human race was given knowledge of God and the cube forms a kind of “map of creation.” This appears to relate back to the “rhombohedral monolith” of the early episodes, the college’s strange obelisks. It is worth mentioning that Euclidean spaces generalize to higher dimensions. I feel really weird.
This poem is part of a larger sequence. You can read the rest in the June 2016 issue of Poetry.