My last posting, Abandon the Shovels, ended with the sentence, "This is getting us nowhere." Several readers agreed, which led my brain down another path. Quirky though it may be, here it is.
It was actually the word nowhere that stayed with me. Have you ever been in an Erewhon store? I don't know if it is just an upper-midwest business, but the stores are great outdoor equipment and clothing suppliers. The store name, Erewhon, is the word nowhere spelled backwards, a fact that has always fascinated me. Someone, or enoemos, in the Erewhon tradition, had either a great sense of humor or was highly creative or both.
Sometimes it seems that everything is backwards in our world. Ancora imparo readers know that I write, not infrequently, about Mother Nature and, lately, she even has her weather patterns a bit backwards. She cannot make up her mind between snow, sleet, rain, ice, thunder and then back to snow. It is as if she is out of ideas and is just throwing whatever is left on her weather palette at us, hoping that something sticks long enough for a meteorologist to talk about it on the evening news.
In music, there is a series of modernistic techniques called retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion. (My apolologies, in advance, to the 20th century composer, Arnold Schoenberg, whose twelve-tone row concept I am butchering for this posting.) Retrograde takes a thematic strand of notes and, using the same notes, writes all the notes backwards. Take for instance, "Mary Had A Little Lamb", in the key of C major. The first phrase's notes (or prime) would be: edcdeee, ddd, egg. Retrograde would look like: ggeddde, eed, cde. Same notes only backward. (Bored yet?) Inversion takes all of the original interval relationships and changes their direction; i.e. e f# g# f# e e e f# f# f# e c# c#. (Riveting, isn't it?) Retrograde inversion simply takes the inverted form and writes it backwards, or c# c# e f# f# f# e e e f# g# f# e.
My point here being that in music, at least, there is a logical reason for doing things backwards. Perhaps not in the rest of the world, but, at least musicians can justify their backwardness.
Continuing with my theme of backwards, I'll close with this thought:
Ste'l nodnaba gnihtemos ro onoemos rehtegotla. I etov rof retniw!
Orapmi arocna (retro-retrograde form)
