"It must B": simile, rebus, and power

1

The cat was lying on the ground, watching another cat.

 Click to enlarge.

I looked at his legs and a simile occurred to me: "He looks like . . ." So I did some photoshopping in two stages,

and then I had something for the Jahrzeit of Edward Gorey (d. April 15, 2000), painter of cats and the ballet.

2

Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz of Los Angeles's Chai Center has (or had two years ago, when this article was published)

http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/article/chai_center_rabbi_explains_off_the_handle_emails_20080215/

an interesting trait: after meeting an attractive woman, he changes from a human being to a Language poet. Once the woman has passed out of his field of vision, he begins translating his memory of her into words and composing what the article calls "rambling e-mails in large print, heavy with text-message shorthand punctuated with varied text colors, point sizes and fonts."

To one woman, for instance, he sent a poem which included this text.

What were U thinking when U brought a GOY 2 our Seder??? How did U dare 2 do such a reprehensible thing? It must B tht U R quite mentally unbalanced & not taking yr meds. And then U had the Chutzpa 2 try 2 pick up another Jew from our group while U were sitting there W/ a GOY (who was even of a dfrnt RACE ... )?

I call the text a poem for the simplest possible formal reason: because it is about language as such. Consider the poem's phrase "It must B," for example. Spelling out the lower-case word "be" would have cost Rabbi Schwartz no more keystrokes than the upper-case rebus "B," but the rebus's encrypted readability enforces a power relationship which the unambiguous full word can't. To be understood, "B" has to be read twice: first as a failed objective reading, then as a translation which requires its reader to submit to the letter's singularity ("In my language, 'B' means what I say it means.") That, of course, is the rebus's purpose. Like Harold Bloom's Milton or Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, Rabbi Schwartz has fashioned language into a projection of his power as a strong poet.

3

But the cat was lying under this flower, which I had photographed this way a moment earlier.

It would be easy for a weak poet to make the flower too into a balletic simile. There once existed a whole manual of procedure for that translation: the Victorian technology called the language of flowers. But to be a strong poet would be to keep the dictionary closed and remain self-imprisoned in the wordless grammar of the plant as such -- self-imprisoned until the completing instant of metamorphosis. And in what language then would the flower deign to speak to us?