NPPF: C.17: Gradus ad Parnassum

[Jasper Fidget]

_Gradus ad Parnassum_ (the first Gradus?), "A step to Parnassus; aid in
writing Latin poetry; a work on Latin verse-making containing rules and
examples."

http://www.sacklunch.net/Latin/G/gradusadParnassum.html

"Steps to Parnassus"; in Greek mythology Parnassus was the mountain dwelling
of the gods. A composer, having climbed Parnassus, would, according to the
metaphor, have achieved a perfect compositional technique. 

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/glossary.html

>From Webster's Revised:

"\Gra"dus\, n. [From L. gradus ad Parnassum a step to Parnassus.] A
dictionary of prosody, designed as an aid in writing Greek or Latin poetry."

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=gradus
 
>From OED:

"[Latin = step(s) in Gradus ad Parnassum 'Step(s) to Parnassus', the title
of a manual of Latin prosody. Cf. VULGUS noun2.]  Hist. A manual of
classical prosody used in schools to help in writing Greek and Latin verse."


[Excuse me while I spiral out for a few minutes:]
_Gradus ad Parnassum_ concerns advancement (in steps) to the Home of Poetry
(and gods), to a final arrival in art.  Gradus acts out this movement
between two fixed points (as with 181 and 1881, the bordered or book-ended
lemniscate or fixed Cassinian oval), between origin and destination, between
waking and sleeping.  The final long sentence to Note to Line 17 (p 78) has
Gradus as part of the poetic texture of daily life, "riding past in a rhyme"
and "moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter" and so
on, "falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night."  Gradus is
generated into life through the poem, lives in its lines, and must sleep
when the act of the poem's creation pauses.  Gradus only lives when John
Shade writes; there is a parallelism to Gradus moving and the poem expanding
(for example on July 5, as Shade begins Canto 2, Gradus leaves Zembla for
Western Europe), the time it takes Shade to fill the space of his index
cards paralleled to the time Gradus consumes to travel geographically (Time
and Space paralleled), and on July 21, as the poem is finished, Gradus has
no where left to travel -- and so has finally arrived.

This business with sleeping and awaking might be worth pursuing.  In sleep,
Shade's spirit is free of the inexorable approach of death (qua Gradus), for
time has stopped and spatial movement has paused.  Line 101: "No free man
needs a God; but was I free?"  The numeral 101 is linked to being trapped in
time and the need for escape due to awareness of death in life.  Wakefulness
/ consciousness is a prison from which sleep grants a brief release, as
described in the stanza at 873-886: Shade is divided into a waking half and
a sleeping half -- forming either a somnambulant whole or a split dream
consciousness -- until the two halves recognize one another and the complete
original being is returned to wakefulness.  The dream half of Shade is his
"free" "spirit" (876), which moves around outside in the "reflected sky"
zone of Shade's lawn (line 4 -- note that 4 is half of 8, half infinity, a
decidedly angular numeral).  Line 880-881 has: "And then I realized that
*this* half too / Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke"; in connection
with the 8s, 0s, and 1s (of course!), the spirit-half within the infinity of
dreams has a realization (880: lemniscate activity of the spirit returning
to consciousness, to the zero, unknown, death -- the realization), and wakes
up (881: crashing into the wall, barrier, window, posited end of life).  

"Mirages, miracles, midsummer morn" (886): if 8 is the lemniscate of
infinity, then 6 is the arc that leads to it.  Or the arc that leads to
death?  Or maybe I should have quit while I was ahead.


-=Jasper Fidget=-