Beware of snarks baring greeks

This stanzel has already had its fair share of analytical pummeling (go ahead, I know you like to watch), but we artists know that it’s best to kick a drawing when it’s down and so I present you with this tasteless, additional bit of post-pummeling pudding :

This stanzel is a perfectly cooked example of a big-shot Greek philosopher, So-crates as he’s known to Bill & Ted, being roasted and basted on the spit of my crowquill until he cries out « Μπάρμπας » and admits that he is the Father of Nonsense and not Philosophy, the big faker!

I’ll leave the expository details of my cunning argument to whomever is in need of an quickie thesis for their doctoral dissertation. Let’s just say for now that all this Socratic business of Forms, all this wordy confusion between meaning and structure, first begat Plato (seen here in the Form of Charles Darwin seen here in the Form of the Boots) and then begat all of Western Philosophy — and then begat Nonsense, the idiot man-child cowering in the linguistic basement of that slum-lord Plato’s grubby cave!

Words, words, words, they mean nothing and everything at once and let’s face it, in a wrestling match between Ontology and Nonsense, who are you really going to put your money on? Yow!

Where’s Kiki de Montparnasse when you really need her?

Know thyself is easier said than done when you’re a Snarkhunter equipped with the cerebral capacity of a concussed bee.

We see here the Bellman doing his best to keep his crews’ spirits up with a bit of anapestic music-hall-cum-ontological crosstalk, all of it involving some sort of terribly misplaced sense of the Socratic Method … a peripatetic method which requires the use of one’s legs, legs which are now growing comfortably numb as the hemlock works its way downwards.

Season of woe indeed!

Fit the Fourth, Page 25, Panel 2 … Die kleinsten Schnarken sind die stolzesten

"I said it in Hebrew — I said it in Dutch —
I said it in German and Greek:
But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much)
That English is what you speak!"

These headless anapaests of Lewis Carroll rollick onwards in their frolicksome procession and who are we to deny their cantering allure? Of course, the essence of an anapaest is the idea of a reversal and what better expresses the idea of reversal than the dawning realization that one is speaking in a language that no one understands? The unfortunate Baker is quite literally going backwards as the sense of what he says is instantly transformed into nonsense by his puzzled auditors.

Snarkologists call this sort of thing the Snarkosocratic Method, a kind of dialectic in which a question is responded to as though it were absolute nonsense. This in turn forces the questioner to endlessly repeat himself until his uncomprehending auditors gradually lose interest and finally go away.

Left alone in his splendidly impenetrable semiolinguistic Fortress of Solitude, the Baker is now free to concentrate his intellectual powers upon himself. Toying with the building-blocks of language and meaning, he will arrive at some sort of Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything in It … eventually …

Fit Two, Page 14, Panel 1 … 'cause my heart belongs to dada

The Bellman perceived that their spirits were low,
And repeated in musical tone
Some jokes he had kept for a season of woe —
But the crew would do nothing but groan.


Jokes kept for a season of woe, an almost biblical undertaking on the part of the Bellman, whose storehouse of mirth has been sorely depleted by divers chasms and crags. But to this geologically disheartened hunter of the Snark, we say, in the finest demotic vulgate we can muster : lighten up, dude! Like, get a hobby!

Hmmm … how about music? Music is nice, musical tones are even nicer. How about the fiddle? It’s an instrument that’s still welcome at hoe-down and rave alike. And all the girls love musicians, especially those hirsute ones (musicians, not girls) who emote over their Boojums in smoky Parisian cabarets, the kind of place where Kiki de Montparnasse might toss her turban at sugar-dada Man Ray or Jean Ingres pops in to play some violon airs upon a g-string behind her naked bach.

But the Bellman knows it will never work out. From the vantage point of his solitary table in a dark corner, he sighs aloud and weeps a solitary English tear into his hemlock and branch water. He knows he’s the wisest man in the place, simply because he’s the only one aware of his own ignorance. That and the numbness creeping up his legs … and up his back …

______________________________


NB. A tip o’ the poutine-sodden solar-topee to the Poetry Foundation, who have very kindly furnished their readers with a link to this Snark Hunt. Comix lovers should reciprocate with a look at the Poetry Foundation’s on-going series, The Poem As Comic Strip. It’s an encouraging development in the often overly-commercial world of sequential art and deserves more attention and hopefully, imitation and expansion. Besides, poets are even lower than ink-stained illustrators on the capitalist food-chain, they deserve a respite.