Essays by Robert Fuller

Writings About Writing: Opening Thoughts, by Robert Fuller

Before I begin, it must be said that I have not been active on Medium.com for nearly a year. Suffice it to say that my attention was occupied with other things, mostly, a suite of three visual design apps that I’ve been developing for the Android. (Stay tuned for more on that, once my next article is ready for posting on Medium...)

The last article I posted on Medium (4/18/2022) was “Deus-Ghost in the Ex-Machina”, which is the seventh of 64 poems in my newly-published poetry collection Etymologicon :

http://books.google.com/books/about?id=dXapEAAAQBAJ

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dXapEAAAQBAJ

On April 1, 2022, I published an essay discussing in detail the origins of my poetry collection Etymologicon from the initial set of 16 poems that I wrote, which became every fourth poem in the set, starting with the fourth one, “Quarry”. I refer you to that article if you wish to “dig” (pun intended) further—or venture down the “delf trail.”

My approach to writing is inextricably linked, in part, to my 50+ years of background and experience in the arena of classical music, mainly piano and composition.

All aspects of life necessarily involve some degree of repetition; we can easily see that in the rhythms of daily life. There is also evolution, or change, and it is in the balance of these two basic forces, along with an inevitable revolution, in the sense of return—or the feeling of return—that life and its creative energies demonstrate themselves.

This same balance of forces pertains as well to our individual and collective creative efforts as human beings. If these forces are out of balance in either direction, to any great extreme, those creative efforts, in my assessment, become to some degree or other less potent.

I can be a rather unforgiving critic of pop culture, and this is so because it is my opinion that the balance of forces of which I speak, as it pertains to pop culture, is largely out of balance in the direction of excessive repetition.

We’re all aware, certainly, of the “echo chambers” that so mark—and often befoul, pollute, and degrade—our digital world nowadays. Anyone’s vile, malicious, evil thoughts can be sent into that echo chamber, that social media amplifier, and emerge out the other end as the next trending click-bait meme thingy, the next viral plague infecting the gullible and uninformed.

But alas, I digress...

However, I have more to say about repetition (and amplification by repetition), namely, that we as a society tend to be drawn to individuals and groups who are already well-known, famous, or even infamous. This is another form of repetition, in the sense of reinforcement; it’s that old adage of “famous for being famous.”

In my considered assessment, the excessive adulation, even to the extent of worship, of those who have already become household names, does not really add anything of great cultural value to our human heritage; in fact, such obsession about already-famous people, quite often to the exclusion and ignoring of other creative voices, is in a way a detriment to our society.

There’s a whole other essay that could be written on a topic of this nature, but my final point in the arena of this excessive repetition and reinforcement of who (and what) is already famous, is that, in today’s world, it all comes down to this society’s errant and ill-conceived tendency to focus just about everything on one thing: Money (and the commodification, commercialization, and cooptation of just about anything that can be somehow converted into cold, hard currency, usually for the sole benefit of the already excessively-monied).

So, I am gradually working my way towards the actual topic at hand; this is kind of a random walk that eventually, miraculously, finally reaches the goal.

Very much related to the repetition/evolution dichotomy is this one: formula vs. process.

Once again, much of pop culture is based on the simple notion of taking what already sells and figuring out how to replicate, how to distill the essence of, whatever it was that made the thing that sold (or went viral), in order to ride that same bandwagon in copycat fashion, usually in order to try mimicking the commercial success of the “prototype.”

In cooking—or perhaps chemistry in general—a formula is similar to a recipe, albeit the former is by its nature much stricter, in that a recipe can usually be altered at whim without ruining the results, or causing great calamity.

And a process is related to a recipe as well, with the recipe being a kind of “middleman” between a fluid process (a relatively elastic way of proceeding when transforming something into something else) and a static, end-result formula that allows little or no possibility of variation.

At this point, going by my notes of a couple of days ago—although for good reason I’m not adhering 100% to the original order of those notes—I’m now getting more to the meat of the subtitle of this essay, “Reflections on Etymologicon.”

If the template for the above dichotomies is in the form static/fluid, then this next pair has to be expressed in this order: Narrative vs. descriptive.

Not every poem, not by any means, is essentially narrative in nature, and by its very essence, poetry tends to be imbued with descriptive qualities whether narrative in nature or not. But in the case of Etymologicon, by and large the balance is more in the direction of description. This doesn’t necessarily imply that the mode of description is completely static in nature, primarily because of the poetry’s rootedness in history via the agency of etymology.

Even when the poetry in this collection tends more toward the narrative end of the spectrum, it is not narrative in a conventional sense (if there is such a thing!); rather, it is narrative to one degree or another in the sense that—in contradistinction to the poems on the more descriptive end of the spectrum—mainly in that there is a distinct sense in which the language moves the reader in some kind of recognizable trajectory from one “place” to another.

Now, as to structure, my original line of thought along this line was that much of my approach to writing has undoubtedly been informed and influenced by my study of music, both piano and composition.

But then I considered the static/fluid dichotomy that has already surfaced in this essay, and it became obvious that the notion of (static) “structure” has its own kind of (fluid) counterpart, which might be referred to as some kind of “sandbox” or “playground”—or in mathematical set theory, a “universe”.

With regard to specifically musical notions of structure, there are all kinds of elements that could be brought up, such as sonata form, counterpoint, motivic development—and also the very underpinnings of music, such as melody, rhythm, and harmony, especially their foundations in acoustics and other aspects of physics.

However, in my experience in music composition, the progenitor to any sense of structure that results from such an act is in fact process. And this brings me back to the poem that started it all: “Quarry”—a search in the form of a dig wherein one explores the materials at hand in order to bring to the fore the nuggets contained therein.

This brings me to one of my central points, and for me, this point is the crux of my own personal “philosophy of poetry and writing”: In a word, resonance.

There are other words that I associate with how I like to work with language, but this one word really captures the essence of my philosophy.

What I mean by resonance in this context is the sense that there is a thickness, a complexity, of how the words are arranged and how they sound and signify within their context, such that they appear to “talk” to each other, often in ways that are not commonly seen or heard, in a kind of “feedback loop” that amplifies certain frequencies, colors, and so forth, much in the same way that feedback loops can occur in musical acoustics and other such phenomena in nature.

This “crosstalk” within the words of the poem, wherein the words are in some metaphorical sense “informing” each other—and making the proverbial whole greater than the sum of its parts—is to me, akin to how, in the best gustatory experiences I’ve enjoyed, each bite tends to bring out a completely different facet of the flavor profile of the food eaten.

So it’s all about richness and complexity. And at best, something new surfaces that perhaps was previously hidden.

My penultimate point in this essay is “merely” this: Poetry as polymathy, as composition, as music, as history, as philosophy...

Now, I wouldn’t by any means say that the above point is my final word on poetry, or my philosophical leanings in that arena, just as I would find it hard to imagine ever writing a poetry collection like Etymologicon ever again. Yet, there are certain ways in which my writing happens, with respect to both the preceding point and the one before that, that will persist throughout much of my writing.

Considering that the (sub-)topic of this essay concerns a poetry collection in the form of a treatise on word origins, my final word (for now) revolves around the word “poetry” itself.

In etymonline.com, my source for this word dig, the more useful entry—between “poetry” and “poem”—is the latter:

poem (n.):

1540s, “written composition in metrical form, a composition arranged in verses or measures” (replacing poesy in this sense), from French poème (14c.), from Latin poema “composition in verse, poetry,” from Greek poēma “fiction, poetical work,” literally “thing made or created,” early variant of poiēma, from poein, poiein, “to make or compose” (see poet).

From 1580s as “written composition, whether in verse or not, characterized by imaginative beauty ion thought or language.” Spelling pome, representing an ignorant pronunciation, is attested from 1856.

What stands out for me in the above are the references to “thing made or created”, and “to make or compose.”

It’s all music to my ears.

Toward a Philosophy of Poetry and Writing, by Robert Fuller

Reflections on Etymologicon

Before I begin, it must be said that I have not been active on Medium.com for nearly a year. Suffice it to say that my attention was occupied with other things, mostly, a suite of three visual design apps that I’ve been developing for the Android. (Stay tuned for more on that, once my next article is ready for posting on Medium...)

The last article I posted on Medium (4/18/2022) was “Deus-Ghost in the Ex-Machina”, which is the seventh of 64 poems in my newly-published poetry collection Etymologicon :

http://books.google.com/books/about?id=dXapEAAAQBAJ

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dXapEAAAQBAJ

On April 1, 2022, I published an essay discussing in detail the origins of my poetry collection Etymologicon from the initial set of 16 poems that I wrote, which became every fourth poem in the set, starting with the fourth one, “Quarry”. I refer you to that article if you wish to “dig” (pun intended) further—or venture down the “delf trail.”

My approach to writing is inextricably linked, in part, to my 50+ years of background and experience in the arena of classical music, mainly piano and composition.

All aspects of life necessarily involve some degree of repetition; we can easily see that in the rhythms of daily life. There is also evolution, or change, and it is in the balance of these two basic forces, along with an inevitable revolution, in the sense of return—or the feeling of return—that life and its creative energies demonstrate themselves.

This same balance of forces pertains as well to our individual and collective creative efforts as human beings. If these forces are out of balance in either direction, to any great extreme, those creative efforts, in my assessment, become to some degree or other less potent.

I can be a rather unforgiving critic of pop culture, and this is so because it is my opinion that the balance of forces of which I speak, as it pertains to pop culture, is largely out of balance in the direction of excessive repetition.

We’re all aware, certainly, of the “echo chambers” that so mark—and often befoul, pollute, and degrade—our digital world nowadays. Anyone’s vile, malicious, evil thoughts can be sent into that echo chamber, that social media amplifier, and emerge out the other end as the next trending click-bait meme thingy, the next viral plague infecting the gullible and uninformed.

But alas, I digress...

However, I have more to say about repetition (and amplification by repetition), namely, that we as a society tend to be drawn to individuals and groups who are already well-known, famous, or even infamous. This is another form of repetition, in the sense of reinforcement; it’s that old adage of “famous for being famous.”

In my considered assessment, the excessive adulation, even to the extent of worship, of those who have already become household names, does not really add anything of great cultural value to our human heritage; in fact, such obsession about already-famous people, quite often to the exclusion and ignoring of other creative voices, is in a way a detriment to our society.

There’s a whole other essay that could be written on a topic of this nature, but my final point in the arena of this excessive repetition and reinforcement of who (and what) is already famous, is that, in today’s world, it all comes down to this society’s errant and ill-conceived tendency to focus just about everything on one thing: Money (and the commodification, commercialization, and cooptation of just about anything that can be somehow converted into cold, hard currency, usually for the sole benefit of the already excessively-monied).

So, I am gradually working my way towards the actual topic at hand; this is kind of a random walk that eventually, miraculously, finally reaches the goal.

Very much related to the repetition/evolution dichotomy is this one: formula vs. process.

Once again, much of pop culture is based on the simple notion of taking what already sells and figuring out how to replicate, how to distill the essence of, whatever it was that made the thing that sold (or went viral), in order to ride that same bandwagon in copycat fashion, usually in order to try mimicking the commercial success of the “prototype.”

In cooking—or perhaps chemistry in general—a formula is similar to a recipe, albeit the former is by its nature much stricter, in that a recipe can usually be altered at whim without ruining the results, or causing great calamity.

And a process is related to a recipe as well, with the recipe being a kind of “middleman” between a fluid process (a relatively elastic way of proceeding when transforming something into something else) and a static, end-result formula that allows little or no possibility of variation.

At this point, going by my notes of a couple of days ago—although for good reason I’m not adhering 100% to the original order of those notes—I’m now getting more to the meat of the subtitle of this essay, “Reflections on Etymologicon.”

If the template for the above dichotomies is in the form static/fluid, then this next pair has to be expressed in this order: Narrative vs. descriptive.

Not every poem, not by any means, is essentially narrative in nature, and by its very essence, poetry tends to be imbued with descriptive qualities whether narrative in nature or not. But in the case of Etymologicon, by and large the balance is more in the direction of description. This doesn’t necessarily imply that the mode of description is completely static in nature, primarily because of the poetry’s rootedness in history via the agency of etymology.

Even when the poetry in this collection tends more toward the narrative end of the spectrum, it is not narrative in a conventional sense (if there is such a thing!); rather, it is narrative to one degree or another in the sense that—in contradistinction to the poems on the more descriptive end of the spectrum—mainly in that there is a distinct sense in which the language moves the reader in some kind of recognizable trajectory from one “place” to another.

Now, as to structure, my original line of thought along this line was that much of my approach to writing has undoubtedly been informed and influenced by my study of music, both piano and composition.

But then I considered the static/fluid dichotomy that has already surfaced in this essay, and it became obvious that the notion of (static) “structure” has its own kind of (fluid) counterpart, which might be referred to as some kind of “sandbox” or “playground”—or in mathematical set theory, a “universe”.

With regard to specifically musical notions of structure, there are all kinds of elements that could be brought up, such as sonata form, counterpoint, motivic development—and also the very underpinnings of music, such as melody, rhythm, and harmony, especially their foundations in acoustics and other aspects of physics.

However, in my experience in music composition, the progenitor to any sense of structure that results from such an act is in fact process. And this brings me back to the poem that started it all: “Quarry”—a search in the form of a dig wherein one explores the materials at hand in order to bring to the fore the nuggets contained therein.

This brings me to one of my central points, and for me, this point is the crux of my own personal “philosophy of poetry and writing”: In a word, resonance.

There are other words that I associate with how I like to work with language, but this one word really captures the essence of my philosophy.

What I mean by resonance in this context is the sense that there is a thickness, a complexity, of how the words are arranged and how they sound and signify within their context, such that they appear to “talk” to each other, often in ways that are not commonly seen or heard, in a kind of “feedback loop” that amplifies certain frequencies, colors, and so forth, much in the same way that feedback loops can occur in musical acoustics and other such phenomena in nature.

This “crosstalk” within the words of the poem, wherein the words are in some metaphorical sense “informing” each other—and making the proverbial whole greater than the sum of its parts—is to me, akin to how, in the best gustatory experiences I’ve enjoyed, each bite tends to bring out a completely different facet of the flavor profile of the food eaten.

So it’s all about richness and complexity. And at best, something new surfaces that perhaps was previously hidden.

My penultimate point in this essay is “merely” this: Poetry as polymathy, as composition, as music, as history, as philosophy...

Now, I wouldn’t by any means say that the above point is my final word on poetry, or my philosophical leanings in that arena, just as I would find it hard to imagine ever writing a poetry collection like Etymologicon ever again. Yet, there are certain ways in which my writing happens, with respect to both the preceding point and the one before that, that will persist throughout much of my writing.

Considering that the (sub-)topic of this essay concerns a poetry collection in the form of a treatise on word origins, my final word (for now) revolves around the word “poetry” itself.

In etymonline.com, my source for this word dig, the more useful entry—between “poetry” and “poem”—is the latter:

poem (n.):

1540s, “written composition in metrical form, a composition arranged in verses or measures” (replacing poesy in this sense), from French poème (14c.), from Latin poema “composition in verse, poetry,” from Greek poēma “fiction, poetical work,” literally “thing made or created,” early variant of poiēma, from poein, poiein, “to make or compose” (see poet).

From 1580s as “written composition, whether in verse or not, characterized by imaginative beauty ion thought or language.” Spelling pome, representing an ignorant pronunciation, is attested from 1856.

What stands out for me in the above are the references to “thing made or created”, and “to make or compose.”

It’s all music to my ears.

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dXapEAAAQBAJ

(Originally published on Medium, 2/14/2023)

Four Poems From Etymologicon, by Robert Fuller

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dXapEAAAQBAJ

It all began with a word dripping with multiple meanings: “Quarry”. I’d already been working on a novel of that same name; I guess I must have been fascinated with the possibilities of where such a word would lead in poetry just as much as I was in the arena of storytelling.

My intent in telling you about this, in letting you in on some of my little secrets, is to let you see some of the behind-the-scenes activities that come into play when I work. You see, work is play, this is all a play; we know how it ends—or do we? Does it end?

Analysis can be dry and relatively meaningless; it can also be a key not only to understanding how someone or something works, but also a key to how you can help unlock your inspiration as you walk this Earth in relationship to your creative muse.

The four poems discussed here from my just recently published tome bearing the rather unwieldy title of Etymologicon were the first four poems that I wrote before I knew what the title was to be or what the collection would ultimately become: a treatise in word origins in poetic form.

“Quarry” was the first, and based on the way of working that I intuited even then, was the one that led to the first sixteen of these poems, all set in quatrains, four each. Each was crafted out of its predecessor via an organic process of digging deeper and asking where to go next.

The full collection, Etymologicon, is comprised of sixty-four poems; the sixteen poems that began this adventure—from “Quarry” to “The Gear Box”—have been placed in the set as every fourth poem, beginning at number four and ending at number sixty-four.

So the number four is present everywhere here in this modest poetry collection of mine. And it all began with the word that started it all: quarry. “Quarry”, you see, is at least in part based on a word origin that includes, among other things, the number four within its secrets.

Let’s start, then, with that part of the word, both as to its definitions and where they came from. You see, there are three different senses of “quarry”, and it’s the first and third of those that have “four” hidden in them—in plain sight, once you see the word origins.

When I was crafting these first four poems, my source for the definitions and word origins of “quarry” was dictionary.com; therefore, I will show you what I found there. You will find similar definitions at any of your usual online dictionary sources, but this was the one I chose at the time.

Interestingly enough, dictionary.com includes two different sets of definitions for the three different sets of meanings for this word. There are similarities, to be sure, but there may also be some subtle differences, since the first set is American English, and the second one is British.

Let’s start with the word origins, since that’s where our nugget “four” is hidden in plain sight. The American English version of these word origins seems to be more detailed and extensive, so let’s go with that. Here’s what’s listed for quarry¹:

First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English noun quarrei, quarey, quar(r)i, from Medieval Latin quareia, quarrea, quareria, from Old French quarriere, from unrecorded Vulgar Latin quadrāria “place where stone is squared,” derivative of Latin quadrāre “to square”.

So, you see, hints of “four” are visible once you go back to Vulgar Latin and then further back to Latin. Interestingly enough, the Vulgar Latin quadrāria already points directly to places where marble and the like are mined: “place where stone is squared.” Square: a four-sided shape.

And, whereas quarry¹ is the place where square stones are mined, quarry³ denotes the square stones or tiles themselves, so the derivation is similar: First recorded in 1535–45; noun use of obsolete adjective quarry “square,” from Old French quarre, from Latin quadrātus quadrate.

I’m sure you’re aware of what the second and final set of meanings for “quarry” refers to; since it’s completely different, even though the word is the same, the derivations—and what they signify to us—are different, as well. Read this, and you’ll soon get to the heart of the matter, first recorded in 1275–1325:

Middle English quirre, querre, quirrei “parts of a deer given to the hounds,” from Old French cuiree, cuiriee, curee “viscera, entrails” (probably influenced by cuir “leather, hide, skin”), from Latin corium “skin, hide, leather”), from Late Latin corāta (plural) “entrails,” from cor “heart”.

There is a common thread, however, between all of these senses of the word “quarry”: There is a hunting for something, whether inanimate or animate, and there is also the something that is found and gathered—whether inanimate or (at some point) animate: cut stone or entrails.

In the notes I compiled in 2019, I made it clear that this first poem, “Quarry”, was in one sense a play on a kind of cycle-return (from...to...and back) aspect of existence, and its primary form was expressed in this manner: QUARRY-ESCAPE-PREY.

There is also a schematic I laid out in the first three poems: a progression from sight to sound to touch and smell, and then to taste (and tongue), and finally, to movement. This sequence also includes hidden meanings that hint at the emergence of language (hence “tongue”, or langue).

Quarries are usually, but not always, open pits from which stone, slate, marble, and the like are extracted. But before the extraction, those objects of interest or desire are typically hidden from direct view. So the primary set of opposites in my notes was this: VISIBLE-HIDDEN.

In the middle sense of the word “quarry”, if you examine its derivations, there is another way that this primary set of opposites manifests itself. Recall that these derivations involved not only “viscera, entrails” but also “skin, hide, leather”: the skin hides the viscera (as in outer-inner).

In the last two quatrains of “Quarry” there is another dichotomy introduced, that of context. My notes read thusly: outer-inner-context/earth/universe. I suppose that my line of thought was that earth was somehow “inner” and universe was “outer”—the latter “containing” the former.

I think that just about covers the main keys to my modus operandi in the writing of the poem “Quarry”. My annotations indicated that its first quatrain referred to sight, the second to sound, and the third to touch and smell. (Taste/tongue/langue came in at the last quatrain of the second poem.)

Now a few elucidations on the first poem: “What I was looking for”—this is never specified, in part because in my assessment we never really know what we’re ultimately looking for, do we?—and whatever it was, it in any case “outcloaks me”; it escapes me, literally.

So then I downplay it: “It was nothing, anyway...” We all do that, sometimes as sour grapes. But what is this “play” that happens next? When “yet somehow / It outplays me, plays away...”? What “play” is that? What does it have to do with the subject matter?

Oh, yes! The play is part of the cycle: Escape! But “away from the pollen...”? And then: “—ex cappa”? Where did these drift in? Well, we neglected to include in our word origin excavations the “escape” part of the cycle, so that’s the piece that’s missing (or hidden).

When we dig further, it turns out that ex cappa refers to the made-up word “outcloaks” and that it (ex cappa) is the derivation of “escape”: someone got “out of” the “cape or cloak”! But what about pollen!? How did that drift in? We can thank palynology (the study of pollen etc.).

What’s “cappa” mean? The thick wall on the proximal side of the corpus of a pollen grain. So it’s the outer part of what makes you sneeze. And interestingly enough, palynology as a study of particulate organic matter covers all of these: pollen counts, crime scenes, and sedimentary rocks!

That’s only the first quatrain. Then, in the first two words of the second, we see (or hear) this: “Meaning drifts...” That two-word phrase can be read in at least two ways, depending on what word you emphasize most: “meaning”, or “drifts”? So perhaps both readings are true at once.

Is “meaning” a noun? A present participle? Both? Is “drifts” a plural noun? A third person verb conjugation? Both? “Meaning drifts” reads as “signifying slow movements”, whereas the other emphasis, “Meaning drifts” reads as “what is defined floats effortlessly”.

And what is this “...from gaze to tower and back...”? Where did it come from, and where is it going (and when does it come back)? Most simply, the “gaze” was the elusive “long look” at the “thing stared at” that was nothing really, just pollen, that I was looking for but would never find.

“Tower”, though? Really!? Yes. There’s “watchtower” or “citadel” for starters, on the noun side, and if you dig into the verb side, you get not only “rise high” but also, of hawks ,“to fly high so as to swoop down on prey”—so you get sight, height, and prey all in one!

And both “gaze” and “tower” can be either noun, verb, or both. Gaze (v.): “look steadily and intently”; and tower, well, we’ve already covered that in both noun and verb forms. But with gaze and tower, who’s really looking at whom? A “gaze-hound” was a dog that followed prey by sight.

And then “...pilot-fish to osprey...”—what’s that all about? In part, old seafarers’ tales, in that a pilot fish was metaphorically thought to lead sharks to their prey, in some kind of symbiotic relationship. And osprey, a bird of prey, a sea-eagle, was also literally a “bone-breaker”.

Both forms of life, then, involving this “prey”—quarry. And the quarry-escape-prey cycle, always returning. But after this: “Meaning drifts from gaze to tower / And back, pilot-fish to osprey...” we hear something for the first time: a story told perhaps in onomatopoeia.

And in “telling / Of waves, winds, wings, and songs” we enter the realms of myth or legend, “And the swoop of the griffin...” This swoop, of the kings of beasts and birds conjoined, leads us to a strange enough place: “auspex”. An “observer of birds” or of the entrails of sacrificed animals.

But the innards are out of sight, hidden by their counterpart: quarry hiding quarry—from the earth (ground or globe, or both). You get the reference to “squared” by now; it’s the first and third forms of “quarry”. What about “squared relay”, though? Where did that come from?

Well, there’s the verb sense of “relay” and where it came from: c. 1400 (Old French), relaien, “to set a pack of (fresh) hounds after a quarry”. Note the last word. The noun form comes from this: late 14c. (also Old French), in hunting, relai, “hounds placed along a line of chase”.

So then “squared relay of pointers”—if you know that a “pointer” (and recall also the earlier reference to “gaze-hound”) is a gun dog for locating prey, usually birds—might represent a pack of hunting dogs “squared” or intent on finding whatever prey their masters were looking for.

And at the behest of their masters what was it they were looking for? Quarry, it seems, but “the place of cut stone...”!? Did those dogs take a wrong turn somewhere? Or did someone mix their metaphors? It’s “heart” to tell: it was “to locate ... the heart”—heart, at the root of quarry².

What was this “heart”, then? “The very substance of the delf trail itself.” Heart, as in “inner part of anything”—the essence, or very substance. We know the references to “trail” and “itself”. But what is this “delf” reference? It’s related to the verb “delve”, to dig: ditch, pit, quarry, mine.

So we’re still engaged in the search, and now we have hunting dogs assisting us. But will we ever find what we’re looking for? We pray, is this prey that we seek ever elusive? How will we ever find what we are looking for? Can it be found? And how do we even know what we’re looking for?

We move from Earth (globe and the ground beneath our feet) to the whole of this arising, the universe. “Parsed moment by moment by the universe...”—and this “parsed” is metaphorical, perhaps. We are possibly observed and analyzed by whatever it is we are arising within.

Or maybe it’s just a casual reference to moments passing by, mostly unnoticed, since it’s the universe “which remembers to forget in a secret place...”: time slices that have no real substance, that are just fleeting moments, that are both remembered and forgotten by whatever this all is.

And the closing lines in this last quatrain of “Quarry”, “The invisible feather perpetually beating its own wings / Floats imperceptibly inside a complete nothingness,” shows what it was that was being parsed by the universe: the paradox of that invisible feather; fleeting moments.

This is getting just a tad long-winded, but seriously, folks, the first poem of this set of four is by far the densest. The second poem, “A Maker of True Form”, according to my notes, in its first two quatrains expands upon, then collapses, all four quatrains of “Quarry”.

In those first two quatrains, there are certain key phrases that I’ve highlighted in my notes: “the trail of trial”, for instance. And the mysterious “res nata”. Also “the gem sheared of its value”. Closing with “the wall of the dig”. At the top of this page of notes: poet/etymology. And a title, crossed out: “Poetymon”.

The reference to “the trail of trial” has more than one reference. We are on a “trail” in a path of life, and it has its trials along the way. (Think Kafka, for an extreme case of that, in The Trial.) There is also the sense of “trial and error” in that we’re just experimenting, feeling our way through whatever this is.

The cryptic “res nata”, according to my notes, means “thing born”, or “small, insignificant thing”. This is what is venturing along that trail of trial, a born entity that, in the face of the universe and whatever is manifesting it, is all but insignificant.

And “The gem sheared of its value” stays in “the wall of the dig”: this perhaps is a reflection that the uncut, unquarried gem—maybe even that res nata, the one that was born—is little if at all noticed by the “dig” that gave birth to it. The “gem” is but a small, insignificant thing.

The last pair of quatrains, according to my notes, is like the emergence of language from “the wall of the dig”. You recall those ancient stories from Biblical days about a certain tower? This “emergence of language” might be related to those stories in some way. “Aahs and oohs…”

And then there’s “A joyous feeding”, which brings in taste and tongue—“a ravening gorge of tongue”, to be sure—and all of it reached by a “walk” (random, chaos, strange-attractor, fractal?) “separated by spaces and times”; encompassing all of history.

As to “ravening gorge”, a gorge is akin to a ravine (“ravine-ing” a homophone for “ravening”), and it’s also archaic for throat (from Old French), and stems from the Latin gurges, “whirlpool”. So this joyous feeding certainly makes for a full belly. And insatiable, at that.

In the first quatrain of “New Ways of Pressing Out” there is finally a hint of movement, by the final line. But first, “New ways”, creative solutions, of “pressing out”, extracting or squeezing the juice out of—out of where? Out of “the bind”, or problematical situation, or “suffering-body”.

These new ways “Enter in at the gateway”—a means of achieving a state or condition, according to my notes—“into the hidden / Initiation”, some kind of secret ceremony, perhaps, “of closed eyes and lips where / No sound tokens presently dance in symbols.”

There’s a lot packed into those three short lines. Sound tokens is my way of saying syllables, whereas symbols are, for instance, letters. Thus, they are both in a sense atomic aspects of words, of language beginning to take form from a more primordial origin, a metaphorical dance.

And they refer back to the last quatrain of “A Maker of True Form”: “Literals, from the first two to two tens with hex, / Are not splittable…” The first two: AB, or alphabet. Two tens with hex: the 26th letter, Z. Are not splittable: as letters (A to Z), atomic units of written speech.

And the quatrain just before that, which references spoken syllables, also atomic: “gatherings of / Verbs and vowels and together-soundings, / Aahs and oohs of clicks filtered down to nouns.” All of this frozen “into gatherings” via “Steadfast zeal”, form contrived “out of no particulars”.

So the dance of language itself is initially frozen, since “No sound tokens presently dance in symbols.” Language is still emerging from the primordial; it’s a preverbal state of consciousness. And closed eyes and lips, no sound tokens? My notes say: “see, speak, hear” (no evil, or anything).

In the second quatrain of “New Ways”, who or what in heck is “The mister”? In this case, it’s not necessarily an honorific, but rather, one who (or something which) mists. The clues are there in the phrase “fogs / All the vapored globe” — suggesting that forms haven’t quite arisen as yet.

But “small confidence trickster” suggests at least an iota of deception. What sort of deception? Because, after all, in some cultures, the trickster is one who possesses a secret knowledge, esoteric in nature, even; and that one may use such knowledge not to deceive but to expose the illusion.

The final two quatrains of this poem are meditations (my notes said “muses”, but mostly:) on creator-destroyer. The third quatrain’s “what is built is toppled” leads so directly to “What is formed is nullified”, which is “disappeared by / The same unknown hand that beckoned it”.

The references to “the unending deep” and “the all-pervading sleep” are simply meditations on self-existence, self-awareness, conscious existence, as beckoned into view by an unknown hand that brought to that existence—that conscious awareness—shape, color, light, and sound.

And taste, of course. Soup’s on! My notes for “Soupçon”—a very small quantity of something, and of course also French for “suspicion”—tell me that there is a thin versus thick dichotomy in soup versus stew and that “primordial soup/stew” references the Big Bang/Creation Myth.

And www.bonappetit.com, in “The Etymology of Soup and Stew”, informs me that “soup” is from Germanic roots (for today’s words supper, sup, and sop, as well) which meant “to consume something liquid”, and that a Latin word, suppa, meant “a piece of bread eaten in a broth”.

Later on, the French version came to mean both the broth-soaked bread and the broth itself. When it entered the English lexicon later on—bonappetit.com informs us that a broth without bread became the rage in the 17th century— “soup” more or less replaced “pottage” or “ broth”.

On the other hand, “stew”, when it first came from the Old French estuve, initially referred to a stove, heated room, or cooking cauldron, from Latin extufare (“evaporate”), which was from the Greek typhos (“smoke”). Then it took a wild trip from steam bath to brothel and finally stew.

Perhaps, suspiciously enough, this is part of the reason I’ve highlighted the last two words of the first quatrain, “after words”, the last two lines reading “But there have since then been too many / Substitute ingredients added after words.” Yet: soup is. Even if “not quite primordial enough to taste”.

The middle quatrains address certain existential issues that we all probably deal with from time to time. But this existence is addressed as a “circus”— complete with “admission fee” paid in order to “enter this spectacle”—and features “clowns” or “whatever would terrify”.

This all points to the central dilemma of existence, namely creator-destroyer, alluded to in “New Ways”. But in this poem, it all wraps back to food and more particularly digestion; this universe and this conditional existence is in a sense like a mother that eats its own young.

This final point becomes clearer in the last quatrain, where it is plainly laid out that this is all cycle-return, like QUARRY-ESCAPE-PREY, except in the form of a shape shifter where what once was is recycled and becomes something else. And, like the clowns, it fails to amuse you.

The “active organs / Of motion and emotive mind”—made possible by those “Heaping plates and bowls” that were transformed into them through digestion and assimilation—later become an “excess of sludge” that is “sent out to elsewhere, to both ferment and fertilize.”

Coulrophobia (extreme or irrational fear of clowns), whatever fails to amuse you (and your intolerance thereof), and bacteria all meet in this circus of stew and soup that mystifies, terrifies, and delights us all—in nutritious fermented foods, in the gut, in the soil.

In Praise of the Quotidian, by Robert Fuller

Blue oyster babies: The one cluster seems to want to grow, so I’m continuing to water it and monitor it. If the little ones don’t appear to have stunted growth, and they actually start to mature, I’ll send some photos your way. I just now took a photo, in case they actually do grow this time. What’s my best guess as to why they finally wanted to grow, if they actually do start growing this time? It might have something to do with the recent increase in humidity because of the last few days of rain.

But this cluster also looks more like what blue oyster mushrooms normally look like, which is that they have blue caps (light blue, in this case). And that’s partly a result of my having moved them a bit closer to the kitchen window; although mushrooms can’t really tolerate direct sunlight, their health and the color of their caps are positively influenced by brighter indirect sunlight, or even room lighting.

What I like about little “stories” like this about mushrooms (and the birds and squirrels in the yard) is that there’s something endearing and personal about them—if the person telling the story feels a real connection to the birds or mushrooms or whatever. It feels to me like a bit “Let me tell you a secret,” where you're inviting the reader in, into a world they maybe didn’t know they cared about, but then you tell them in a “just so” way about the intricacies of this micro world-within-a-world, and maybe for at least some of them, it clicks. And they themselves become a bit fascinated by it, too. They start feeling the connection—and then a larger sense of connection with all of this whole damn mystery that’s the world and the incomprehensible universe, yet which is also captured in full in these tiny, insignificant, fragile stories that appear here before our eyes and ears and other senses every day, if only we would notice.

The stories that are normally told are ones of great “importance” and are in general about all the earth-shattering events that we are now so completely surrounded by, with no escape—No Exit, as that famous play by Sartre about the underworld warns us—and yet, I can’t help feeling that there would be no need to tell such stories if only human beings would allow themselves to become maximally sensitive and empathic toward everyone and everything; were that to really happen, there would be no need to tell such stories because they wouldn’t be happening in all their horror and devastation and senselessness. And then people might begin to realize that the real stories, the most important ones, are not about those self-important types with grandiose ambitions and insatiable lusts and desires to in some sense do something important, or at the very least something of such notoriety that they are remembered in the dark annals of human strife and history.

Those are not the stories to tell. We need to go beyond such stories—because finally, such atrocities and self-obsessions and negativities would no longer be happening, and would no longer be tolerated. It’s the simple, modest, homely stories that are the tellable ones, and which might even serve to delight rather than petrify us. In many indigenous cultures and traditions, there were (and still are) many such stories about the lands and the spirits and the living beings and the journies through all of these, where the lands and the spirits—and all else—were simply walking meditations on the spirits and the ancestors and the living land and the mysterious, breathing, conscious, present source of all of it.

This is in part why I sometimes write in direct conversation or communication with friends, partly because I know they’re listening and they care, and partly because these friends and others are a source of inspiration to me. I in turn listen, before and after, and often, it’s by reading what others have written, that the spark of inspiration is lit.

Email Ruminations on Ephemerality

The Allure of Flash Fiction, by Robert Fuller

There is a mystique of sorts to committing yourself to writing a different story at least one a day, for a full year. You don’t know what you’re getting into, at all. You don’t know, on any given day, if you should be committed to some kind of institution. The challenges that arise in this kind of endeavor cannot be foreseen until you actually try the exercise. You will find your ability to write challenged to various extremes, of course, but you will also sigh and say to yourself, on any given day, “Now, what is there to write about?” And you will sigh and sigh and sigh again, and then something clicks, and you say “Aha!”

But the topic of the day is not even half the battle. You still have to write, write something... Anything! And when you settle down, if you are truly ready to take today’s plunge, you find that your mind becomes focused, and then in no time at all, what you were going to write about starts writing itself, at least from your perspective.

So this daily challenge is not pressure, per se, it’s more of an intense motivation that grabs you in every corner of your being and heightens your awareness of the words that you are sculpting for yourself and others to read. And you find a way to breathe, and the words flow, and it’s often in ways you never would have imagined.

It is my direct experience that the place where you choose to write whatever it is you write can profoundly affect what you are writing. Something, anything, can happen right there where you are doing your writing, and there can be a major change in direction because of whatever it was that happened. There can be a pure white dove that heads toward the fountain for a drink of water; but that was the last thing you ever might have expected to see! And then the dove becomes more than just that; and you see that what you were writing was more than just that.

So, day after day of just writing, it takes a toll on you; of that there’s no doubt. At the same time, you continue to hone your wordsmith abilities every single day, and you develop themes over time that return in different ways, and each time you finish a new Flash Fiction, even if you think it’s not all that much in the scheme of things, it becomes another seed for ideas that could feed your other writings; and any of these pieces you’ve done on a daily basis could well be the seeds for even greater and richer writing, going forward. Each of your pieces of Flash Fiction has the potential to grow into something that has as yet never been imagined. And that’s why you keep writing, despite the odds.

June 18, 2024 [18:02-18:35]

The True Nature of Translations, by Robert Fuller

There are some, maybe even many, who say that a translation of an original text is a flawed replica of the original, one that doesn’t capture it sufficiently, that doesn’t do it justice. Over time, I’ve developed a different appreciation of what a translation is and does.

For anyone who has sufficient understanding of the language to which the original is being translated, it may become apparent that the new language is not so much a flawed replica of the original, but that it gives new meaning, new nuances, to what the original text said.

Each language has its quirks, its rules, its way of saying things that can’t be said. And if you get a composite of two, three, or more of these ways of saying things, you most likely get an even more complete picture of what the original text said than that text itself, absent anything else.

There are those of us who luxuriate in these ways of saying things that can’t be said, and we swear by translations that bring things into new lights. Such translations only serve to inform us, the readers of such texts, about what such texts really mean.

Each language has its own quirks. This is a topic for another time. Yet each can inform the other in unique and unimagined ways, and these “flawed” ways of striving to say what cannot be truly said, in any language, should be embraced as the heightening of what the author already tried to say.

June 18, 2024 [19:04-19:24]

Refuge in Creative Pursuits, by Robert Fuller

I can’t speak for anyone else, but in today’s incessant news cycles, often I’m in need of a kind of cocoon, a place to go, where whatever I am, whatever I do, is incubated in such a way that hopefully something positive results from it. I am not one of those whose head has to be buried in the sand, avoiding at all costs noticing what is happening to us on a daily basis within the framework of this fragile human condition, or what is happening to the ecosystem that we, and all living beings, are dependent upon for life and for thriving and for doing better than that, by flourishing, by shining brightly, by making things better.

I am one of many who is daily becoming more elderly and perhaps more frail, to one extent or another, and the barrage of challenging news that hits us on a daily basis nowadays is sometimes very hard to process, or even deal with on any level. So, to whatever extent possible, it is my sincere feeling that we all need a refuge, a space to breathe and be, just be, so that we can replenish what we lose daily with this onslaught of disaster that has become the main item on the menu with each passing news day, or hour, or minute.

My recommendation to anyone in this type of situation is to embrace your inner creative self in whatever way or ways you can, and to spend some amount of quality time, on a daily basis, engaged in those creative pursuits that best allow you to channel your energies in whatever way you can toward a positive outcome, whatever it is you are doing. In my experience, if you have more than one way that you enjoy expressing yourself creatively, you have an important tool in your toolchest, which is that your inspiration can be fed and nurtured in two or more directions, and each spark of inspiration in any of your areas of endeavor can serve to light the kindling of whatever you are doing in your other creative pursuits.

My main cocoon, my main refuge, in the last two hundred days or so, has been the discipline of writing, on a daily basis, at least one Flash Fiction piece, and I have managed to do that through thick and thin. The logistics of making that happen can be—or at least feel—daunting. Where does the next idea come from? That is one of the most pressing issues. Yet the ideas continue to flow, and I continue to write.

Once an idea is in place, then what!? In my case, most typically, I set myself a specific start time, and a specific (yet malleable) end time, and then, once the clock has started, in most cases, I’ve entered that cocoon, that safe place where my focus shifts magically to making the illusion that I am about to make in words take tangible shape, and it’s really just then that the magic itself starts to happen, often beyond any direct control I may have imagined I had over the premise or idea before I actually started writing.

Many writers have mentioned this kind of thing, where what is written is soon beyond their direct control, and the tale told begins to take on a life of its own. My assessment, in the case of the “time trial” writing exercises that I’ve been doing for nearly two hundred days straight, is that each such instance of the story taking on a life of its own is possibly more intense than what is usually described, in that, whatever the story will be, it will last for mere hundreds of words, perhaps a thousand or more in certain cases, and the writing will in most cases take around an hour or so, give or take.

The intensity and focus characteristic of an exercise such as this requires ways for the author to empty the mind of encumbrances, at least every now and then. So I have certain other creative pursuits, and even mindless activities, that I tend to turn toward whenever the mind has become excessively burdened or cluttered with detritus. This is an important part of how it is that I’m able to refresh the creative muse of writing, to whatever degree I do, on a daily basis.

My main go-tos nowadays tend to be free improvisation (on the piano and/or synthesizer) and food prep, including dreaming up new recipes.

Mainly, what you want to do if you pursue the type of writing experiment I’ve been doing for over six months straight on a daily basis is to keep it fresh, and get your inspiration wherever you can. And have fun, lots of fun!

August 23, 2024 [15:55-16:47]

A Year Of Daily Flash Fiction, by Robert Fuller

Being that the year anniversary of my Flash Fiction experiment is a mere two weeks or so away, I thought it might be useful, at least to me, to reflect on what various aspects of this project have taught me. Roughly two weeks shy of the one-year mark, having written over 175,000 words, with at least one Flash Fiction piece every day, I can say with confidence that a project like this is both exhausting and exhilarating. My working title for this experiment, as I should make a point of mentioning, is “Flash Fiction Test Kitchen”, and if and when this experiment is published in one form or another, it will hopefully be clear to any potential readers that there are both merits and downsides to such an experiment.

In a test kitchen, at least as I imagine it, the composer of new taste sensations begins by thinking outside the box, considering ingredient combinations and novel ways of food preparation that perhaps haven’t yet been tried. And some of those approaches will prove to be excellent, while others will be maybe so-so, and yet others may end up as complete failures. The same is true, by the way, when one does free improvisation, in the field of music, or perhaps theatre, or perhaps dance. But what is gleaned from any such experiments is that even the complete failures might end up as the seed for something else that might never have been imagined if it were not for that experiment.

In the case of this nearly yearlong project of mine, I have experimented with numerous different writing styles, and, this close to the project’s conclusion, one of my main takeaways has been that much of my writing throughout this year has been essentially a kind of prose poetry. And, in many cases, there might be a kind of disconnect between the title and the main body of the text, which also tends to make such a text essentially a riddle of sorts.

Another thing that has happened during the past year or so is that from one Flash Fiction piece to the next, over time, there are themes that begin to emerge, with characters who recur at odd times without much explanation, and so there is a kind of continuity from one end of the project to the other. Much of this has to do with the fact that much of what I do I consider in a very real sense a form of music composition, in which there are motifs that not only recur but are embellished and made into variations and developed much as might have happened in a Beethoven sonata form, or a Bach fugue—or a free improvisation that seems to have no rules yet has its own interior logic and hidden patterns.

It is difficult for me to see the bigger picture, the perspective from above, so to speak, with regard to this project, being that I have been metaphorically in the daily trenches and have not yet reviewed the entire project as it now stands in a single reading. But what I can impart to you without a doubt is that the daily practice of having to write something, if taken in the right spirit, has the potential to focus the mind in ways one might not imagine possible. And this is especially true in my own experience because of the way I have normally chosen a particular starting time for the writing to begin (and usually with a set ending time) and so when the starter gun goes off my mind usually tends to be laser-focused on the writing experiment at hand.

The musical aspect of how I tend to work has in large part to do with how the words sound when juxtaposed but also how they tend to resonate with each other in those juxtapositions especially in English in which there are so many ways of creating multiple meanings by means of synonyms and ambiguities and crystal clear clarifications and so many other ways of creating a nice kind of chaos that hopefully invites one to ruminate on deeper meanings and all kinds of paradoxes without too many rules that might get in the way.

There is a chance I might have more to say about this project but let me leave you with this for now: Much of what I have written during the past year is prose poetry in which the elements have been juxtaposed to create various vignettes or paradoxes or even what you might consider a kind of parable. And much of my most recent writing (as of this date, January 29, 2025) has been intended as a sharp “political” critique of the extremely sad state of affairs that is currently the case in the United States.

For anyone who might be reading this and who might be an aspiring writer, if you happen to have writer’s block, I would strongly recommend choosing an existing text of your choice, one that you find inspiring, and using the words in that text as your selected vocabulary, which should focus your mind and your energies on finding new connections between words and phrases that no one has yet imagined. For an exercise of this type, you should limit yourself in the text you are writing to only those words that appear in the original text, and for any such word, you should limit the number of times you use the word in your text to the maximum number of times it appears in the original. And, as you can probably guess, you need not use every word from the original in the text you are writing. But the main point is for you to make poetic connections between words and phrases from the original text, while at the same time coming up with a completely new composition that is not merely some kind of paraphrase of the original.

I hope you have found this interesting and perhaps even useful.

January 29, 2025 [16:35-17:36]

A Few Reflections On Keyboard Improvisation, by Robert Fuller

There is a strong connection between three of the main aspects of music, namely, performance, improvisation, and composition—not to give short shrift to other disciplines within the sphere of music such as theory, analysis, history, and others. But the first three mentioned, as was taught to me by my PhD advisors at University of Iowa, where I majored in Music Composition, with a special emphasis on electronic and computer music, well, they are kindred spirits within a continuum. I often like to say that when I improvise, I forget just about everything I ever knew about piano performance, music theory, and the like—but that’s not necessarily 100% true, and it’s probably just more on the order of a “wish list” item.

You see, you can’t completely forget any of what you’ve learned, in this or in any other discipline, if you wish to freely experiment, relatively speaking free of the usual shackles, so to speak, of whatever it is you’ve been taught or that you’ve learned through experience. All of what you’ve experienced or learned, you see, serves to feed what you wish to do when you freely improvise. And in fact, that observation, that of somehow being fed, is one of the keys to what you are really doing when you improvise. It’s known as a feedback loop.

A feedback loop, simply stated, happens when a system of some sort—you, for example, as the improvisor—takes in signals or data or sounds and the like, and then responds in some meaningful way to that input in such a way that the output that happens afterward is affected, altered, transformed, in a meaningful way. So if you with your eyes closed begin to play notes, rhythms, harmonies, what you play next, if you listen and respond carefully enough, will be in some sense meaningfully transformed by what you have just heard.

Music performance—and in this specific case, I’m referring to the performance of a musical score written in conventional music notation within the European musical tradition—at its best embodies that same kind of feedback loop, in which the performer listens and responds to what they have played, and then that affects what happens next. And at best, you get a sensitive rendition of what the composer has so carefully and meticulously written down.

Music composition, then, within that same tradition, is the flip side of the same coin, wherein the composer is writing careful and meticulous instructions as to what the performer or performers are to perform, based on what the score stipulates within the realm of standard music notation. And so, as might be obvious, the musical score is a blueprint for a very specific design that the performer is to adhere to, which can and should be embellished in various meaningful ways by the performer or performers and how they respond to whatever happens in real time during the scope of the performance. Yet it is also true that music composition is improvisation.

Think of the artist and the blank canvas. In order for a painting to emerge from the otherwise blank canvas, the artist has to listen or look or feel, and then respond in a meaningful way to whatever impulses might come up. The composer is in a similar situation, wherein there is no set way to start putting notes on the staves on that blank music paper. Inspiration ultimately comes from somewhere, but the writing of that music, much as with the writing of a novel, or the creation of a new culinary sensation, goes in fits and starts, and in most cases the ultimate outcome is not known in advance.

So then, any compositional act is really just a performance, an improvisation, but in slow motion—not in real time. And this observation brings us to the central point, in music, in this case, that performance, composition, and improvisation are parts of a trifecta of sorts, three parts of a three-ring circus or circle, that are, curiously, directly related. They all involve feedback loops in a very real sense. Two of them happen in real time, and the other happens in slow motion mainly within the mind and heart of the composer, who is in some sense striving to create an architectural blueprint on a blank page.

And then there is the very real sense in which improvisation is in many cases an act of composition, because in most cases, it is impossible to jettison what you have learned through your various influences, which means that you are drawing upon them and in some sense repeating or otherwise reinforcing what you have learned or experienced. And so improvisation is in a very real sense “composing” music in real time.

The two main keyboards I have been using for improvisation most recently are the piano and the synthesizer—specifically, the Nord Lead 2 “virtual analog” synthesizer. I have used them both singly and in combination, and each keyboard has different attributes and challenges; and the use of both at once brings in a whole new world of possibilities and challenges.

When I improvise on the piano alone, because of the relatively homogeneous nature of the piano “sound”, I often tend to gravitate toward softer, somewhat bell-like sounds, and rather more supple, fluid rhythms. Over the years, it has been my observation that, if played softly and subtly, note combinations that might otherwise be perceived as jarring dissonances, when played at a higher volume, can be quite soothing and mysterious. And the more supple, fluid approach to rhythm can have a similar effect, in my experience.

In the case of many or most of the improvisations I do, in the moment when it happens, it is often most directly a feeling matter. The act of listening and responding is part and parcel of the feeling aspect of what I do, but what I’m referring to as feeling is also the literal touch of fingers on the keys, and the bodily movements that occur within this feedback response.

Now, the synthesizer aspect of what I do, with the Nord Lead 2, well, that’s a whole other ball of wax. You see, the main starting point, when you begin to improvise with the Nord Lead 2 and other similar synthesizers, is what you call the “patch”. I’m fairly certain that this name stems from the use of multiple patch cords on, for example, the original Moog synthesizer. In the case of the Nord Lead 2 “virtual analog” synthesizer, there are no actual patch cords, but the patch still refers to much the same thing. It’s a particular configuration of the synthesizer that, initially, results in a particular “sound”—which includes more complex combinations of various sounds, depending on how the patch has been set up.

The patch, then, on the Nord Lead 2, is the whole key to what you will get out of those keys when you play them. And then there are all sorts of knobs and toggle buttons and other controls that you can change during your improv that can be used whenever you wish. So it is very easy to change not only what keys you play and when, but also the very sound colors, the timbres, and even the rhythms and many other aspects of your real-time performance—and in many cases, it is possible that you will find yourself in a completely different soundscape than where you just were, merely at the touch of a button!

It is possible to learn how the modules of a synthesizer such as the Nord Lead 2 interact and what they do, but in my assessment it is virtually impossible to figure out how, in any given patch or configuration of that synthesizer, any given button or knob or other control will affect the next sound you get out of your keyboard.

So this aspect of the use of this type of synthesizer means that when you are performing something on it you will have to listen and respond closely and you will always have to be in some kind of intuitive mode. For me, the fact of the relative unpredictability of performing on this and similar keyboards is a great part of the charm and challenge of working with it. And the rewards can be immense; you can discover new soundscapes you never knew existed; you can improvise something that warms your heart like nothing else; you can find ways to connect to your fellow human beings through unique sounds and soundscapes that are not easily reproducible and you can hopefully warm some of their hearts as well. But working with synthesizers like this can be difficult, as well. Sometimes it can be difficult to find a patch that you can work with, and sometimes you might find it difficult to find anything at all.

When working with both the piano and the synth within the same improv, it often comes down to what the hybrid sound of the two keyboards is. And you have to adjust expectations for whatever either hand is doing with whichever keyboard, and you have to carefully listen to and respond to the sounds that come out. Yet these sounds can be some of the most intricate you might make. The two keyboards might be detuned to some extent, for example, in which case you might be creating a performance that is to one extent or another microtonal. The synth might be geared toward a regular rhythm because of its configuration, and that might end up driving what you do with the piano. And then you might end up in various types of “twilight” zones you never would have anticipated.

A final reflection, for now, on improvisation in general, is that when you add others to what you are doing, so that it’s no longer just you, you will find that what you do and how you do things is altered, since now it’s not just you in your own feedback loop, but it’s also you responding to one or more others and what they are doing, and that’s another whole can of worms. And that is both the fun and the peril of it.

February 10, 2025 [17:00-18:52]

Theory & Practice: Is a Genre-free music possible?, by Robert Fuller

The first question that this title seems to beg is just this: What is a "genre"?

Well, we all sort of know that. A genre is something that can be recognized as a something by virtue of the fact that it is in some sense a replica of something else that preceded it. So in some sense, at least in some cases, it may be formulaic. You have this, this, and this, and you plug in different variables, and you get another "this" that resembles some "song" or whatever that you've already heard before.

It's very much like a BBC piece I heard this morning about how families are being lured to movie theaters again, despite all the streaming options where they can just sit at home and watch that entertainment on their device of choice. How do the major Hollywood moguls achieve this seemingly impossible outcome? Simple! They do remakes. They do "film" versions of popular video games. They do sequels and prequels and unequels of whatever variety they can get their grubby hands on. Because it's all about making money 🤑. And it's also FAMILIAR to their target paying customers, who might not want to take a chance on some indie film that actually CHALLENGES them. And it's "family-friendly", although in my assessment in a perverse sort of way. This is one facet of a dumbing down of "culture" so that it's made merely into a popularity contest. If it goes viral, it makes money. And money is basically the only "value" left in this "society" at the moment.

As another detour in my little essay, you may have noticed that Generative AI can now create "pop" "tunes" that can be uploaded to various audio streaming sites, and that those uploads can often generate huge income streams for the "generators" of those fake tunes. Why is this possible!? I ask you to consider, in the pre-AI era, the plethora of "copyright" lawsuits filed by X, Y, or Z "artist" claiming that some Alpha, Beta, or Gamma "artist" "stole" their "intellectual property". Well! What a state of affairs that is!!! In much of our current pop "music" "culture", there are only so many ways you can manage chord progressions (usually of 3 to 4 chords each), or create "melodies", usually out of the same diatonic scale notes—not to mention the usual sophomoric breakup "lyrics" in many of these "songs"—and after a while you have to conclude that this whole commercial, highly-commercialized "music" industry is really not about anything much other than providing yet more replicas of the same thing that "consumers" are already buying... Because they already "like" it, and they want to hear something similar. Prequels and unequels and sequels.

How this all relates to music theory (and practice) is just this: Are we, as a culture, striving to just go where the money goes, or are we striving to add something of real value and significance to the aggregate of human history? I would hope the latter.

So, if you consider the possibility of "genre" as oft-repeated pattern, even to the extent of becoming a mere formula for generating yet more revenue streams for those who already control the monetary spigots, and who earn their money off of musicians simply wishing for a fair shake and a way to earn a living, why not try something that in some sense goes beyond this whole notion of "genre"? You, in other words, just being yourself.

I have zero stake in what others think of my work, yet I keep producing it, sometimes even tirelessly. And yes, to wrap back to music theory, much of what I do is necessarily tied directly to the very many things I've learned about the various facets of music theory. And then... You put what you've learned into practice. My main way, these days, is in the art of improvisation, and I've got plenty of that posted on the various Meta platforms as well as YouTube. I've been uploading a lifetime of experience in the many disciplines of music that I've studied for over 50 years online for others to hear.

My final thought in this essay to leave you with, so that you might respond to it, is this: Is it possible to have a "genre-free" music, in some real sense? In your responses, please consider everything I've talked about in this brief essay. Thanks for your interest!

August 6, 2025 (posted in the Facebook Music Theory group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/876194196241093)

Theory & Practice: The notion of the "tonic", by Robert Fuller

A quick (?) observation or two about the notion of the "tonic"...

I've been considering the idea of "tonic-as-resting-place" in the context of improvisation.

If you've listened to enough rock and pop songs of various genres, you may have noticed that, while the song is mostly or completely in a particular key, fairly often, instead of the song ending on the actual tonic (I) chord, typically it will end on something like the subdominant (IV), so, relative to Classical theory, it never does resolve to the usual chord.

But in my recent improvisations, what I've been noticing is that the sense of "resolution" or "return" in many cases has nothing to do with the key center, the main chord in a key, mostly because the improvisations I tend to do are not, strictly speaking, tonally-based. Yet for some reason or other, many of them seem, at least to me, to have a real sense of "resolution".

So, what I've gathered listening back to many of these improvisations is that there may be a different sense of what we call the "tonic"; it's a point of arrival, but the significance in the case of what I'm referring to is not anything that has anything directly to do with tonality (or modality); rather, it's the sense of arrival at a finishing point by some other means, including, for example, a rhythmic "setup" (such as a slowing of the tempo), or a particular use of dynamics, or a combination of factors. You also have to consider the ending point in the context of the underlying "logic" that's been set up in the improvisation. Each improv has its own particular "logic", in my estimation, and in the way I work, there's a continual feedback loop whereby I'm intently listening to what I've already done and responding to what I hear. And so, within any particular time constraints, I'm listening to where the improv is going and kind of "predicting" where it will end up.

I hope this is of some use to somebody...

August 13, 2025 (posted in the Facebook Music Theory group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/876194196241093)

Theory & Practice: Rigid rhythm versus fluid rhythm, by Robert Fuller

Not that it matters to anyone else, but in certain modes of improvisation I enter into, I tend to find myself in a more fluid notion of what rhythm is. It's free-flowing, like water in a stream or river, and it just flows within its own logic, if there is a logic.

Much of our written-down or otherwise performed music is set in a kind of strict beat pattern, kind of military, in a way, troops marching to a single beat. Yet, when the written-down music is interpreted by those who feel what it really is, there is a give and take in how those beat patterns end up sounding.

On the other hand, the highly-commercialized music is often strictly "in time", with no give and take in how the rhythms flow—or don't.

In the best of circumstances, for example in free improvisation in which the improvisor is in "the zone", the fluidity of rhythm is clearly perceived, and you may not be able to make "sense" of what those rhythms are, yet you might still feel them. This is an example of what I refer to as fluid rhythm. Other examples include the liberties that performers take when interpreting written music, when they allow themselves what you might call "breathing room".

An overly-mechanical approach to rhythm, such as when bands make excessive use of drum machines, for example, just makes whatever music that's being made, to whatever extent it even happens, come out as sounding mechanistic, as if a machine cranked it out.

Nevertheless, there's definitely a fine line between "fluid" and "rigid" approaches to rhythm. They both have their place.

September 10, 2025 (posted in the Facebook Music Theory group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/876194196241093)

Theory & Practice: Masking, "Overtones", and Composite Timbres, by Robert Fuller

These ideas stem from my recent work in improvisation, which might seem a bit far afield of Music Theory, but my observation is that most or all of the practice and theory of music originated in, and even continues as, the art of improvisation.

Another thing that is true of Music Theory, at least in my knowledge and experience, is that it's not as a field limited to the harmonic, rhythmic, melodic, and/or formal facets of music analysis, but that it's actually more all-encompassing than that. Musical acoustics, for good reason, has been mentioned within this group; it's a fundamental underpinning of virtually everything else that we call Music Theory.

There are certain facets of music that are easily overlooked when the emphasis is primarily on scales and modes and chords and functional harmony. One of those is timbre, which in larger ensembles of musicians becomes the theory and practice of orchestration.

So what I've been noticing recently with regard to my most recent improvisations involving both piano and synthesizer is that I've started to develop a tendency to create "hybrid timbres", within which there is a kind of melding of the piano sound with whatever sound the synthesizer is producing concurrently.

Part of the way this works is what I'm referring to as "masking", wherein one of the two (in this case) component sounds is to some extent or other at a lesser volume than the other; in the improvisations that I've been doing, it's usually the synthesizer sound that takes a back seat to the piano, although it can work either way. In certain cases, for example, you can hear the piano sound prominently enough that whatever the synthesizer is doing sounds in some sense as "overtones" of the timbre of the piano; thus, it's like a composite timbre that can be perceived as an "enhanced" piano timbre. Sometimes there might be a bell-like aspect to that enhanced piano timbre, or perhaps in some cases a more "ghostly" or spectral sound, or the composite sound might resemble a piano sound with a flutelike sound "grafted" onto it.

In cases where the piano sound is of lesser volume than that of the synthesizer, it's usually more of a "masking" effect, so that there are hints of a piano sound under a kind of "blanket" or "shroud" of whatever sound the synthesizer is producing.

What I'm imparting to you, in my opinion, relates pretty directly to the art of orchestration in its broadest sense; I say this in part because it's been my observation that an artful melding of piano and synthesizer, much of which can depend on the nature of the synthesizer "patch" being used, ends up sounding, at least to me, as if the composite had been orchestrated. It sounds to me, often, as a strange kind of orchestral music, even though it's only two keyboard instruments that have been utilized. The reason for this is primarily because of the complexity of timbre that can be achieved with the synthesizer I've been using, the Nord Lead 2. In fact, using just the synthesizer itself, an experienced practitioner can create the illusion that there are two or more different sounds being produced simultaneously.

I hope this post is interesting or even useful to at least a few. Let me know your thoughts.

P.S. There are plenty of examples of my improvisations combining both keyboards; they're available in my Instagram, Facebook, and Threads feeds, as well as on YouTube. The easiest way to find them is probably a search on "Keybologues". Cheers 🥂!

December 16, 2025 (posted in the Facebook Music Theory group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/876194196241093)

Theory & Practice: When Is a 4-Voice Fugue Not (Always) a 4-Voice Fugue?, by Robert Fuller

(NOTE: the pages of the score (with certain passages highlighted in light green) appear at the end of the essay.)

The f minor Fugue from Bach's WTC I is notable in quite a few respects, one of which is certainly the radically chromatic (almost 12-tone) nature of the Subject. And the form of the Fugue is masterly in other ways, as well.

For a 4-voice Fugue, this one spends quite a bit of time in only three of the voices at a time, including the "interludes", so to speak, when neither the Subject nor its Answer is present.

Now, in many or most cases of the Fugue structure, if you have four voices, the Fugue exposition will typically feature Subject, then Answer, then Subject again, and then the final Answer—where "Answer" is most often the Subject, but transposed from the tonic to the dominant. Curiously enough, when doing a cursory analysis of this Fugue just recently, I'd somehow neglected to really notice that not only does the fourth voice not enter immediately after the first three—there is a rather extended interlude before it enters—but when it does enter, the fourth voice comes in not as an Answer (at the dominant), but as another iteration of the Subject! (See the highlighted bit at measure 13 in the first page of the score.)

After that iteration of the Subject concludes, there is more of an interlude (in only three of the four voices), and then at measure 19 (still page 1), the second Answer finally comes in—but we're still in three voices.

At the conclusion of that second Answer, the interlude remains in three voices, and then, at the end of measure 27 (page 2), the Subject comes in again in the Bass. Once the Subject is done, we're back to an interlude in only three voices (measure 30).

And then the structure of the Fugue enters the realm of the relative Major, at measure 34 (at the beginning of page 3), where the Subject comes in using all four voices—followed by another 3-voice interlude. And the Major rendition of the Fugue structure concludes with an Answer in the dominant of the relative Major, at the end of measure 40 (still page 3).

And then Bach makes some of his interludes play out in four voices (end of page 3, starting in measure 42, highlighted in green), which leads us in measure 47 (page 4) back to the dominant of the main key, f minor. Wow! I hadn't noticed that detail until just now! It almost seems to me like a kind of retrograde of the Subject-Answer episode in the relative Major! Because after the "Subject" version of the theme in the dominant concludes, and there is another 3-voice interlude, the final statement of the Subject, again in the Bass, brings us to the final denouement, a final episode (interlude) that resolves nicely into a tierce de Picardie.

~~~

Many thanks to open source and crowd-source software and other resources. The score of the Fugue is courtesy of Mutipia. The PDFs were converted to JPGs and then cropped. And I used GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) to add the yellow and green highlights. Yellow is used to denote the Subject or Answer in a fourth voice after a 3-voice interlude. Green is used to denote a 4-voice interlude or episode that extends the use of four voices after such a Subject or Answer.

February 2, 2026 (posted in the Facebook Music Theory group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/876194196241093)

Theory & Practice: Random Musings About "Form", by Robert Fuller

Since the topic of "form" has surfaced recently within this Music Theory group, I thought I may as well add my two cents to the mix (as if I haven't already done so).

What you may (or may not) wish to consider is something like this: Is your notion of "form" a notion that what you call "form" ought to have clearly delineated "sections" such that you can easily identify that, this is the A section, this is the B section, and then we get some kind of hook or chorus, something that's repeated enough times that it becomes someone's earworm? Which is to say, do you want to have repeated sections of your "song" or musical composition such that it's easily wrapped up in some kind of package that says "form"?

There are many different ways that music can be structured, some of which are quite regular, even to some lesser or greater degree repetitive and some of which are more evolving over time, such that one thing morphs into another which then changes into something else you hadn't expected. You are free to express your own notion of form however you wish. But what you (we) call form is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Beethoven, as one prominent example—and what he did was pretty highly influenced by his predecessor Bach, among others—was very much into the notion of not just repetition, but of development, wherein one motif, whether melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, timbral, or any of the various combinations of those, could be reimagined and let's say even reincarnated as something else—but bearing a resemblance, nevertheless, to the material it was based upon. This is a form of magic, of alchemy, wherein what once may have been such-and-such was transformed into something else that was of similar affect, but which was also something unexpected, and something that brought a new life into that music.

And so here I'm going to tell you that there is nothing that is without form. It all depends on what you yourself signify by "form"; I would hope that that would be obvious. But the thing that I'm saying here is that anything in sound or in any other medium that is within the realm of human perception and understanding and the like, any such phenomenon has some kind of form. The key is this: Are you (any "you") able to perceive the form in question.

So this inquiry necessarily has to go further into the question of what you (any "you") considers to be music; to be form.

My plan, as of the time of this writing, is to follow up with another article (or articles) that addresses some of the ideas broached in this article, in greater detail, and within other realms of musical theory, thought, practice, etc.

But for now, I leave you with a leading question, or questions, something like this, or these: Given an instrument like, for example, the vibraphone (and in my improvisations I've been using a vibraphone setting on my electric Yamaha keyboard), what is/are the primary aspect(s) of what you call "form" when you hear such an instrument? Would that be melody? Harmony? Rhythm? Timbre? Some combination of the aforementioned? (Hint: my primary focus, at least in some cases, might be timbre.) And in the case of synthesizer music, the same questions would pertain. But, in the case of synthesizers having certain capabilities, it needs to be pointed out that the various facets of how music and sounds are built up—including pitch, timbre, rhythm, and so forth—all exist in some very real sense as part of a continuum, governed by frequency and time, in various aspects of time... It can very easily be demonstrated on certain synthesizers that if you take a sound that is sequenced at a certain rate of rhythm, let's say 4 beats per second, if you increase that rate to 20 beats per second or greater, the resulting sound will no longer be a rhythm; it will be more of a timbre or (especially) a pitch. So what happens in music or sound is on some level or other part of a continuum.

There are other questions that ought be considered in the arena of musical form. Hopefully I've planted a few seeds this evening.

March 3, 2026 (posted in the Facebook Music Theory group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/876194196241093)

Theory & Practice: The Importance of Metaphor in Music Making and Music Theory, by Robert Fuller

The various standardized, formal approaches to the study of Music Theory (including music analysis) and various other aspects of the arts of music making are all very useful tools for the understanding of how music is structured, how to interpret it either on the page or aurally, how to combine various elements of the language of music in composition and improvisation, and so forth. And I'm definitely interested in such formal takes on what Music Theory is.

Any study of Music Theory, at any level, in any genre, is useful as a tool for helping you understand how music "works" in whatever ways you are able to apply what you have learned either to help you create your own music or analyze various aspects of other people's music (and even your own) or even to understand how music has changed through the centuries or how it differs from culture to culture. Essentially, as with anything else in life, the more tools you have available for whatever you are studying or putting into practice in some way or other, the richer your experience may be.

My focus in this essay is in essence to "push the envelope" beyond whatever confines there may be in the context of formal approaches to Music Theory and other aspects of music making.

I may not achieve in this essay the fullest extent of what I'm getting at, but it should at least be a start.

I suppose I should start out by explaining part of the motivation I had in writing this, which was to explain some of the comments I've made and some of the interchanges I've had with others in this group regarding what seems such a basis facet of Music Theory: the tonic, which in much of Classical Music traditions is in some way the central focal point of the harmony of the work of music in question. In much music of the Western Classical Music Tradition, the tonic of a work or a movement within a work is both the beginning point of the work, harmonically and melodically speaking, and also its ending point. In my interchanges with others in this group, I made the observation that the final chord or sound or whatever else, the point of resolution at the end of a work, need not be a tonic (usually major or minor) chord or equivalent. I had been reviewing quite a few of my improvisations, on piano, synthesizer, and other various keyboard instrument settings, and it became clear to me that in most of what I reviewed, there was the feeling, at the end of the improvisation, of arrival, a feeling of the satisfaction of having arrived at the end of a journey.

In quite a few cases, the point of arrival was, let's say, an augmented chord (rather than major or minor). In other cases, it may have been some kind of strange synthesizer sound.

So I suppose my first hint in the direction of metaphor—metaphor that I hope can further one's understanding of musical form—is the art of story telling. Thus, the arrival, the resolution, is like that of a novel or other work of fiction or theater. And in music, we have certain vocal genres that are very much about just that—story telling. Some of the most prominent, as you know, are various country and folk genres.

Another important facet in this metaphor or set of metaphors I'm pointing toward is that of flow, of fluidity. It's been my observation over the decades that in much of pop musics that are highly commercialized, there's always an incessant regular beat—and for some people, the absence of that might mean for them that what they hear isn't really music. The various types of music making that I've been most interested in over the decades are the ones in which there is, for example, a stretching of the timing of the beats, a lingering here and there in order to accentuate some facet or other of what is actually happening in the music. And I'll give you an important case in point in my own music making when I'm playing the music of Bach, which is that, first of all, I love to play much of his music as softly and slowly as possible, within reason, generally in order to be able to linger on and accentuate the various dissonances that occur throughout his music.

Another aspect of this flow, this fluid approach to music making, has to do with what often occurs in various ambient musics, trancelike musics, which is that there aren't very many, if any, distinct articulations of a beat; rather, the sounds are more like the flow of water or other fluids, wherein one sound color gradually becomes another, and you feel like you're floating in some sense.

And in quite a few of my piano improvisations, I make ample, often continuous use of the sustaining pedal, so that harmonies continue sounding and blend into one another, as if they're part of an oil painting or a watercolor painting in which colors have been blended and blurred together.

This brings me to another part of this journey of metaphor in Music Theory and music making, which is at least peripherally if not directly related to synesthesia, which, as you know, is the experience of one or more additional sensory excitations in response to a single sensory input. As in when people see colors or images when they hear music, for example. Now, I don't claim to actually be a synesthetic per se, but my imagination in any case entertains the possibility. So what I'm getting at—and which I've already alluded to when I mentioned music and storytelling—is that in my experience, it's useful to allow yourself to be inspired by the various other arts (and even sciences, of course) in terms of how you experience, describe, and create music.

Speaking of sciences, there's been some discussion within this group every now and then of musical acoustics. And I believe there's even been discussion of the various facets of music, including rhythm, pitch, and timbre, among others, existing along a time continuum such that rhythm, if sped up sufficiently, becomes pitch or frequency, and complex cross-rhythms, if sped up sufficiently, become timbre.

So this brings me to harmony and how in certain situations it can actually be more like timbre—sound color. In quite a few of my piano improvisations, I somehow settle on what I would call bell-like sounds. A bell-like sound is in general a timbre in which the partials are inharmonic—in other words, they're not related to each other as integral multiples of the fundamental pitch. (An example of integral multiples of the fundamental 440 Hz would be 440, 880, 1320, 1760, and so forth—each successive partial is generated by multiplying the fundamental by 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth.)

If you have bell-like sounds or other sounds that have various inharmonic partials, how does such a sound "function" in functional harmony? So my treatment of sounds like that, including the many strange sounds you can produce with a synthesizer, is as more of a flow and less of a rigid, tightly controlled rhythmic structure.

One final thought, regarding other arts, is that you could consider the various timbral facets of sound as "ingredients" that you combine in a recipe; they have different auditory "flavors".

As I hope you can see, the use of metaphor in Music Theory and music making can possibly serve to broaden your understanding and appreciation of how music can be made, understood, appreciated, and brought to new, previously unexperienced levels.

March 10, 2026 (posted in the Facebook Music Theory group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/876194196241093)

Preface to “Skeleton Key”, by Robert Fuller

NOTE: I am including this Preface to Skeleton Key to a Poetry Collection You’ve Never Heard Of (Until Now) primarily because it further elaborates on what is revealed in the essay “Four Poems From Etymologicon”; the third paragraph of this Preface even touches very directly upon themes that are central to my Flash Fiction piece “Clocks”, namely, the chess-piece-related notions “... castle, citadel, chapel ...”. So this Preface is a kind of meta-essay on my workings with language and etymology in Etymologicon as laid out in the essay “Four Poems From Etymologicon”. A link to the PDF of Skeleton Key to a Poetry Collection You’ve Never Heard Of (Until Now), which includes quite a few more links, will be posted shortly, right after this Preface. The PDF also includes some interesting imagery.

~~~

Before I say anything else, I should acknowledge that for the first digital edition of this book, the four essays published herein are essays that I originally posted on the Medium.com website. Also, for the curious: How to pronounce “Etymologicon”!

The experience of reading Etymologicon can vary from person to person (and even for the same person reading it at different times and in different moods).

To me, it can be akin to walking through a “place of cut stone” that perhaps resembles a fortress, castle, citadel, chapel, chateau, or cathedral; or along the “delf trail” referenced in the poem (“Quarry”) that started it all; or along the “trail of trial” in the next poem in the set, chronologically-speaking (“A Maker of True Form”).

“Trial” is after all at the heart of the human experience, as is search. This entire life, human beings knowing as they do that it is ephemeral, fleeting, bounded, and subject to cessation at any moment without warning, is a real ordeal. So the historical “delving into” language and what words really mean (or meant) that so deeply characterizes how this poetry was written (and also how it is perceived when it is read with careful consideration) is in some real sense a reflection of that fact, at the same time it is an attempt (vain, perhaps) to go beyond the limitations of time (and space) that are in some mysterious way at the heart of whatever immense force is manifesting all that appears and disappears as what we call life.

And what do you do as you wander through this strange land filled with so many anachronisms and artifacts and ideas juxtaposed so seemingly haphazardly? At times, you may not know exactly where you are, although you might see certain reflections of things you’ve already encountered in some of the other rooms of this ancient (and simultaneously modern) mansion.

You might, thus, consider each of the sixty-four poems in this mansion to be rooms that you are wandering through in a kind of dazed, hazy “random walk” somewhat resembling a house of mirrors, a fun house; and at times it’s disorienting enough that you have no idea where you are or how you got there.

There are two (maybe even twin) title poems in Etymologicon. Near the middle of the set is the actual title poem (“Etymologicon”), whereas the very first poem (“Etymon Eccentrics: Strange Attractors”), which is closely related, is some kind of shadow or doppelganger of the title poem itself.

The journey begins, in the first poem, as “Endless whimsical circlings” (and by the end of its first quatrain, you see that those circlings are “like an odd duck surrounding its own quack”). So this first poem really serves to set the stage for all the other rooms that you will visit, should you choose to do so.

Meanwhile, guiding you through this peregrination, if you’re attentive enough to notice, are the sixteen original pillars, the structural supports for this mansion that you’ve somehow found yourself in: namely, every fourth room!

There is a rather clear path from “Quarry” to “The Gear Box” if you simply start at the former and leapfrog your way to the latter, stopping only at every fourth room. The addition of all those intervening rooms, although bewildering to an extent, serves to enrich your expedition, just as long as you keep your compass and your map oriented in the proper direction.

One of the principal reasons I have made “Four Poems From Etymologicon” such a central focus of this collection of essays is that I wish to divulge how it is that I work with language; what motivates me; how I think and where I get my ideas from; and so forth.

This is in the hope that others might find these ideas at least to some degree useful and inspiring. (And as possible icing on the cake, that they might also be inspired to read or experience some of my writings and other creative endeavors discussed in these essays, perhaps even by buying one or more of my books.)

I am also keenly interested in opening up some very much overdue discussion about where human society is at in these trying times.

During my Ph.D. studies (in Music Composition, including electronic and computer music) at the University of Iowa, I was fortunate and blessed to be studying under two Doctoral advisors who were knowledgeable in many diverse fields, and who very much stressed being politically aware and capable of using the critical thinking abilities that we have all been graced with to one extent or another (but which in some circles seem to be all but shunned and mocked, as if to avoid this kind of critical thinking were somehow to be worn as a badge of honor).

My thinking along these lines is usually focused on a very simple question: What do we really want human society to look like?

So, the opening essay in this ebook, which was the first article I ever published on Medium, although it’s entitled “In Celebration of Polymaths”, begins in a way that might be considered a tad unusual: with a rather pointed critique of how things are being run in this neo-Darwinian “capitalist” system that is worshipped and lauded, mainly by those with the most skin in the game.

The point is not by any means to simply point fingers at what is wrong with the system and just leave it at that; the point is to begin to ask the very real questions that we all ask (or ought to ask) concerning how this society, this culture, this world, could be so much better than what we (most of us) are suffering through.

And in my estimation, much of it comes down to making most effective use of everyone’s talents and abilities, to the maximal extent possible, even those that are now hidden from view.

I will continue to ask such questions, and I will continue to ask others to join in asking such questions, so that we can begin to manifest dreams like those given voice to by Martin Luther King Jr. in his vibrant voice, and by so many others who wish the best for all of humanity (even though in the present status quo none of that seems like anything but an impossible dream).

My writing (and other artistic) efforts are focused on giving something useful back to humanity, to the best of my abilities, and I would hope that most of us who are living within the ordeal of this human condition would feel likewise.

Dreaming without rain droplets. The rain had subsided. How to dream it back?

(From “A Feast for the Senses” and other writings , by Robert Fuller.)

The present ebook is dedicated to the many kindred souls who wish to help make individuals and society at large within this fragile human experiment the best that we can be, within whatever time is allotted to each of us, to any of us, to all of us.

I will continue to offer this ebook as not only free of charge, but also in a sense as a form of what’s called “open source” (normally in the software world, but in other arenas of human endeavor as well).

In that spirit, I welcome an ongoing conversation about the cultural, societal, artistic, artisanal, political, humanistic, and policy-related issues (as well as many other similar topics) that I’ve begun to address within this modest tome.

Whereas I’m not 100% sure at this point in time the exact nature of what such a conversation might look like, my idea for the moment is to welcome essays from my readers that are thoughtfully crafted and considered, for possible publication.

I was originally going to say only that I plan to release subsequent editions of this free ebook that include additional essays of mine that cover many of the issues and topics already mentioned, but it occurs to me that you might also have something to say.

So the “possible publication” referred to earlier means possible publication, in the second and subsequent editions of this free ebook, of your own well-considered essays, so that we may truly continue and expand upon this much-needed conversation.

Stay tuned for what may happen next...

2023

“Skeleton Key” PDF (essay collection) © 2023 Robert Fuller

This is a link to the 2023 essay collection of mine, Skeleton Key to a Poetry Collection You’ve Never Heard Of (Until Now), including all images and links.Enjoy!

You should be able to access the PDF in a separate tab using the link below.

Skeleton Key to a Poetry Collection You’ve Never Heard Of (Until Now) (complete PDF)

Theory & Practice: I'm not really all that much into the tuning standard debate. But I do have my beef. , by Robert Fuller

NOTE: The posting in the Facebook Music Theory group was in some sense in response to a number of different postings in that group wherein the people posting their essays or comments were advocating for a tuning standard based on 432 Hz rather than 440 Hz. Whereas I did not really take sides in that debate, I had other issues to gripe about...

And this will be brief.

Let's not talk about frequency issues for the time being. Let's talk about amplitude.

As someone who tends to prefer relative quiet, even the occasional bout of silence, my beef is simply this: The over-amplified playing of recorded music is an act of aggression, as far as I'm concerned. (The person who wants to play over-amplified music over a car stereo or whatever else, that's their business... Unless it becomes my noise pollution, and an intrusion into my sonic world and that of others.)

And these acts of over-amplified aggression are typically experienced by me (and others, I'm sure) in the context of people driving by the yard with their vehicle stereos at full blast, and not only that... Many of these drive-by vehicles are totally muffler-challenged!

To wrap this up, I've been noticing, more and more these days, a kind of sonic "road rage", wherein there seems to be a competition, among certain types, to have the loudest vehicle possible, and usually paired with the loudest over-amplified pre-recorded music possible. Loud enough, often enough, to set off car alarms in the immediate vicinity. And the worst culprits I've observed are those really noisy motorcycles with the ultra-high volume speakers that blast you to Kingdom Come. Just what is the message these people are imparting? I can only conclude that they're acting out their aggressions on others. Either that, or they're completely oblivious to the concept of being courteous to others.

March 10, 2026 (posted in the Facebook Music Theory group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/876194196241093)