A meditation upon catachresis

Parts Is Parts

Corn has ears
but cannot hear.
Spuds have eyes
but cannot see.
Cups have lips
but cannot kiss.
Chairs have legs
but can't run free.

Combs have teeth
but cannot bite.
Bread has heels
but cannot walk.
Clocks have hands
but cannot clap.
Streams have mouths
but cannot talk.

I wonder why
some things
have names
that people's parts
have too,
when their parts can't
do any
of the things
that ours can do.


Thanks to my son, Sawyer, for introducing me to this poem.
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Allusion, Magic and Catachresis in the flight of Medea

(Note: This post is solely for the confirmed Ovidophile, and even he or she might hesitate. I keep finding Ovid to resonate with curious relationships of words and things, of poetry and poetics, the making and interweaving of sound and meaning. He does so in ways that draw many of his choices of character, theme, motif and story together in powerfully suggestive configurations. At least that is the argument here. It is long. You have been warned.)

allude 1530s, "mock," from M.Fr. alluder or directly from L. alludere "to play, sport, joke, jest," from ad- "to" (see ad-) + ludere "to play" (see ludicrous). Meaning "make an indirect reference, point in passing" is from 1570s. Related: Alluded; alluding.

After Medea dupes the daughters of Pelias into carving up their father, she absconds. We then get a 53-line passage that has her flying zigzaggedly among places where metamorphoses are said to have occurred. William S. Anderson suggests that Ovid did not wish to compete with Euripides in telling what next transpired in Corinth (the confrontation with Jason and the murders there), so he invents this mini-tour that allows his erudition to be displayed. It's Book 7, 350-403.

So the tour is a tissue of more than a dozen allusions, mostly to very obscure tales. (Riley's edition of Metamorphoses is helpful with some of the more obscure references in the passage.) Medea's dragons are wandering amid vague, or entirely unknown, poetic territory here. Let's look at some of these references.

Medea begins her flight near Pelion, home of Chiron, and Mt. Othrys, the Thessalian mountain from which the Titans staged their ten-year Titanomachy with the Olympians.

The mention of Othrys brings up Cerambus, a famed poet credited with inventing the sherpherd's pipes, the lyre, and great songs. Thanks only to Ovid, we know him to have survived Deucalion's flood. Honored by the nymphs of Mt. Othrys, Cerambus became arrogant, singing unflattering tales about them. Yet, says Ovid:

By the Nymphae's aid wings bore him through the air, and when the earth's great mass was whelmed beneath Deucalion’s flood, he escaped unflooded by the sweeping sea.

We'll come back to this special poet.