levelheaded: Decimal Cereus

 

What is the meaning of this poem’s title? “Decimal” is a common word, though it takes on odd possibilities as a noun or adjective here. “Cereus” is decidedly less common. It’s a Latinate word that describes waxiness in several disparate species’ scientific names (a fly, a bacterium, a cactus). Based on the “Anthers” of the second stanza (and some quick google searches), we’re leaning toward the cactus here. But still, why a “Decimal” cactus? Is this a particular species? Does this point to the kind of fracture (a word that shares its root with “fraction”) we see later in the poem?

 

We’re introduced to the tangled quality of the language in poem’s first three words—“Never I saw.” We understand what the speaker’s saying. But the words aren’t organized to achieve maximum clarity. Despite its concision, “Never I saw” is odder to our ears than “I have never seen.” The words might be organized with sound in mind, but sonorousness is not their primary purpose—there is some substance behind the sound. So the question remains, why use a chopped and screwed syntax?

 

Well, the syntax slows us down. It gives the individual words a little extra weight, asking us to work a little harder to understand what they’re telling us. The effect is something like reading the florid language of 17^th century poetry. For fun, take the opening sentence to Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”

 

In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin,

Before polygamy was made a sin;

When man, on many, multipli’d his kind,

Ere one to one was cursedly confin’d:

When Nature prompted, and no Law deni’d

Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;

Then, Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,

His vigorous warmth did variously impart

To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.

 

Just as we have to reorganize Dryden’s asides to understand the method’s and motives of his sex-crazed king, we have to parse out what the speaker means when he says, “Anthers daydreamt speeding never, not I, / rods precedent beneath the radius.” “Anthers,” we mentioned, may point to plant life. “Daydreamt” (as opposed to “daydreamed”) is another stylized, almost antiquated word. It appears to passively refer to the speaker’s action, but there’s some wiggle room. Maybe the flower is also dreaming… Regardless, all is happening slowly—“speeding never” could as easily read “never speeding.” Finally the “rods” and “radius” may refer to the physical structure of the anthers, or the rods and cones of the spherical eye, in which case the speaker may be engaged in a Whitmanic consideration of a flower.

 

All this is a long-winded way of saying the poem means to say something. Unlike with Dryden, we can’t be absolutely sure what we’re being told. The poem’s ambiguity keeps it modern. But with enough time and space, we think we could outline exactly how this speaker’s mind is moving over the world. We’ll let you do the hard work, but here’s our brief summary to get you started: memory + imagination = art.

 

 

– The Editors