Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[AHF <>]

Hi All,

This has to come from my leaky memory — no source code available to me at this time.

The “writing through' method of mesostic making.

Input a source text, possibly quite long. For example: The Book of Genesis. (I remember typing that into the computer round about 84 or 85, before there were online versions believe it or not. It’s a hell of a book.)

Input a mesostring, quite short, for example “Messe des Pauvres”.

Using software, scan the source text for the first word having the first letter of the mesostring but not followed by the 2nd letter of the mesostring. This is the 50% rule — which John and I certainly started out with. Most likely I did a 100% version later on, but I can’t recall if and where it was used.

Proceed on to the 2nd letter, as for the first. Continue to the end of the mesostring. Result is one found mesoword per line of the output poem.

Find all the wing words that fit the 50% rule on either side of the mesowords. Go backwards, to the left of the mesoword in the source text, stopping when the rule rejects a word. Do the same forwards, to the right. Fill in all the words on both sides up to but not including the breaking words.

Print it out on paper, then using a pencil, cross out words on the tips of the wings, left and right, that by taste you decide you can do without. The remaining words are always contiguous: you prune in from the ends, not by jumping around. (Memory alert — maybe at some point John did jump around, but I doubt it.)

Accept stanza breaks based on the word breaks in the mesostring, or not, perhaps instead breaking stanza’s for breathing when reading, or some other performative constraint, or just based on how the reading flows.

That’s it.

It’s worth mentioning that there are no chance operations involved. This is process, not chance. (Think about what that means.)

Writing-through is not the only way John made mesostics. He often just fit words around some text, often someone’s name, as they came to him, typically the 50% to 100% rule. 

It looks from my notes here that mesomake is a writing-through tool, while mesolist produces a catalogue of all the words matching each letter of the mesostring in the source text, and mlfind get’s one word for each mesoletter from a mesolist list. In any case, very different results. 

The point is: “mesostic" and "writing-through" are not synonyms.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Andrew Culver