Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, set just upstream, the favorably disposed citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.

coil The controversial Barry Coat of Arms

The controversial
Barry Coat of Arms

coil

March madness

Without contradiction the Barry Family itself lays no claim to the notorious Barry Coat of Arms.

That distinction belongs to another group entirely which has — confusingly and somewhat arbitrarily to the Barry way of thinking — the same name.

Just this sort of confusion was predictable; was in point of fact predicted, by progenitor Barrys during the whole long harrowing controversy of the Naming.

Long the Barry Family had remained unnamed. It was a selective and serious unnaming, a considered public posture, that they might be called things, many things, by all the others, as they so often were down the ages following the Discovery of the Barry Family, but declined to name themselves.

It was a relict thing, that posture, a nicety most likely assumed in forgotten days before the bogs, even, but it was the standard posture and they, the members of the Barry Family, held it convincingly enough all down the millenia until they came to Ireland. What a profound thing it amounted to, that consequential remove from the range of the unnamed, and what a profound and lengthy time they had of arguing for it and against in the throes of the Naming.

It was given to the Barry Family that naming was a religious act, the central act of the human ceremony, in which and by which object and symbology received each from one another mutual blessing in momentous sacral union, at least in theory. Self-naming in particular was a reserved act, acute and private.

In practice of course, the members of the Barry Family, driven by a mildly irritating but apparently unavoidable inclination toward neologism, had more words than they knew what to do with at any given moment, a great store of the things readymade by back and fore and side formation, built on whim and fancy or the authority of others, words like gerf and trall and pob which never saw use at all, and others which, when trotted out even in the most gerful tralation, wilted in the shadow of more successful constructions, thus failing to remain applicable. The Standard of the Barry Family in this regard was utterly relaxed: naming went on all the time. But it was a relaxation that had slumped and hardened around the principle that the Barry Family could name anything, but nothing could name the Barry Family.

And yet, the members of the Barry Family turned to doing just that, to naming themselves both anyway and publicly when they first arrived in Ireland, and a fearsome bother it was for all concerned.

During the entire engrossing crisis of the Naming letters were exchanged, of course, and though the materials were primitive, and do not survive, the gist of what they must have contained is well recalled, as they expand readily enough from their famous slogans in three directions.

The slogan "No We Say," broadly applied to a class of letters, their authors and adherents ranged in opposition to the plan of Naming. Overall this group might be described as traditionalists, if not doing something in and of itself constitutes a tradition, which in the given instance might be the case. These letters and those who endorsed them are commonly catalogued according to spleen, spanning the spectrum of vituperation from curt missives spelling out the mildest brief no, to the formidably voluminous expressions of complete and comprehensively detailed opposition to which that portion of the Barry Family, in common with all the members of the Family, was more habitually inclined.

Counterpoised against "No We Say" in a rough triangle of conflicted sympathies were two other herds of thought weighed down with their own defining slogans.

"Tell Me What to Say" was vertex C, let us say, in this triangle, and represented those growing numbers of them who had a Christian bent. The slogan was nothing if not scurrilous to their belief, of course, having been crafted for just that purpose by their opponents in a cutting reference to the slur known to all as offered by Nonnos against their Christ.

It will take longer to describe the slur than it did to engage the ire of those targeted by its pronouncement in that age.

That so much of mediocre Nonnos has survived down the ages which have so contrarily arranged for the utter loss of almost all of superb Sappho drives home the unavoidable truth that there is in the end no accounting for taste. Why does his Dionysiaca survive, and his Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, and not her limpid lyrics, now forever erased from human ken?

Just because, we are inclined to believe. Just because.

Nonnos is a bad writer: Nonnos may have simply blundered with customary inelegance across the wordspace and into the cruel phrasing at the crux of the crucial slur by umitigated mischance, a salient feature of his style being the intractably serpentine circling of the point to be made without actually just going ahead and bluntly saying what might be said directly which characteristically afflicts his writing throughout.

He could not have said simply, it most likely never occurred to him to say simply, "Crucified, He then suffered." No.

Rather, he has it that Christ in his agony turns to no one in particular and says, "Tell Me what to say . . ." before his voice trails off forever.

Exactly how profoundly heretical is this nonce of Nonnos?

Very, very profoundly heretical indeed, whatever Nonnos' talentless intent, was the firm view of those branded by the slogan, "Tell Me What to Say."

"Tell me what to say," indeed!

Oh, the imputing insult rankled, and was meant to, yes.

This is not to say the Barry Family was unused to insult. Not in the least. Like all their kind, members of the Barry Family were called Pigfondler and worse by one and all in public.

Undeniably and in stipulated point of fact they lived with pigs, becoming accustomed over the millennia to all the many and variously nuanced references to the embedded conjuction of pig and Barry Family deployed in the language of near neighbors and most anyone else happening by that part of the Paris Basin in the long millenia of the Barry Family stay. Without fail the Barry Family was called names based on the overriding dialectic of the pig, and indeed, in attending to their own interests in the matter with close if characteristically gradual attention over the ages came to the eventual conclusion that there was great merit in much of what was said, shorn of the barbed accents of others.

The others, near neighbor or not, constantly ranged through their own chosen languages for the exacting name for the comprised lot of them, of Barrys, that particular patch of patently pig-possessing people in that one particular portion of the Paris Basin. There was never a dearth of common pig-referencing phrases to be had in the common bin of parlance for the Barrys.

They had been named insultingly before, those burdened with this slogan had, is what we mean to suggest.

It wasn't that. Somehow "Tell Me What To Say" cut closer to the quick than the standard they averred might be allowed.

Considering the customarily garrulous and willful meanspiritedness entertained by all their neighbor's namings and the font of democratic insult from which it derived, of which the incident Barry Family was by all reasonable measure recipient of but a meagre share of that quotidian torrent of it precipitating everywhere in their speech, it was on the order of their first public service that the Barry Family so readily allowed such words to go unpunctuated by the corrective stave.

Here though, now, with these words, some unflensable chancre was admitted. It burned. It supperated and it burned, the slogan did.

A profound effort was made by those among the Barrys bearing the sore of this troubling wording to mitigate the slur, offering up an exegesis of the phrase in which "Tell Me what I Say . . ." (for so they had it) encompasses Christ's main new commandment: that, having taken up the Word of God, the communicant is —urged? implored? advised? enjoined? — to tell it back.

For who, inhabiting the place of one of those few gathered in witness of His duress, would not, even given the fact that they were not being directly addressed, that in awful truth no one in particular was being addressed, would not, out of whatever meager store of compassion was their share, hearing those sad last words, respond by offering back to him something of what He'd said?

"Blessed are the meek . . .?" you might say, for example, to see if it had some palliative effect.

In the event, Christ dies, and the opportunity to inhabit such a scene is removed once and forever from the human scheme, leading to a magnificent nostalgia for that lost and holy chance.

Exasperating juncture for the Barry Family as a whole this was, everything turning back and round to Him the way it did. In the firm view this tendency thwarted the discursive aims of speaking freely warranted by the matter at hand: the thing would not be done and the argument over Naming ever concluded without the attention of these quarrellers of Christ, but there they went off again dragged inevitably onto the formidable sidetrack of exchange just beside the point among the committed inhabitants of vertex C just mentioned, some of whom were satisfied to pick up the marvelous new exegesis of the contested words of Nonnos and others who, finding Nonnos heretical from the go, wouldn't be bothered to countenance the use or mention of his words in the least, even should they be employed to such gloriously self-serving end as the exegetes had made of it.

Settling this matter and moving on took quite some time, the whole exercise needlessly but inevitably exacerbated by the prankish group of them, "Peekers Behind the Veil," who sought to discredit the exegetes by flauting the restriction against examining Nonnos' words directly and after doing so reporting back that the quote was in point of fact, "Tell Me What To Say…," not "Tell Me What I Say" at all.

The exegetes responded by direct refutation of the argument, denying that "to" replaces "I" in the formulation, although a telling number of them quickly began to prepare a second exegesis based on that substitution just in case.

August 4, 2005

March 2, 2005

End of Volume III

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