Many thanks to Kaye Sturgis, whose recent piece on Mercury retrograde inspired this article.
When I was in high school, the driver ed teacher had an unusual ability: he could write a sentence forwards with one hand and backwards with the other, in script, at the same time. We students were fascinated by that. As I recall, a rather inappropriate portion of each class was devoted to the demonstration of this skill and our subsequent attempts to learn it.
Let's discuss all things retrograde. The word means ‘backwards,’ or in reverse. When a planet is in retrograde, as Mercury is now, it means that its normal orbit appears to us as if it is in reverse. Mercury in retrograde is blamed for all kinds of snafus in communications, travel, project launches and so forth.
We have retrograde motion in music as well, but it doesn't have such a negative connotation. There are three kinds. The first is retrograde motion, wherein the notes of a melody appear later in reverse order. An entire piece in this form is called a 'crab canon' in English ('rondeau' in French), as in this lovely 3-part rondeau by the 14th century composer Guillaume de Machaut:
The next is retrograde inversion, where the melody appears both in reverse and upside down. This technique is used often by composers, and involves reversing the intervallic structure. So if a melody proceeds thus: up a perfect 5th, down a major 2nd, down a minor 2nd, down a minor 6th, then up a minor 3rd, you would then put all those intervals upside down, from last to first. The retrograde inversion would go: down a minor 3rd, up a minor 6th, up a minor 2nd, up a major 2nd, and down a perfect 5th.
That could look/sound like this (click to play):
:
You can also use retrograde motion or inversions with harmonic structures and rhythms!
We mentioned Mercury in retrograde, which will last until August 28 (with another one coming up November 25 to December 15). This mercurial cha-cha around the solar dance floor can step all over our earthly plans, but astrologers say it’s a great time for meditation, contemplation and reassessment.
Musical terms like ‘harmony’ and ‘rhythm’ are often ascribed to planetary movements. This is not a new idea. 17th century astronomer and philosopher Johannes Kepler, when speaking of our solar system and galaxy, referred to "Music of the Spheres." By this he meant not actual sounds, but rather the harmonizing of planetary movements as they unfold in time, just as music does.
Time is created by rotation about the vital centre of a greater world.
–Rodney Collin, The Theory of Celestial Influence
Kepler benefited from a more modern education than had been available to his predecessor Copernicus, whose heliocentric theory had largely been rejected during his life. Kepler was able to present an accepted theory that the planets move around the Sun in elliptical orbits, that the speed of those orbits vary, and that their relationship with the Sun determines the degree of variation.
In visual diagrams, the concepts of retrograde and inversion are used in many symbols. One is the Seal of Solomon, which predated the Star of David and according to legend was inscribed on a ring worn by Solomon, the last king of the ancient Israelites. I have seen this symbol depicted different ways:
The one that makes most sense to me, in a metaphysical way, is this:
The pinnacle of one triangle is at the top and that of the other touches the bottom. The symbology means that what is important in the physical world is unimportant in the spiritual world, and vice versa. This was the motivation behind my song Seal of Solomon which appears on the album Gilly's Caper. The melody of the second half of the song is an inversion of the initial melody (but not a retrograde inversion).
Curious examples of retrograde motion can be found in the work of M.C. Escher. His 1960 lithograph Ascending and Descending depicts an impossibility: one procession of human figures walks up the endless staircase, while another walks down it at the same time. Escher commented on this work thus:
"That staircase is a rather sad, pessimistic subject, as well as being very profound and absurd...Yes, yes, we climb up and up, we imagine we are ascending; every step is about ten inches high, terribly tiring–and where does it all get us? Nowhere; we don't get a step farther or higher. And descending, running down with abandon, is not possible either.
“People don't like to talk about falling; they'd much rather talk about ascending. Well then...I'm working my fingers to the bone, believing I'm ascending. How absurd it all is. Sometimes it makes me feel quite sick."
In words, we have some interesting applications of retrograde motion. One of my favorites is palindromes, which are words, numbers or phrases that read the same backwards as forwards.
"It all started many years ago, when I discovered a mysterious connection between TUMS and SMUT. I remember gazing at the small roll of antacid tablets with a new sense of awe and wonderment. "This could be no coincidence, no random occurrence," I thought to myself. "It is a talisman. There must be others." –William Irvine, Madam I'm Adam and Other Palindromes.
EXAMPLES OF PALINDROMES
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo.
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!
Tarzan raised Desi Arnaz' rat.
(For some reason, rats feature prominently in palindromes.)
Palindromes by words, rather than letters, often depend upon double meanings:
Fall leaves as soon as leaves fall.
Is it crazy how saying sentences backwards creates backwards sentences saying how crazy it is?
Palindromes are not limited to phrases either. There are two English palindromic novels that I’m aware of: Satire: Veritas – David Stephens, and Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo – Lawrence Levine. Click on the link to the Stephens novel for a truly surrealistic literary experience!
Be they planets, music, images or words, things that are reversed are often associated with satanic intentions by those self-appointed Keepers of Decency who lurk among us. While this may be the case in certain instances, I think we artists use reversals as merely another compositional technique. No satanisms intended.
Another application can be found using audio technology to play speech or music in reverse. I actually have a Numark turntable with a reverse control!
“Whoa--back up. What's this about a reverse control, and why do we need one? For starters, let's double park on Memory Lane, corner of Rue d' 1968: The Beatles song Revolution #9 played backwards revealed the words ‘turn me on dead man.’ Similarly, the song I’m So Tired (also from The White Album) when played backwards sounded like ‘Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him.’ This is a technique known as ‘backmasking’ in recording studio parlance, and it became the focus of a fight between Christian audio vigilantes and the rock groups of the day. The decline of vinyl–and the phonograph–and the birth of the compact disc succeeded in quelling the controversy since CD players don't run in reverse.”
–Su Terry, For The Curious
Can speech reversals reach a part of mind that is normally hidden from conscious awareness? David Oates of Australia believes so. He has been researching and documenting hidden messages in reversed speech since 1983. On his website he has many remarkable examples of communication (presumably originating from the subconscious mind of the speaker) being blurted out, unknowingly and unintentionally, when the speech is reversed. Frequently the reversals indicate the very opposite of what the speaker is saying publicly. As an example, his analysis of interviews and speeches surrounding the inquiry into the Kennedy assassination includes telling reversals from Lee Harvey Oswald and Lyndon Johnson, among others.
The mathematical field of topology refers to the qualities of reversability and inversion as "orientability." Topology had its beginning in the mid 19th century, when German mathematician August Möbius created the möbius strip. For those who didn't have the chance to make one in 6th grade: Take a strip of paper, twist it once, then tape the two edges together to form a loop. Draw a line all the way down the middle of the paper till you reach the end. You will find that the end of the line you've drawn meets the beginning, and appears on both sides of the paper, even though you only drew one continuous line.
Escher's 1956 woodcut Smaller and Smaller foretold, in a way, the emergence of fractal geometry more than twenty years later. These topological twists imply a multidimensional expression, and indeed may have influenced alternatives to Quantum Mechanics such as Many Worlds Interpretation, first described in 1957, or String Theory.
The early 20th century composer Arnold Schoenberg held, we might say, a topological (even though the word hadn't yet been invented) view of musical retrogrades and inversions. He said that if you took an object such as a hat and viewed it from all possible angles, it would still be seen as a hat. So even though some of his peers viewed permutations like retrograde as 'artificial,' Schoenberg thought that using retrograde motion and inversion simply expanded the musical space.
Other World, wood engraving and woodcut by M.C. Escher, 1947.
”We are in a strange room in which up, down, left, right, front, and back can be substituted arbitrarily, depending on whether we wish to look out through one window or another. The center of the picture is always the vanishing point; it is the distance point when we look through the windows on the left and in the middle. This is also the view we should expect normally.
If we look through the window at the top and the adjacent one on the right, the same vanishing point has become the nadir; we now see the moonscape from above. The central window has suddenly turned into the floor of the room.
If we look through both windows bottom right, the vanishing point has become the zenith: we are now standing on the moon looking up at the starry sky above. The central window has also changed its function: it is now the ceiling.” –Bruno Ernst
Retrograde motion, in any art, can be a doorway to the surrealistic. Or the sublime. Or the surrealistically sublime. Or sublime surrealism. (When you think about it, each of these terms has a different meaning.)
And of course, neither retrograde nor inversion has any meaning without the forward or upright directions that they’re based on. It is a real merging of opposites–an ancient concept that’s been described in so many different ways it would be impossible to name them all. For starters we could reference the non-duality path of the Vedas, or the Taoist taiji (yin/yang) symbol, or even Hermetic philosophy.
If the aim of an artist is to establish a connection with the Universal, then we certainly want to use any techniques that can reach beyond the obvious, the banal and the quotidian to touch the universal truths we seek. If that involves reversing stuff, then ti eb os.
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Related articles by Su Terry:
Surrealism and Music
Polarity: Music & the 7 Hermetic Principles
My life has entered the retrograde inversion cycle. Moving forward by dancing backwards.
OMG. It is an honor to inspire your writing any way any day, Su. Thank you for another spellbinding newsletter, on the multidimensions of Retrograde Motion. Loved the whole thing.