As described by Homer, the chimera has a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. This mythical beast has inspired the Oulipo to combine texts in an analogous way, and this in turn has inspired researchers here at NUTS to develop a new treatment for figmentalist texts.
Here we take the nouns, adjectives or verbs from one text and replace them with those from a suitably related text. By this means we can conjure up new meanings in an interactive, yin and yang kind of way.
We begin with Chi Kung, by James MacRitchie, and bring this vibrant text into syntactical resonance with Structures, by J. E. Gordon, and Watt, by Samuel Beckett.
ch'imera 01.01 - spirit
ch'imera 01.02 - paranormal
ch'imera 01.03 - senses
ch'imera 01.04 - fluids
ch'imera 01.05 - meridians
ch'imera 01.06 - correspondences
The focus on the endlessly wondrous notion of ch'i leads us also to distinguish a new sub-species of the Oulipian chimera, marked out by means of the Pointmantreau manoeuvre.
NEOTERISM - new things, new words.
© Paul Taylor 2003