Outer Reaches of the Palindrome Page: 26
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with the traditional norms.19" Again, this departure is launched from the platform of humor,
laughter acting as a fuel that propels the sense of the contrary, which acts as a type of spiritual
portal. According to Brown, inversion is an important principle of this process:
Sometimes the Heyhoka's actions are very humorous, because this is, as we have said, a
part of the technique for shattering a person's perception of, and participation in, the
everyday routines of life. To break through the habitual enables one to take some distance
from oneself- to see things a little bit more objectively, and thereby on a higher level. So
the Heyhokas do all sorts of strange things: they do things upside down or backwards;
sometimes they will pitch a tepee with the poles on the outside of the lodge covering,
with the smoke flaps facing the wrong way, or with the doorway to the west instead of to
the east. When they sit in the tepee maybe they will do it upside down, with their feet up
in the air, lying on their backs on the ground; and this of course makes people laugh.
Normally when you enter a tepee in the Plains, you must move around it in a sunwise
direction, clockwise; but the Heyhokas will do it the wrong way. Everything is done in
reverse. Sometimes instead of going in the doorway they lift up the lodge cover at the
back and crawl under; things like that.20
Now I'm going to go out on a very shaky limb because I'm going to propose assumptions
about somebody that nobody knows anything about. Sotades the Obscene of Maronia is
accredited by historians to be the inventor or discoverer of the palindrome as a literary form. He
was also a notorious author of dirty poems, or scurrilous verse. This is where the limb gets really
shaky. Perhaps Sotades operated off of the same aesthetic in his execution of both forms.
Perhaps he recognized, whether consciously or unconsciously, that vulgar poetry is a type of
reversal that contradicts or offends popular norms, a structural principle that might somehow26
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McConnell, Michael Constantine. Outer Reaches of the Palindrome, thesis, December 2003; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4407/m1/29/: accessed May 21, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .