Outer Reaches of the Palindrome Page: 32
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something as worthless or trivial." +al +ize +ation +al +ize=
"floccinaucinihilipilificationalizationalize.")28
Recursion is found outside of the realm of spoken-language grammars. Take, for
example, the late sixteenth-century composer J. S. Bach, who through music employed complex
recursive forms, such as the canon. The canon consists of the idea of one single theme played
against itself.29 Take the classical nursery rhyme, "Row, row, row your boat." The first voice
begins the canon, singing the words, "Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily,
merrily, merrily, merrily- life is but a dream." Upon the fifth beat, during the first syllable of
"gently", the second voice begins singing the theme from beginning to end, staggered four beats
behind the initial beat that began the first voice. Then, at the ninth beat, as the first voice sings
the first syllable of the word "merrily" and the second voice sings the first syllable of the word
"gently," the third voice begins the theme, and so on, until the seemingly cacophonous song
attains a fluid harmony in synch with the time signature. Though this type of canon doesn't
appear to have too much in common with the palindrome, recursion is nonetheless a binding tie.
In the above canon, the same structure repeats at different beats of the song, simultaneously with
the other voices. In the palindrome, the inner nesting is letter by letter; in the string, "abcba", the
sequence "bcb" is inner nested in the string, and "c" is inner nested in the middle of the "abba"
string.
Though a popular device of the canon is inversion, the most obvious likeness to the
palindrome, however, is the "crab canon", where a retrograde copy is played against the original
theme, backward in time.30 Named in reference to the peculiarities of crab locomotion,31 the crab
canon, like the palindrome, ends where it began, forming a "strange loop". A strange loop,
according to Hofstadter, is a phenomena that occurs whenever, by moving upwards or downward32
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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/m1/35/: accessed May 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .