Janice and I are still recovering a bit from our trip and all the work there is to be done around here (today, we’ve got maid service coming, as well as a pro to assess repairs to our fence). Still, I’ve got to buy a pie to celebrate Pi Day tonight—it’s the anniversary of when we became a couple, which makes it a key holiday for us, even more significant than the Ides of March or Saint Patrick’s Day.
In that spirit, I thought I’d share a selection from the longest work ever written in Pilish. What is Pilish?
Pilish is a kind of constrained writing in which each word’s length corresponds to a digit in pi. Since pi begins with 3.14159, a Pilish piece of writing begins with a three-letter word, followed by a one-letter word, then a four-letter word, one letter, five letters, nine letters, and so on.
Not a Wake by Michael Keith is the longest such work, going on for 10,000 words. There’s more about the book, including some resources to buy it, here. But this is how it starts:
Now I fall, a tired suburbian in liquid under the trees
Drifting alongside forests simmering red in the twilight over Europe.
So scream with the old mischief, ask me another conundrum
About bitterness of possible fortunes near a landscape Italian.
A little happiness may sometimes intervene but usually fades.
A missionary cries, striving to understand worthless, tedious life.
Monotony’s lost amid ocean movements
As the bewildered sailors hesitate. I become salt,
Submerging people in dazzling oceans of enshrouded unbelief.
Christmas ornaments conspire.
Beauty is, somewhat inevitably now, both
Feelings of faith and eyes of rationalism.
Blinded delusional horses stumble;
Facetious nonsense is a dark, secluded tabernacle.
Comfort’s buried: bleed a bit as antidote. Is one recovering?
Verily, octopi sing:
Burning choristers accompany the mournful song.
Don’t ponder constantly – existence waits,
Among sunsetting tones, bringing it to you.
A wedding of birds and boars compounds with disloyalty,
Devising contemporary treasons.
This morning’s displeasure: a badger’s life ended,
Frightened to roadkill when a procession of hearses approached.
I whispered the profound truth of symmetrical restraints:
Untie every chain, sacrifice belief, free each beggar,
Go to everybody with peaceful, beautiful hands.
From stairways the multitudes fly downward,
A pointless heaven‐like hell to conceive together.
A tourniquet‐enwrapped servant walks beside Dover’s beach,
Creatures cut the skin deep within a so‐infinite void.