I was brought up to think that the "society of others" was the important thing. To become what is now called a "people person" was of paramount importance. This had always been true, especially for girls, and it always would be true. To please a parent and secure myself a safe future, I accepted that I should practice and become adept at socializing.

Yes, there were groans about wishing to be alone. But wanting to be alone was a teenage "mood thing". Only a Greta Garbo could get away with it.

Society was a plus 10. Solitude was a minus 1. Solitude was risky, led to unsocial ideas, to awkward isolation. If you wanted to be liked you'd better be one way or else expect to be shunned. This is the 1940s.

 As for solitude being equal to being social? What are you thinking? No wonder the two were never understood to be a linked pair.

So, as I sat swinging my legs off the dock, did I think there was a connection between my earnest fishing and my hope that the family doctor might venture a kindly smile when he next gives me an inoculation? No, I saw no connection between fishing and a doctor's smile. And I saw no connection between solitude and "society." I wanted more of one, less of the other. They surely felt opposite but no one would have spoken of them as being opposites. Nor did I. I didn't notice how solitary I was on the dock, how my hope for a kindly smile was my wish and need for human attention.

(Little did I know that thirty or forty years later I would be taking notes on the countless situations in which two things, as disconnected as fishing and a doctor's smile, can come into relationship. They come into relationship through the kind of tension that tells you, for sure, you're in the middle of an equobenity. In 1979 during an equobenity seminar, the novelist in me told two stories to prove that the least expected things can come together in the tension that forces choice. One story was about a teenager's toothache and her studied talent for flirtation. The second story was placed in 16th century Germany and Martin Luther is preparing his historic challenge to the Catholic Church. During an incarceration in one of the post-medieval dungeons, Luther's friend and mentor passed the dark hours observing the life of cockroaches. Taking these observations with increasing seriousness, he discovers facts that are pre-Mendel and pre-Darwin. Released from prison he returns to Luther and all the theological conflicts, but finds himself forced to choose between theology and the uninvented science of cockroaches and "the survival of the fittest".

Toothache/flirtation, theology/cockroach, doctor/fishing --all three oppositions creating the kind of tension everyone expects to find in a novel.)

Are teenagers today taught the value of difference, much less the possible close link between absolutely any two things?

My friends and I only wanted to be LIKED.

Today pairs still mean being LIKE each other. "What a pair! Look at them, they are so LIKE each other. Two peas in a pod!"

There's not much to choose from between two shoes in a pair of shoes. It's a different story when you have to choose between theology and cockroaches. It's a pair of opposites, neither side in the least LIKE the other.

Is it any wonder we never thought of opposites?

•    •    •

When we were all twenty and still being educated we were all perfect. We wanted to be LIKE our best friends, LIKE your mother, LIKE my father. We knew what we were doing, we had the right kind of discipline (tests), we were full of energy and rarely had anything serious to complain about. We were all flexible and tolerant of each other's differences. (I notice this about my grandchildren now --same easy going perfection, same easy going tolerance.)

By my mid-twenties I had four children. I had not mentioned solitude/society as a pair of opposites to my husband even though I had long since collected many other pairs. It all seemed too obvious to mention. Between my husband and myself there were enough issues around our children and our increasingly disparate schedules without my having to bring up something as obviously extraneous as pairs of opposites. Besides, I'd started to write poetry seriously. Not that I talked about that either.

•    •    •

But in my early thirties I noticed something that did need to be talked about. It was something that alarmed me but was also interesting.

I saw in us, and in our friends, that the difficulties of work and money, committed or uncommitted relationships, children, ill parents, accidents --so many things, all tending to make each of us evolve away from openness, to concentrate into a fewer set of responses, a fewer set of attitudes. While some of us grew closer to one another, others slid further away.

As for myself, I noticed that when I spent days and even weeks doing nothing but writing poetry all morning, being with the children when they returned from school, preparing and washing up after dinner, and never once laying eyes on anyone but this dear nuclear family --that I used to absolutely long to get out of the house, find company, find someone to talk to.

I noticed I had to control being unfairly irritable with the children's noisy play. I noticed an unfair grievance: why doesn't my husband give me a hand in the kitchen?  So what if that's what all husbands don't do?  Why does my husband have to be like all the other husbands?

If I hadn't realized what was causing it –an excess of solitude-- or an excess of what, not so long ago I deemed "perfection", my complaints would have become a perfect drag on my husband. Some day he was surely going to shout at me, "Let me out of here!" and break my heart.

When a party came along it was so great.

•    •    •

Something had gone wrong inside my two favorite pairs of opposites, solitude/society and work/leisure! I had too much solitude, too little "society", even too much of my perfect nuclear family. Some friends had too much "society" and were becoming trivial, less thoughtful, or they had opted out of "society" altogether and in an excess of solitude were showing the sad signs of the isolate.

If excess could cause any side of any pair to lapse into a nightmare of wreckage to a friendship or a marriage, including mine, I realized I had something bigger to think about than just my easy-going collection of pairs of opposites.

Now I did need to be able to talk about it. But to talk about it I had to acquire a vocabulary. I researched Partridge's "Origins" and came up with a word that included, and still includes, all that was necessary: equ: equal, ob: prefix as in as in obstruct, and benity: as in good or benefit.

Equobenity.

For the first time I had a word I could use if I wanted to talk about the pairs of opposites. I could talk about what excess did to them. It was about 1965.

•    •    •

Between 1965 and 1970 I knew a divorce was coming. I had secretly published  a first book of poetry and to allay my husband's anger over money spent in such a way, I had dedicated it to him. But in the ensuing difficult years I wrote no poetry and my only comfort was that my husband met an enterprising woman whom he married immediately following our divorce. My equobenity during that time was this opposition, this pair of two good things:

I knew the test was to choose between these two on an hour to hour basis, and not allow either to fall into excess. I'd waited until our youngest son was in his early teens and our eldest daughter in college; all four children had been and remained, very close. I knew they'd have me whenever, and however much, they wanted or needed. This remains an equobenity even today as I press into my eighties.

•    •    •

Not having gone to college I had long felt my ignorance as a waste and scourge. (Who in the world is the Emperor Joseph?)

I went from divorce in 1970 to being a fulltime student in what is now the Gallatin Division of New York University. And I went from a lifetime of Manhattan's upper east side living to being a poet in a SoHo loft across from the Paula Cooper Gallery. If there is heaven on earth for someone like me, it was living in Soho in the 1970s. I still didn't talk about equobenity but I lived in the pairs every day and I experimented with getting into excess and then getting out.

Somewhere along the way I came to a conclusion about the excess. For one thing, while excess was most often the road that lead away from the equobenity, it was not the only road. I don't remember exactly when I first thought of the farmer who plants the same crop in his field for so long the soil becomes impoverished and stops producing a good crop.

Here was the perfect metaphor. "Impoverishment" had none of the glamor of "evil" and besides, it was most literally true. Solitude becomes impoverished when its opposite is not given adequate value. Company becomes impoverished and seems trivial even when it is not, and one longs for solitude again.

The pairs of beneficial opposites, the equobenities could, and did, collapse down into each side of their own impoverished modes.

•    •    •

After graduating from NYU in June of 1976, I was asked to return in the fall and teach the craft of poetry in what is now the Gallatin Division but in 1976 was University Without Walls. This was a wonderful time, my students were varied and involved. We did close work in the study of rhyme, of voice, of content and content's relation to form. But we beached on the subject of rhythm.

As a high school student I had loved poetry and its scansion, with all its time-honored uses for the various patterns of rhythm. But now I discovered there was no longer any way to identify rhythms.

Did modern poetry itself have no rhythm? Was it as flat as prose? It seemed as if English and American culture had gone from using six rhythmic units to having jettisoned them. It was as if a repetition of iambs, for example, had occurred almost by accident. The use of rhythm in the poetry of e.e.cummings or Sylvia Plath, could no longer be compared to the rhythms of Tennyson much less to the rhythms of Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery.

•    •    •

English understanding and use of rhythm dates back to pre-Christian Greece, to poets familiar to Plato. Much later, western European poets followed, used and varied these same Greek units of rhythms, although by the end of the 19th century over half of the original Greek units were neglected. Five or six of the original twelve or thirteen units were all that seemed to be required .

Then the entire English speaking culture changed.

By the end of the 19th century thousands had been flung out of the ancient life cycles of village and farm. Such certainties had been replaced by the separations and uncertainties of industrial and urban life. The same period also brought Freud and the means of intelligent introspection. Suddenly a different set of subjects, and a more complex use of rhythm would be needed if poetry was to connect to a new reality.

Speaking to such engulfing changes Ezra Pound articulated what was needed if poetry and the arts were not to ossify. There is a time for tradition but there is surely a time for change and as a poet, Pound commanded that poets to "make it new." A collective equobenity  was coming into its own:

And poets did make it new. Seventy years after receiving that (order) from Pound, whether accomplished gratefully or regretfully, poetry written in English had changed dramatically. The list of subjects deemed worthy of a poet's expression was so different in tone and execution that a poet had to be courageous or naive if he wanted to write about universals such as spring or youth versus age. As for rhyme schemes and metrical rules, these were being tossed out at such a rate that a published poem using rhyme (much less a rhymed iambic poem) would provoke a major essay.

But the emotion has always seemed better expressed in the rhythms of poetry than in the narratives of prose. Did we want to risk losing sadness, nostalgia, resignation, anticipation, sudden joy or rapture? Prose does well with outrage, anger and irony. But nostalgia, for instance, seems to require too many words when its vehicle is prose. Poetry can create nostalgia just by turning a word or two around and tucking them in with a quieter rhythm.

What to do?

Maybe if we resurrected all the unused rhythmic units the Greeks had long ages ago identified, we would have enough new rhythmic units to identify and create rhythms in our modern poetic lines.

To complicate matters, patterns of rhythm had always been identified with the use of only two marks: - (the short, or upbeat,), and the / (the long, or downbeat). For instance, this was an iamb: - / An iambic pentameter line, as in Shakespeare, would look like this, five iambs, one after the other:

             /           /           /         /       /     

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell.

But if  the poet is confined to the use of nothing more than upbeats and downbeats, at the same time utilizing six different kinds of rhythm --this was beyond complicated. It would self-destruct. Finding the rhythmic pattern of a poem was one thing. To do so with such inadequate tools would hurry rhythm to its death and here it would remain --in the grave of neglect.

I decided to try something for my classes. If it didn't work we'd scrap it. At least they'd know about other subjects of the poet's craft: rhyme, voice and subject. I went to work.

I kept the five or six units already so familiar and so long in use. With the help of Eric Partridge's remarkable "Origins" I renamed the twelve or thirteen units that had been "lost".  I made a kind of fifth century language of Greek poetic archeology. With new names came new shapes: ideograms.  There were now fourteen ideograms. Would fourteen be adequate to identify new rhythms?

For example: -/- the tact as in:

"In Breughel’s great painting the Kermes,

the dancers go round and around --"

My students were ready. At first I would assign three identical four-line stanzas, quatrains. The rhythm was required to be identical in each stanza. Whether rhyme was used, how content or voice was chosen was up to them. After a week or so students were asking to choose their own rhythms. One year I put their poems into a 3-ring binder. A reader knows there is a discipline at work. But it has nothing to do with rhyme, subject or form.

But the sufficiency of the fourteen ideograms might be a fluke. When it came time to scan Allen Ginsburg’s "Howl" I told the class that if we failed to satisfactorily scan it with New/Rhythmics, I would throw the whole concept out. And one of the greatest pleasures of my life was the student who returned with a far more "elegant" scanning of this poem than my own. New/Rhythmics could stay and "elegant" was its operative word; no value-judgments were needed. If a poem was good it would survive, if not, let it go.

However, it seems to have turned out that the Greek choriamb is irreplaceable. It is this: /--/ as in "softly they sing". So far, the choriamb is the only four-syllable unit that has been found necessary. There are two one-syllable units (e.e.cummings), four two-syllable units, and six three-syllable units. Twelve in all, not counting the choriamb. These seem to do the job.

The equobenity in all this?

or

or

I was so immersed in poetry's rhythms, in New/Rhythmics, that after going to a jazz concert I came out humming what I had heard. My friend, who knew I loved classical music, asked how I could do that. I said, "As I listened to the music I watched the ideograms of New/Rhythmics translating for me."

The same student who brought in an elegant scanning of Ginsburg's "Howl", asked if I would improvise poetry for her dance group. She'd been asked to put on an outdoor performance during Lincoln Center's summer festival. It was about 1978. I sat in a long orange dress against the cool beige of the New York Opera House's travertine and spoke words that the dancers interpreted as movement. At one point it became too humorous, almost out of hand, but a major change in tempo and adjectives brought them all out of the reach of audience laughter.

•     •     •

My health only allowed me four years at NYU. And I felt strongly this was the place to at least mention equobenity. The head of  my University Without Walls had encouraged my exploration of New/Rhythmics so one day I told my genial and flexible boss, Herbert London, about equobenity and asked if I could teach a semester. He agreed immediately, I chose the Weimar Republic as my subject and invited an historian friend, Philip Deely, to come in for one or two sessions to make sure my facts were accurate. I still have the papers of my twenty students and sometimes wonder if they ever give equobenity a thought. One student raised her hand to say her boyfriend was a Marxist and what was the equobenity of that. I said, " 'Man does not live by bread alone'."

•    •    •

Decade by decade I have tested, added new insights, tested, added new insights, tested again. I saw each pair on a kind of map, each side able to collapse from the weight of excess. The locations on this map were hard to name, "evil" for awhile, later "news". Eventually "impoverished." This map represents the broad field on which all human choice takes place.

 

•    •    •

I wrote my first essay on equobenity in my late forties, in 1979. That summer I held a month long seminar on the subject in a rented house in Amagansett, New York. Karen, one of the participants, told me that the four letters indicating choice should not be N.E.W.S.. She said west and south should not be stigmatized as impoverished modes. She said to use e.q.u.o.. Of course. I was grateful and later discovered the serendipity of u. o. having apt personal meaning for anyone who is in an impoverished mode. Very simply, you owe yourself something better.

Sometimes I became so interested in just one equobenity, just one pair, that for days I would apply it to everything. Doubt/certainty was one of them. So was resist/submit. Until the late seventies, "equobenity" meant just the pair, the two beneficial sides, each one obstructed from doing good work in the other's presence.

In 1979 I had not yet noticed the T. position on the map, the transcendent. And of course I had not noticed its opposing g.. When I was teaching the one semester at NYU, or when I held the seminar in the summer of 1979 we only talked about the field of choice between, in and around the e., the q., the u. and the o..

•    •    •

In 1981 I left my beloved city where I had truly hoped to die --right after an evening of both poetry and equobenity, and in lots of company. I moved back to Columbia County where I had raised my four now thriving children. I moved partly because I could no longer afford New York. But in terms of money, I did something insanely stupid. With flautist and composer Seth Cooper as instigator I became one of the founders and eventually the director of Spectra, a performing arts group. I believe it was, if not the first, at least among the very earliest cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary performing arts group. By the end of its twelve year run Spectra had put on one or two shows a year in Hudson, New York as well as several times performing in venues like Manhattan's Merkin Hall. Once we did a collaboration with The Asia Society. Around 1986 Seth had found better things to do and I carried on, albeit with no funds, until about 1993. I should mention 1987. I had sold half my upstate property by then but when the buyers wanted to return what I had temporarily forgiven, I had twenty-thousand dollars in my hand. Here was my chance to put on the music theater show now called Cordoba!, an historic recreation of Cordoba under Moorish rule. For $13,000 Cordoba! was produced just once, staged in Hudson, New York's high school. All the dancers, actors, and musicians were Manhattan professionals and the finale became a stage where poetry, flamenco, klezmer and the ud competed and complemented each other on one crowded stage.

•    •    •

In my fifties I collected hundreds of equobenities in the sciences, and in the arts and literature. I saw equobenity as a map before I saw it as a structure.

In my late fifties I became aware of something above and beyond, something sometimes present, sometimes absent: the T. position on the structure. The "new thing", the transcendence of actions between the e. and the q. positions. A T. was always greater than the sum of e. plus q. and it continually required both.

And if there is a transcendence, there is its counterpart, the g. position, the garbage, the slurry and lack of distinction that characterizes all serious doing of harm. Doing harm was the definition of the impoverished modes, the u. and the o.. Harm is done first to oneself. Here it can be corrected long before the harm is done to others.

I finished Volume I  of "Equobenity and the Nature of Choice" in the late 1980s and started what I called App., an appendix to Volume I. When this was finished around 1995 I realized of course that it was Volume II. When my eldest grand child was thirteen I wrote an essay and though she emailed me and said it should be taught, it was lucky this didn't happen as the essay had failed to mention a single word about ethics.

In 1994 I married a composer, moved to the nearby Berkshires, and left the county that had so long nurtured me.

•     •     •

Who is writing this? All the above is my answer if what is on my mind is what interests you. For this web site, what else matters?

Elizabeth Elliott

•    •    •

Someone who is not me will have completely different sources for finding equobenities. My sources are the books I read, The New York Times, THE WEEK, BBC Music, Science News, Saveur and Scientific American, plus flyers, ads, and the begging letters of all the wonderful NGOs like Children International, ACLU and EDF.

Over the course of nearly 70 years of collecting examples of all the relationships on equobenity's structure, I have enough material to replace this website many times over. I would like to concentrate however, to present all these same relationships as they occurred only in Dickens, only in Homer, in French newspapers, in Hawthorne and 17th century America, and of course in the arts and in science (the double helix, the macro world of Einstein, the micro world of (Neils Bohr). The Russians are especially clear and Orhan Pamuk would be a superlative challenge.

The invention of the internet has been a blessing for equobenity. There is nothing severely narrative about equobenity; one can skip around, finding the same material in every corner but from different perspectives. A visitor will grow bored and go away. Maybe come back. Maybe not. As it should be.

However, time remains our least renewable resource and I sometimes fear there won't be time for all this. These long decades of unearthing, of digging and clearing for as much meaning as I could find, has been sleuthing fun from the outset. It is still sleuthing fun. There are still new things to notice. It was only recently, for instance, that I fully comprehended how important the structure is. Who know what will come next? Can the g. position, under heavy strain and a giant's will, curve around in back of the field of choice to come up somewhere in relationship to the T.? Right now I don't think so. A person in the g. position seems to be to have lost h/is soul. On the other hand, reading about the priest who at great personal cost, visited again and again with the cannibal-murderer Jeffry Dahmer and claims that this despicable human now actually understands what he did and now deeply regrets --is this some exception that must not be missed? Repentance. Repentance remains to be explored.

•    •    •

This website, and its companion book, is dedicated to Alexandra Franciscus. Of all the people who showed a dear tolerance of me over all these years, it is only Alexandra who wanted to know about equobenity, know more, have it for herself to read, took it away with her to show her friends, to this day is pushing me to get this done well. I've discovered that one friend like that is really all that I needed. My children and others now use equobenity but Alexandra nagged me and nigged me and pushed for more. I was, I am, grateful.

I can never express adequate gratitude to SwissMango, a web design studio in Palm City, Florida, specializing in websites for Non Profit Organizations. Linda and Christian Probst took me in and gave me all the leeway I needed to make this site so it works for me and its visitors. Kelly and Eric have been indispensable. Thank you. I really appreciate all you've done.

I also thank Charlie Pepper of New Mexico for the simplicity and directness of his drawing of the flying birds that fill the site's background. It is not a flock of birds, humans are not a flock, but they are not alone and no human can fly completely alone. Maybe they are flying toward us and maybe they are flying away. But no matter which, each flying bird has two wings as humans have two hands and two feet, two ears and eyes and a breathing in and a breathing out. The world so often comes in twos.

•    •    •

I want to close with today's equobenity.

Context: My husband and I spend six months of the year in a one and a half bedroom house in the Florida Keys. Because we married in our sixties we each brought with us children, grandchildren and houses with more than one bedroom. Therefore, when we are not in the Keys we are very busy in Maine and Massachusetts. We cherish this Keys time alone. On the other hand, there's nothing either of us love more than to welcome small parcels of either family and next week one of my daughters and her two college age children are coming to stay for the week of spring break.

Physical preparations were done. That left, of course, the non-material, the relationships in so small a place. I suggested, for instance, that instead of saying there were "better ways of doing things around here", a question is asked, "Why do you keep the knives here?" (and not in the drawer that appeared better). Or, "Do you think we could have pizza sometime?" instead of, "No, I'm tired of salad. Where can I get pizza around here? I could bring some home."

My daughter and I agreed with all this. So equobenities have two ways of getting noticed: