Prefixing verse as indication of conversation potential

Transforming the Art of Conversation (Part #5)

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Does the term "converse" itself offer clues to the nature of imaginative transformation? "Conversation" is etymologically associated with having dealings with others, and keeping company with them. "Converse" emphasizes the sense, especially in mathematics, of "turning around" -- and, by extension, of "conversion" as in matters of belief. The sense of turning is found in the origins of "verse" -- involving a "turning" from one line to another, whether as an aid to memory, or further enhanced by the aesthetic possibilities.

A provocative degree of ambiguity is however associated with the confusion between "con" as implying "with", and "con" as implying "against". Both may be compatible with more complex forms of turning in which one is rejected or contrasted with the other, as is most creatively evident in dance. The sense of "with" is then a playful challenge "against" the other -- possibly a development or amplification in the conversation. Significantly, dance provides for continuing transformation (in which roles may be reversed) -- rather than conversion to an unchanging final state.

How is transformation to be enhanced by "turning together" or "converting" one another -- especially when "conversation" has been used for centuries as a metaphor for sexual intercourse? What implications are to be derived for conversation through some process corresponding to "making poetry" -- thereby engendering a degree of memorable coherence, as cultivated in "making music" together? Insights could be derived from the tradition of poetry games of medieval Japan, known as waka (more recently as tanka) is the poetic ancestor to haiku. As noted by Lisa Joseph of the Society for Creative Anachronism in relating that tradition to the modern poetry slam:

By the height of the Heian period, the composition of waka had evolved into a vital social skill. It was considered a mark of sophistication for a courtier to be able to produce these little poems on almost any occasion, all the better if one could make a clever allusion to one of the Chinese classics and display one's breadth of knowledge. At a social gathering one might start a formal or informal competition by suggesting a subject, or even offering a challenge of three lines for someone else to complete. (cf. Heian Poetry Jam: The Poetic and Social History of Waka)

Of further relevance is its relation to renga as the Japanese genre of collaborative poetry and its modern development, most notably via the internet, in the West and in Arabic (cf. Earl Miner, Japanese Linked Poetry, 1979).

There is a degree of problematic challenge in using the prefix "con" in relation to "versation" -- echoed to a degree in the case of other prefixes applied to it: aversation, malversation, tergiversation. Given the common contrast between "pro" and "con", curiously there is no use of either "pro-verse" or "pro-versation" -- which might otherwise have indicated forms of transformation to be explored.

Such preoccupations derive from previous concern with the unexplored role of prefixes (New Paradigms via a Renewed Set of Prefixes? Dependence of international policy-making on an array of operational terms, 2003; Exploration of Prefixes of Global Discourse: implications for sustainable confidelity, 2011). Given the aesthetic implications of "verse", the prefixes conventionally applied to it are (at first sight) not especially fruitful in their implications:

adverse, anniverse, averse, controverse, converse, diverse, everse, intertransverse, inverse, obverse, perverse, renverse, reverse, subverse, transverse, traverse, underverse

A potentially challenging exception to this conclusion is universe, most notably in that (mathematically) it implies the impossibility of a "converse". This implication is suggestive of the constrained nature of conversation within any closed group, as previously considered (Dynamically Gated Conceptual Communities: emergent patterns of isolation within knowledge society, 2004).

Should this be understood as the consequence of "universation" -- through the development of essentially private languages and jargons, as is only too widely evident? Clearly any "other" universe is then readily framed as "perverse" -- as dangerously "subversive", even a "subverse" (cf. Us and Them: relating to challenging others patterns in the shadow dance between "good" and "evil", 2009).

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