My Own Cellar Door; Or, Dead in the Middle of Little Italy
Many people have cited “cellar door” as the most beautifully euphonic phrase in the English language. Examples are too numerous to cite, but just off the top of my head I can remember a science fiction novel (maybe by Frank Herbert) in which a character was known as Doctor Sellar Door; in Donnie Darko, the cult classic film of teen angst writ against a backdrop of terminal adult hypocricy, I distinctly remember hearing a young female voice speaking the words “cellar door,” as the main character travelled his way down through the convolutions of the time spear that dilates his pupils and takes him on a strange journey to an alternative, adjacent reality.
I guess we all have our “cellar doors,” some perfect phrase or maybe just a couple words, or an epigram, that we keep handy in the front of our brains, reminding us that perfection may not be a total abstraction, that it might exist and might have actually been rendered by someone, be they poet, musician, or artisan (if you’re into the applied arts). “I sing the body electric” is an unassailably beautiful statement, declarative as much as poetic. It’s romantic and euphoric and yet it has the firm quality of something that is also just a matter of fact, like “The Shoe Department is on the Third Floor.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pyrrhic war to grasp the past in the present moment, to articulate something about nostalgia’s importance (rather than just its fleeting and pleasant effect on the sensoria) was something he called “the green light.” “Gatsby believed in the green light,” was a line I remembered from The Great Gatsby.
My own “cellar door,” my own litany so perfect it feels like there’s a mystery undergirding it (some great anagram or palindrome) comes courtesy of Christopher Lee Rios, better known by his rap moniker of “Big Pun.”
Here is his contribution to the canon of potential perfection, which eludes me in my own work but which I can always admire when someone else manages to clutch ether and treat it as if it was as malleable and substantive as clay: “Dead in the middle of Little Italy/ Little did we know that we riddled two little middlemen who didn’t do diddly.” My friend Guzman, a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx who I met in the Army, used to taunt me by saying this as fast as he could, and seeing if I could get anywhere near repeating the verse back to him verbatim. We usually played this linguistic game while on some field maneuver, sitting there among dead leaves or swampy grass with our weapons in the extreme cold or heat. We would be in some slit trench hastily dug with e-tools and he would look over at me, grin, and say, “DeadinthemiddleofLittleItalylittledidweknowthatweriddledtwolittlemiddlemenwhodidn’tdodiddly.” I would pause, take a deep breath, and then try myself, spluttering out something like “Dead Italy middle man riddling, aw shit,” and give up for the time being, ignoring his laughter at my back while I worked out land nav coordinates or used a bore brush on my m16.
“Dead in the Middle of Little Italy” is more beautiful to me than “cellar door,” if for no other reason than that it presents a mixture of euphony and cacophony, as opposed to just one or the other. The staccato of consonants pinging around vowels wrangled and carried on fricatives is more impressive than the open-mouthed, almost umlaut-like quality produced by saying “cellar door.” Saying “cellar door,” even ten times fast, still creates a kind of laconic, droning rhythm that sounds like an onomatopoeic guttural attempt to approximate the moo of a cow protesting its tipping.
Incidentally, Big Pun was 700 lbs. at his most obese. That makes his verbal gymnastic even more impressive, considering that breath control is so key to multisyllabic rhyme schemes. What’s the most that a “cellar door” booster ever weighed? I hazard Edgar Allen Poe never got above a buck fifty.
I guess we all have our “cellar doors,” some perfect phrase or maybe just a couple words, or an epigram, that we keep handy in the front of our brains, reminding us that perfection may not be a total abstraction, that it might exist and might have actually been rendered by someone, be they poet, musician, or artisan (if you’re into the applied arts). “I sing the body electric” is an unassailably beautiful statement, declarative as much as poetic. It’s romantic and euphoric and yet it has the firm quality of something that is also just a matter of fact, like “The Shoe Department is on the Third Floor.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pyrrhic war to grasp the past in the present moment, to articulate something about nostalgia’s importance (rather than just its fleeting and pleasant effect on the sensoria) was something he called “the green light.” “Gatsby believed in the green light,” was a line I remembered from The Great Gatsby.
My own “cellar door,” my own litany so perfect it feels like there’s a mystery undergirding it (some great anagram or palindrome) comes courtesy of Christopher Lee Rios, better known by his rap moniker of “Big Pun.”
Here is his contribution to the canon of potential perfection, which eludes me in my own work but which I can always admire when someone else manages to clutch ether and treat it as if it was as malleable and substantive as clay: “Dead in the middle of Little Italy/ Little did we know that we riddled two little middlemen who didn’t do diddly.” My friend Guzman, a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx who I met in the Army, used to taunt me by saying this as fast as he could, and seeing if I could get anywhere near repeating the verse back to him verbatim. We usually played this linguistic game while on some field maneuver, sitting there among dead leaves or swampy grass with our weapons in the extreme cold or heat. We would be in some slit trench hastily dug with e-tools and he would look over at me, grin, and say, “DeadinthemiddleofLittleItalylittledidweknowthatweriddledtwolittlemiddlemenwhodidn’tdodiddly.” I would pause, take a deep breath, and then try myself, spluttering out something like “Dead Italy middle man riddling, aw shit,” and give up for the time being, ignoring his laughter at my back while I worked out land nav coordinates or used a bore brush on my m16.
“Dead in the Middle of Little Italy” is more beautiful to me than “cellar door,” if for no other reason than that it presents a mixture of euphony and cacophony, as opposed to just one or the other. The staccato of consonants pinging around vowels wrangled and carried on fricatives is more impressive than the open-mouthed, almost umlaut-like quality produced by saying “cellar door.” Saying “cellar door,” even ten times fast, still creates a kind of laconic, droning rhythm that sounds like an onomatopoeic guttural attempt to approximate the moo of a cow protesting its tipping.
Incidentally, Big Pun was 700 lbs. at his most obese. That makes his verbal gymnastic even more impressive, considering that breath control is so key to multisyllabic rhyme schemes. What’s the most that a “cellar door” booster ever weighed? I hazard Edgar Allen Poe never got above a buck fifty.
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