How ‘Tenet’ channels the mystical power of palindromes
Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster is inspired by a form of word play as old as writing itself. Sam Leith reports
‘All I have for you is a word: ‘tenet’,” runs the mysterious line in the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s new film of that title. “It will open the right doors – some of the wrong ones, too. Use it carefully.” Why “tenet”? It’s no accident.
Embedded in this futuristic adventure is one of the oldest pieces of wordplay known to us. The word comes from the so-called “Sator Square”, a graffito of which survived in Pompeii but which has also been found in ancient sites all over Europe. It’s the central word of five.
The square is, you could say, one of the closest things the classical world had to a meme. And it’s a source of fascination. Its translation from Latin is (roughly) “the sower Arepo labours at the plough”, but it’s not the meaning of the phrase that has caused it to prove so fascinating: it’s the arrangement of the letters.
The whole phrase is a perfect palindrome – that is, it reads the same backwards as it does forwards. And this one’s even better than your common-or-garden palindrome, because it also has four-way symmetry. Arrange it in a square, and you can read the letters up or down, backwards or forwards, and the same phrase emerges.
“Tenet”, in the film, is a sort of magic word. And it’s no surprise that palindromes themselves have a history in magic. The Sator Square has been used in spells and incantations in formal religion and folk ritual; a set of 12th-century medical texts called Trotula suggests inscribing it on a bit of cheese and feeding it to a woman who has had a miscarriage. It’s theorised that it may encode the names of the god Saturn and his consort Ops (plural: “Opera”); or it’s given a Christian interpretation, rearranging the letters into a cross to make it spell PATERNOSTER vertically and horizontally with the leftovers, A and O, representing Alpha and Omega, or the omnipresence of God. Another palindromic inscription on an amulet, thought to be 1,500-odd years old, was unearthed in Cyprus in 2014: “Iahweh is the bearer of the secret name, the lion of Re secure in his shrine.” The Greek palindrome “wash your sins not only your face” has adorned baptismal fonts, and Hebrew palindromes have been used to answer obscure Rabbinical questions about dietary laws.
The fascination with these accidents of orthography – or, if you’re of a kabbalistic cast of mind, clues as to divine immanence – most likely goes back to the earliest days of the written word. Palindromic structures in music have intrigued composers from Haydn to Bartók, and recreational mathematicians like to play with palindromic numbers. News headlines around the world earlier this year rejoiced in the date being 02/02/2020 – the first palindromic date for 909 years. And why not? Most of us won’t live to see 12/12/2121.
Many among us will be able to reel off a few of the best-known palindromes. There’s the remark of the first man politely introducing himself to his consort: “Madam, I’m Adam.” There’s Napoleon’s lament: “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” There’s the theological koan: “Do geese see God?” And there is, of course, Leigh Mercer’s famous: “A man. A plan. A canal – Panama.” Think of a good one, and it will outlast you.
One of the pleasures of the palindrome is the unexpected way in which orthographic coincidence creates thematic connections. If they hadn’t built that canal, you could say, we’d never have had that neat palindrome. That makes them irresistible, then, to writers in general (James Joyce minted the longest single-word palindrome in the OED – with his “tattarrattat” for a peremptory knock at the door in
Ulysses) and poets in particular. Anthony Etherin, for instance, is an experimental poet who posts ingenious palindromic poems on social media (he’s @anthony_etherin on Twitter). “I’m very interested in what happens to language under various constraints,” he says. “Palindromes seemed a particularly interesting challenge: not only are they very difficult to compose, but they also possess innate poetic value, in the elegance of their abstract symmetry. Preserving grammar and meaning is difficult enough in palindromes, and it’s certainly easier the shorter the palindrome. So, it’s a fun and rewarding challenge to compose a meaningful or musical palindrome of a decent length.”
He considers his best short palindrome to be “How to Draw a Pyramid”: “A zig. Now one Zag. Gaze now on Giza!” And he enjoyed topical success with a lockdown palindrome:
Put it on. Knot it up.
Walks a man, in a mask…
Law: Put it on. Knot it up.
But Etherin knows that he is standing on the shoulders of giants. He points out that as long ago as 1614 the poet John Taylor hit on the self-reproaching “Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel”. And – which may be the Everest of palindromic verse – the stand-up comic Demetri Martin composed a perfectly palindromic 500-word poem about, in his own words, “a guy in a strip club who becomes infatuated with two strippers […] crosses the line and ends up getting walloped by a pair of boobs”. (He published it in the US-only “Palindrome Week”– the 10 days last year in which the date was palindromic from (US notation) 9/10/19 to 9/19/19.)
Novelists have got in on the act too. Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day includes two rival scientists called Renfrew and Werfner.
And two brave souls are said to have completed full-length palindrome novels. It took Lawrence Levine 20 years to write Dr Awkward
& Olson in Oslo (he wrote it because, he said, “to my knowledge no other person had ever composed an equal nonesuch. I decided, as it were, to be the first”) and he published it in 1986. One David Stephens also composed a 58,000-letter palindrome called Satire: though – regrettably – I can find no evidence of it on second-hand book sites. Etherin offers an apt warning: “Writing palindromes is addictive, to a troubling degree: I can no longer read a street sign, a label, or a sentence in a book without then also reading it backwards.”
So: tenet. It’s a word. It will open the right doors – some of the wrong ones.
The words have been used in spells, formal religion and folk ritual