Lecture on Overflow
This is our fourth lecture.
Overflow
Treading on thin lines
Like a marginal ropewalker
A lively rosalia
Imitates the chains of population
And a farandola
Is forced to associate
With septuplets.
Grapes and fapes
And berries and cherries
Are often used in wine
While the stronger stuff
Will bear no fruit
But would rather
Base its structure on grain.
A foundation falters when
The edifice
Is too
Tall
And that is why there are
building codes
And yet laws may be broken
And in such disasters
Man's fate will tumble like a
hippopotamus on
ice.
— Zumwalt (1974)
The Lecture: The Hippopotamus on Ice
Greetings, poetry lovers. Today we continue our journey through the works of Zumwalt with his 1973 poem, “Overflow.” If our last lecture on “They’ve Stripped the Forest for Babble” explored a world freezing under the weight of meaningless information, “Overflow” examines the structures that contain that information — our social, intellectual, and even artistic systems. The poem is a profound meditation on scale, a warning against the oversized and unnatural edifices of modern life. It argues that we have built systems so large and so sterile that their collapse is not only inevitable, but will also be utterly absurd.
We will trace the poem’s argument through its three distinct movements: from the precarious state of the individual within an overwhelming collective, through a brilliant metaphor on the nature of systems, to the final, unforgettable vision of collapse.
I. The Precarious Individual and the Overwhelming Collective
The poem opens with an image of profound instability:
Treading on thin lines Like a marginal ropewalker
This is the state of the modern individual. We are not on solid ground, but performing a delicate balancing act on the “thin lines” of societal rules and expectations. The word “marginal” is interesting, serving multiple purposes — marginal room for error, the rope is a margin, etc. but also hinting that the ropewalker is not the star of the show, but a peripheral, almost irrelevant figure, precariously suspended over a metaphorical void.
Now, Zumwalt gives us two really beautiful and strange juxtapositions here to illustrate the crushing weight of the collective. He writes:
A lively rosalia
Imitates the chains of population
And a farandola Is forced to associate
With septuplets.
Let’s stop on that word rosalia. If you are into insects, you might recognize “rosalia” as the scientific name for a genus of a type of longhorn beetle. Maybe Zumwalt was aware of this, maybe not, but forget the beetle definition; the musical one is the one that is relevant. In music, a rosalia is a melodic sequence that gets repeated, moving up or down the scale one step at a time. It’s a pattern. And while it can be engaging and interesting, it can also become incredibly predictable and boringly robotic if overused — an aesthetic trap.
So when Zumwalt says this musical chain “imitates the chains of population,” he’s crafting a brilliant metaphor for oppressive conformity, the sound of a society stuck on repeat.
And he then cleverly “transposes” this idea of a chain from the musical to the physical with the image of the “farandole,” a joyful, chaotic, communal chain dance where people link arms, guided by a leader. But in this world, the dance — or more accurately, this instance of those dancing this dance — is “forced to associate / With septuplets.” This is the poem’s central, absurd crisis. Imagine the leader of that winding dance, our “marginal ropewalker,” trying to guide the chain through its intricate patterns while simultaneously being forced to carry seven infants. One baby would be a challenge. Two a struggle. Seven a complete catastrophe.
What Zumwalt seems to be saying is that in this world of “overflow,” our most organic forms of art and community are being crushed. The lively musical pattern becomes a robotic trap, and the joyful community dance is saddled with an impossible, life-choking burden. Given the era’s anxieties about a population explosion, the “septuplets” are not just a random number; they are a symbol of a world producing more than it can possibly sustain. It’s a vision where our artistic and social structures are doomed to collapse, not from an external attack, but from being overloaded from within.
II. The Wine and the Grain: A Metaphor for Systems
Having established the plight of the individual, Zumwalt pivots to the poem’s philosophical core, presenting a masterful metaphor for two different kinds of systems:
Grapes and fapes
And berries and cherries
Are often used in wine
While the stronger stuff
Will bear no fruit
But would rather
Base its structure on grain.
Here, he contrasts wine with distilled spirits. Wine is made from fruit — grapes, berries, even the nonsensical “fapes,” which hints that even the natural is being corrupted. Wine is an organic system, rooted in nature, terroir, and tradition. It is variable, complex, and “fruitful.”
The “stronger stuff” — spirits like whiskey or vodka — is based on grain. It is a product of agriculture, industry, and technology (the still). It is more potent, more pure in its alcoholic strength, more uniform, and ultimately sterile — it “will bear no fruit.”
This is Zumwalt’s framing of the modern world. We have abandoned the complex, nuanced, sometimes weaker but fruitful “wine-based” systems (tradition, organic community, art) in favor of the more powerful, efficient, and structured, but ultimately sterile, “grain-based” systems (ideology, mass production, raw data). We have traded the vineyard for the factory.
III. The Inevitable and Absurd Collapse
The final section of the poem shows the consequence of this choice. Having built our world on these “stronger,” grain-based systems, we have created edifices of immense size and terrifying fragility.
A foundation falters when The edifice Is too Tall
The very structure of the poem on the page mimics a tall, teetering building, a brilliant piece of formal irony. These oversized systems are inherently unstable. Our attempts to secure them are flimsy:
And that is why there are building codes And yet laws may be broken
The “building codes” are our laws, our regulations, our ethical frameworks — society’s desperate attempt to keep our own creations from collapsing. But Zumwalt adds the cynical, inevitable truth: “And yet laws may be broken.” Our safeguards are fallible.
This leads to the final, unforgettable image of what this collapse will look like:
And in such disasters
Man’s fate will tumble like a
hippopotamus on
ice.
This is Zumwalt at his most devastatingly brilliant. The collapse of our grand, sophisticated civilization is not a noble, epic tragedy. It is not a graceful fall. It is the fall of a hippopotamus on ice. Hippos are creatures of immense size and power, and maybe from a absurdist viewpoint, extra-large relatives of barnyard pigs. So put ice skates on one of them, which would be a feat in itself, and we have this clumsy, completely out of its natural element, ungulate, trying to maintain balance but ultimately, and inevitably, headed, or maybe “rear-ended” — that’s a bad pun, I take it back — headed, and looking utterly, ridiculously pathetic, perhaps — headed for a fall. The image is both terrifying and darkly hilarious.
“Overflow” is Zumwalt’s warning about the hubris of scale. It argues that by pursuing over-amplified production over moderate levels of production, artifice over art, and size over stability, we have created a world that is precarious for the individual and destined for a collapse that will be stripped of all dignity. Our fate, he suggests, is not to burn out in a blaze of glory, but to slip, flail, and crash with the absurd, pathetic comedy of a hippo on a frozen pond.
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