Palindrome: a word, verse or sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards
from Webster's Third New International Dictionary 

In view of the broad definition given by the dictionary, not many conditions have been placed on the palindrome beyond its being a string of letters arranged symmetrically outward from the center. Notably, the odds against this alone are staggering: the likelihood of a palindrome of eighteen letters occurring naturally in written English is roughly one million to one. This means that every small lackluster palindrome represents a victory over incredible odds. The ones that crystallize a thought or create a provocative image are absolute miracles!

Palindromes are all around us. The concept exists in the field of mathematics where a palindrome is defined as a series of numbers which, when reversed, represents the same numeric value. When children practicing the piano go up and down a scale they are making musical palindromes. There are numerous passages of music in which the notes are arranged in a palindromic fashion. The most famous of these is J.S. Bach's "Crab Canon." Even the building blocks of life, the polynucleotide chains in a D.N.A. molecule, bear a palindromic relationship with each other as they wind along the double helix…

I believe that human beings are fascinated with palindromes because, in an uncertain world, they provide us with a sense of order through their perfect balance and symmetry. At the same time, perhaps because they are such enigmatic and curious things, they put us in touch with mystery.

Language has its own agendas. Humans have invented written words in order to communicate, only to find that our creations share relationships among themselves that we did not put there!

Given their demanding structure and the random relationship between their words, how does one explain the outpouring of colorful imagery, the presence of meaning, and the perfectly reasonable syntax found in palindrome after palindrome? No one does. 

Thoughts from Stephen J. Chism
Excerpted and put back together (with permission of the author)
from his amazing book From A to Zotamorf: The Dictionary of Palindromes

A few words from the artist:

I've always been a fan of patterns but high school study hall was the birthplace of my delight in palindromes. There, some friends and I came to concoct the palindromic phrase, "Go drop a vapor dog!" which we then followed with a series of dog fart cartoons. I was delighted by the feeling that we were simply discovering structures that already existed, and whatever meaning occurred seemed accidentally miraculous. Through my cartoons, I was simply illustrating that accident, which was oddly freeing.
 
I've continued concocting palindromes because, as Chism writes in From A to Zotamorf, "The results of such endeavors can be astonishing. Images and juxtapositions unlikely to have occurred in any other context pour forth." (Pg. 6)

That is also one of the things that I love about making puppet shows — not being constrained by the confines of reality allows me to put a sloth on a bus or a dung beetle in the White House. Unlikely juxtapositions make drawing palindromes really fun, especially when I find one that I want to place in relationship to another.
Suddenly the illustration is the glue that makes them make sense together.

Some time later, I had the humbling realization that most, if not all, the palindromes I had written had already been written by someone else. Which doesn't make the process of creating one any less enjoyable. But it does mean that I can't claim original authorship of any of them. No big deal, I mostly revel in the challenge of drawing them. If you want to see where most of the palindromes included in this calendar first appeared in print, please consult Stephen Chism's extensive bibliography at the end of From A to Zotamorf. Thanks go to him for his support of this calendar; to Karen, Lior, Sonja, Alexis and Bindlestiff Books for their publishing assistance; and to you for choosing to spend your year palindromatically. Hope it's a well-balanced one. Wow!

– Beth (No X in) Nixon
www.ramshackleenterprises.net