Tag Archives: word tasting notes

procrastination

Posted on July 10, 2012 | 1 comment

Please forgive this divagation
but I have a little question
prompted by a blog
’s poetical suggestion:
Are you pro or anti crastination?

You know, there’s so much nastiness,
such pain and stress and sorrow
and mental haze and fog
you can bequeath to tomorrow –
in Latin, that’s pro crastinus.

There is one thing you’ll likely say:
why is tomorrow so crass
(as we learn from the Latin)?
Well, if it’s a pain in the ass,
we’ll find a way not to do it today.

It’s like a crunchy mastication
of the kind of mental food
that functions but to fatten,
a potato-chip attitude,
this word procrastination.

Frankie said “Relax, don’t do it,”
but I say be the master
and get the bad things done:
rip off the sticking-plaster
and then you’ve gotten through it.

I think if you weigh the pros and cons
when all is done and said,
it’s best to end with fun
and – whoops, it’s time for bed.

Thanks to Blue Moon Huntress and her lyrical and thoughtful poem “Consequences of Procrastinating about the Batteries” for inspiring today’s silliness.

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monadnock

Posted on July 9, 2012 | 4 comments

Spring comes thickly to this monadnock, this aboriginal inselberg. It sits solitary, a lush carbuncle, a furry emerald under a rug of green. There are no ranges of monadnocks as of Adirondacks and Monashees; a monadnock is a monad cnoc (there’s an Erse word for you, cnoc for hill), penetrating the peneplain, an instance of a type of which the archetype is Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, grandee of Algonquian name: Mount Isolated-Mountain.

So sits this, as remote as Maunganui, as grand as Mount Doom, but no volcano. Still it erupts: the verdure effloresces, and the clines of this eminence are a riot of inflorescence: raceme, corymb, umbel, panicle, thyrse, spadix, verticillaster, spikelet, ament, catkin, strobile, elating side by each. Waxwing, chickadee, and nuthatch flit and peck in this boreal forest; in the crepuscule and accreting dark the spike-billed woodcock rasps its froglike call. And in the syntax trees we catch the scrape of the claws of the nesting clause, which builds its inset breeding ground by weaving twigs, sprigs, fronds, scions, and tendrils as it delectates the lexis that everywhere expresses itself.

For we are in word country. This monadnock of manic thickets is no mere geologic rampike nor escaped esker or spring-gone pingo. Every kind of syntax tree grows here. There are short sentences. Sentence fragments. Passives can be seen. Look for the imperatives. You may find following a vine of a sentence you discover yourself down a garden path.

The ten thousand things revel in their names here, grow juicy nasals and voiced stops and succulent liquids, crisp aspirated plosives, fricatives with stridor that outstrips susurrus and cicadas, and vowels, oh, ah, ay, vowels so long a cuckoo may exhaust itself flying singing along them, and curious diphthongs twining out aside and around, and short sounds that skitter and rattle as quickly as a woodpecker’s chips. The monadnock’s mossy boulders hum with the richness of /m/ and /n/ and turn the ear quickly with the unexpected post-nasalized stop /dn/, and then you crack the rock itself.

This is all fertilized by millennia of quotations and citations and attestations and instances. As you traverse the base of our inselberg you step over Melville: “His great, Monadnock hump.” You embark on the trail, your foot upon Emerson: “Monadnoc is a mountain strong.” The plants clustered by the spring, the source, the fons et origo of the brook that parts this forest, are nourished by W.M. Davis from an 1870 National Geographic: “In my teaching, Monadnock has come to be recognized as an example of a distinct group of forms, and its name is used as having a generic value. A long paragraph of explanation is packed away when describing some other mountain as a ‘monadnock’ of greater or less height.”

But beware the population of poppies on the pool’s perimeter. Their seeds are the very seeds of words themselves, but you may relax and be lax as you drink in and find your self drink ing on till you are under the in flu ence of morphemes. No, you must stay clear of mind, for today we stalk that prehistorical theriomorph that fertilizes, enriches, fructifies, fecundates, prolificates this forest and its undergrowth, the monadnock’s eudaemonic thesaurus.

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guyot

Posted on July 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

“Guyot,” he said, raising his glass slightly in salute. “I’m doing some vine training.” He chuckled slightly as he sipped his Burgundy. “Ah, c’est beau,” he said. “En fait, c’est Beaune. Savigny-les-Beaune.”

“I say,” I said, “that’s a rather good Burgundy. Guyot, you said?” I pronounced it as he had, /gi o/.

“Not as in guillotine,” he said. “Like you got rearranged without the o. Like Jules Guyot, the French agronomist who invented the vine training method named after him. It’s a version of cane pruning.”

Guyot, whatever his first name was, did not elaborate, leaving me to look it up later. Leaning on his cane, he turned his flat-top brush-cut head (a military man?) to the nearby table, which was covered with glasses variously part empty, part full.

“Ah, look,” he said, “my namesake. As it were.” He started moving himself slowly towards the nearest chair.

It took me a moment to guess what he meant by his namesake. “A tabletop under water,” I said.

“Oui,” he said. “That is what a guyot is. It is an underwater volcanic mountain – of some size, at least 3000 metres above the sea floor and typically at least 10 kilometres across the top – isolated, and flat-topped, and at least 200 metres below the sea surface. Probably originally an island, worn flat by wave action and then gradually sunk by plate tectonics.” He set down his glass, pushed an empty dinner plate aside, and gripped the table edge as he eased himself almost glacially into his chair. “It was named by Harry Hammond Hess,” he said with a grunt, “whose theory of underwater seafloor spreading helped gain acceptance for plate tectonics.”

“I’m going to assume he didn’t name it after the viticulturist,” I said.

“No,” Guyot said, “after Arnold Henry Guyot. A Swiss geologist who taught at Princeton in the 1800s. Guyot figured out how glaciers move – flowing rather than sliding, and faster in the middle.”

I paused, trying to see the connection.

“Some have pointed out that Guyot Hall, at Princeton, housing the Department of Guyotsciences – ah, sorry, Geosciences – named after Guyot, has a flat top,” he said. He added, with a slight air of confidentiality, “This may not be coincidence.” He sat back. “But it is more of a castle-type building, and not so very much like a mesa in the ocean.”

He leaned his cane against the table and looked at his right foot, which he had extended forward. “Gouty,” he said. “I am sentenced to it by my name, it seems, though I had always hoped there was some sort of mix-up. I suppose it is better than a problem with the gut – oy. Then I would have to eat yogurt.”

I smiled. “Indeed. But Guyot is a nice, smooth name, and moves the tongue in a way similar to how one does when tasting wine.”

He smiled and picked up his glass. “Ah, wine. A pleasure, but –” he nodded to his foot – “a bit of a curse too. My volcanic toe, I would like it to be cut off some days.” He sipped. “Oh, dear. You know, I must not forget. Jules Guyot died at Savigny-les-Beaune.”

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cormorant

Posted on July 7, 2012 | 1 comment

The significance of this word to you will vary depending on your context and interests.

If you are a lover of Canadian literary fiction, you may think of the publisher Cormorant Books.

If you follow military aircraft, you may think first of the CH-149 Cormorant, a Canadian Forces helicopter, or you might think of a cancelled project by Lockheed Martin for a drone that was to be launched from submarines’ missile tubes. Which would be a funny reversal of direction for cormorants. I’ll explain in a moment.

If you follow ships, you may know that both the Royal Navy and the US Navy have had several named Cormorant.

If you follow Monty Python, you will surely recall this address by a headmaster (played by John Cleese) to his students in The Meaning of Life:

Now two boys have been found rubbing linseed oil into the school cormorant. Now some of you may feel that the cormorant does not play an important part in the life of the school but I remind you that it was presented to us by the Corporation of the town of Sudbury to commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British. So from now on the cormorant is strictly out of bounds. Oh… and Jenkins… apparently your mother died this morning.

If you are a Biblical scholar, you may know that it is mentioned twice in the Mosaic law of the Pentateuch (Torah) as one of the birds that one must not eat. Here’s from Leviticus 11:17 (in the King James Version):

These are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, And the vulture, and the kite after his kind; Every raven after his kind; And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.

It’s also in Deuteronomy in a slight variation on the same. The Hebrew word here is shalak, which refers to its plunging. The translation to cormorant is sometimes questioned, but it’s reasonable enough.

So, oh, yes, by the way, it’s a bird that plunges. Dives, in fact. Quite deep at times. More on that in a moment.

The cormorant is also mentioned – at least in the King James Version – in Isaiah and Zephaniah, again in two similar contexts. But this cormorant is Hebrew ka’ath (“vomiter”), which is probably a pelican or perhaps something else entirely, such as a desert owl. Here’s the bit from Isaiah 34:11 (yes, I did notice the numerical relation to the Leviticus passage):

And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever; from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever. But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it; and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.

If you’re an ornithologist, or a common birder for that matter, a cormorant is not necessarily so portentous. It’s something you see by the sea, diving into the sea, emerging having grabbed a fish. In some places cormorants have been used for catching fish – the owner ties a snare around the base of the bird’s throat to keep it from swallowing large fish. So the bird gets the fish, comes back, and the owner pulls the fish out – prestifishitates it, as it were.

They are, indeed, birds known to have prodigious appetites. This leads to a figurative use of cormorant to refer to a greedy or rapacious person, and it’s something Warren Clements (he of The Globe and Mail) highlights in his recent book Bird Doggerel (Nestlings Press, printed by Coach House Press, available at better bookstores in the Toronto orbit), in a brief poem:

The Double-Crested Cormorant
by Warren Clements

I wish I were a cormorant.
I’d gobble all the fish I saw
And fishermen would find they can’t
Compete with me, so great’s my craw.
I’d kill the trees I nested in
And have a family so huge
We wouldn’t leave a single fin.
Après le cormorant, le déluge.

(The closing line is not a reference to the cormorant’s presence with respect to Noah, but rather a reference to a quotation attributed to Louis XV or Marie Antoinette.)

You may infer from the title of the poem that there is more than one kind of cormorant. In fact, there are quite a lot of them in its family, the Phalacrocoracidae. Some of them are called shags, evidently from their plumage. But they’re all Phalacrocorax one thing or another. They’re related to pelicans but don’t have the pouchy beaks. They actually vary in appearance quite a bit, and in size somewhat too but they’re generally not too small (the OED calls the cormorant “a large and voracious sea-bird”).

One nice thing about the word cormorant is that one doesn’t have to say phalacrocorax (a fun word, to be sure, but a nuisance even to type); another is that it is less subject to misunderstanding than shag (which also makes it less fun, though). The word doesn’t seem especially delicious or appealing to me generally, however; although it has overtones of korma (a kind of curry), Cor! More? (a British exclamation), Coruscant (a planet in the Star Wars movies), and marine corps, it also brings to mind moron and rant and ant. And although it has a smooth core made with liquids and nasals, and crisp voiceless stops sandwiching that like crackers, those two /or/ sounds have a rather lugubrious echo.

Lugubrious like Poe’s raven – and his whole poem about it, which uses that /or/ sound quite heavily for baleful and doleful effect. But, say, what is a raven? Corvus corax. Hmm… that corax… as in Phalacrocorax? Yes, the cormorant has been thought of as like a sort of sea raven (and not just because ravenous) or sea crow: corvus marinus. Which passed through some French and English mutations to become our word du jour, cormorant. I guess the rest got eaten – like half of the middle syllable when many people say it.

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boson

Posted on July 5, 2012 | 8 comments

The news is all abuzz with the confirmation (at the 5-sigma level, which is enough certainty for most people) of the Higgs boson. This is particle physics, so of course it’s pretty much Greek or Sanskrit to most people. But even if they’re all at sea, people still want to stay abreast of these things.

So… first, boson is not related to bosun (which is from boatswain, which is what you call the guy who’s in charge of the equipment and the crew work on deck on a ship). And it is not related to bosom, which has old Germanic roots. (It’s also not related to bazongas.) Nope, it’s from… wait for it… Sanskrit and Greek.

There are two classes of elementary particles: fermions and bosons. They are named after two pioneering physicists: Enrico Fermi and Satyendra Nath Bose. Fermions include electrons, quarks (some of which combine to make protons and neutrons), and a few other particles (neutrinos and mesons). No two fermions can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously; that’s a defining characteristic, and leads to the differentiations that have created matter as we know it.

Bosons, on the other hand, can occupy the same state. They’re fungible and you can herd them like sheep – into lasers, for instance: photons are bosons. There are three other elementary bosons – whoops, four. There are three that fill in the tidy grid that classifies elementary particles – they mediate the strong force and the weak force, and I think if I start explaining all these terms for noobs we’ll be here for a while (“o snob,” you think) – and then there’s the Higgs boson. Which is needed just because there’s nothing in the model for all those other particles that requires any of them to have mass. So there needs to be some all-embracing – catholic – particle that celebrates, I mean gives, mass. (You may know they call it the “God particle.”)

I’m not going to give a long explanation of the function and nature of the Higgs boson here when other people do it so well – for instance, this great video made from an interview with Daniel Whiteson of CERN, and even this tidy little article from the BBC. I want to get back to this word boson. This is, after all, a word tasting note. Knowing all about what the word signifies is an important part of that, but brevity is the soul of notes, eh?

I said boson comes from Sanskrit and Greek. Satyendra Nath Bose was Bengali, and his name – a fairly high-caste family name that’s been around for a millennium in Bengal – is descended from Sanskrit, and means (I am told) “forest dweller”. It’s a very common name in Bengal, and now around the world; another bearer is Amar Bose, an MIT professor who started a company that’s become pretty famous for making stereophonic equipment.

Where’s the Greek from? The on, which is the same on you see on electron – just the Greek neuter nominative suffix (various particles have this on ending, all modelled on electron, which for its part comes from the Greek word for “amber”, a substance that sparks when you rub it). Does that make on an elementary particle of English? Depends on how you spin it, I guess. Morphemes – which this on is in the etymological sense – are the smallest meaningful units, but then there are phonemes, the pseudo-individual sounds we stream together to say morphemes (pseudo-individual because, as I say, they run together when we say them, more like waves than particles, but when we hear them we identify them as separate: it’s our own linguistic version of the collapse of the wave function).

Not that all bosons are elementary particles. Any compound particle with integer charge spin (fermions have fractional charge spin) is a boson too, and is subject to a lot of the same rules. This is why, at temperatures near absolute zero, matter can start to become one incoherent mass just hanging together like a bunch of dopers at an extremely packed rave – a thing called Bose-Einstein condensate.

So you can tell the bosons by their charge and their fungibility. You don’t need to stick bows on them. They’re like the s and s in bosons – both are /z/ (though some people will say the one in the middle as /s/, with no buzz on it). They’re not like the o and o, which look the same but are said differently.

They also occupy symmetric quantum states, which is not quite like oso – though that has rotational symmetry. But in the strange and charmed world of particle physics, for all I know some kind of rotational symmetry will turn out to be important too, and the rotational-symmetrical pair of a boson will be a uosoq. You know, it has such a geeky charm to it that someone’s probably tried to make a theory that allows the use of that word.

But rotated letters don’t match up with rotated sounds. Boson has a springtime, bee-buzzing-in-a-blossom kind of sound; uosoq is rather harsher and more wintry, and looks like it comes from Inuktitut or Klingon. So let’s just stick with our boson buddy here, and not go for the bonus round. This matter is heavy enough as it is.

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melisma

Posted on July 5, 2012 | 1 comment

It’s Independence Day in the US, so Americans will be hearing their national anthem sung perhaps even more often than usual. And I’m willing to bet that, with current fads in singing, many will have heard it (as also at baseball and football games and so on) sung in a manner sometimes lately described as oversouled – a miasmal malaise of melisma: “O-oh, sa…ayee-ay-ayyy, ca-uh-aw-ah-uhn yoo-ee-uh-ew-oo-oo-hoo seeheee…” Oh, I smell a wannabe…

Even worse when you accidentally stumble into some “reality” music contest show or other, and they’re all trying to jam as many frills and trills in as they can, some of them (I swear I have seen this) tracing the air in squiggly lines with their index fingers as they do this. Talk about rhythm and bruise.

But while I have a dislike of pretentious oversouling, it would not be fair to tar all melisma with the same brush. Indeed, melisma is a foundation of western (and much non-western) music (with the exception of certain Finnish groups who seem to fit about seven syllables into the same note). At base, it’s just the practice of singing a single syllable over multiple notes. It can range from the long meditative but lifting lines of Gregorian chant (for instance in a Kyrie – click link for a video example) to the wail of a flamenco singer to practically every piece of Arabic song out there to Handel and Mozart and Hall and Oates to… well, take your pick. Not too many songs keep to one note per syllable. Not all have long and involved ornamentation, but I challenge you to find me a popular song (I don’t mean a kindergarten song) that has no instance of melisma: a syllable held over several notes.

Hardly seems even to need a word in that broadest definition, does it? And indeed the word melisma has only been in English since the 1880s, brought over from German (where Felix Mendelssohn used it in 1831), which took it from Greek – Hellenistic Greek melisma μέλισμα “song, air, melody”, from Ancient Greek melos μέλος “song, melody”. (Oh, yes, Greek music has it too. And long lines of melisma were apparently favoured in the ritual music of the Eleusinian mysteries.)

But it’s a lovely word, warm and friendly and lithe and, well, melodic. I feel certain that at this very moment there are hundreds of girls and women walking this earth with the first name Melisma. Why not? Warmer than Melissa, softer than Melody, longer than Lisa or Emma… It has not one phoneme in it that cannot by itself be sung for a long passage: /m/, /ɛ/, /l/, /ɪ/, /z/ (probably the least likeable, musically), /m/ again, /a/ (for singing, or /ʌ/ or /ə/). Reminiscent of mellifluous – which (cognate with French miel) refers to honey – and the Eleusinians and the Elysian Fields and perhaps Irish milseán “sweet, candy” and a smile and perhaps something lissome… And the isma could have been an ism like so many other isms, but the added a makes it so much more singable.

So while you may with justification dislike the many imitators of Whitney, Mariah, Christina, et al., I enjoin you to put them out of your head for a time and listen to Mohamed Khaznadji show how it’s done. Think of him singing the word melisma on one of his myriad-noted melodies…

Thanks to Doug Linzey for suggesting melisma.

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Picasso

Posted on July 2, 2012 | 1 comment

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. Father: Don José Ruiz y Blasco. Mother: María Picasso y López. His mother’s name, with its un-Spanish double s, “stranger, more resonant than ‘Ruiz.’” A Northern Italian name, the Pic the same Pic as in Picardy. A name to be famous like Picabia and Pissarro and Braque and Matisse.

Even when petite, Picasso was a precocious artistic picador of prodigious capacity. Became, in time, a byword like Einstein. But a magpie, an explosion of peculiar artistic pica, pick-and-mix, fricassee, picalilli of peinture; promiscuous stylistically like James Joyce, promiscuous sexually exactly not like James Joyce. And each depiction an epic of picking apart, a diffraction, a flattened tesseract. Breasts P bodies i buns c bellies a legs ss mouths o,

ricochet lips to back to tip, triangle vowels high front, low front, hollow back echo, voiceless voice voiceless voice voiceless voice

so pick as picture associated pieces case some Picasso, pose sacral cipollini ossified acid poetry, Paint Power Pleasure ictus its ink ischemia it create coin copulate kill kiss and after ass apple accident aggravate amnesia animal sing smile slap sex sculpt over open oblation so no oh: castle, catastrophe, picrorhiza, pickle, keep, packs, pisco, piso, piss, pass, paso, pia, icap, isso, cass, caso, ossiai, Ossian, saci, soca, ossip, capisce pax auspices copulase scepsis acolta episcopa is a cops aspic so

But still, all it’s there. Picassos: valuable but rare not. See you can another almost way the same. Scraps, skips, escapes? Coherent. Keep scoping and see. Peek: ah, so. Anyone can do pretty. Pick Picasso, and ex post facto after cerebral explosion sweep up conceptual scraps, concatenate, extrapolate, speculate. Look, anyone can look at it. Your kid could do that. It’s like capering on the flat capstone peak of a castle: precarious, perhaps, but not particularly impracticable. All you have to do is get there first.

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lambent

Posted on July 2, 2012 | 3 comments

He opened the book and a tongue of flame licked across the leaf.

“Quick – the book!” I said. “It will burn!”

“The book is quick,” he said, “but little worry about the flame. It brings more light than heat.”

It licked again, a lithe lambda giving a warm glow, soft like the fleece of a lamb. A tongue of fire had descended on this volume – no, was ascending from it. It flicked, bent, ambled, melted, bloomed. He handed me the book, open, not hot, in flame but not inflammable. I could see now what the word was that played its tongue on the page so: lambent.

My own tongue and lips engaged: the tongue like a lamprey sliding its tip, the lips meeting softly and then breaking apart, the tongue pressing again to kiss its tip behind the teeth but coming to a hard end. I could see the play in the letters: upward flicks at l, b, t; curls and curves in between at am and en.

“I thought lambent meant a lamp,” I said. “That soft glow or gleam. Or a gladsome radiance. Shed some light on the subject.”

“It’s clear now,” he said. “A clear flame, licking the book. A tongue of fire. Here’s Latin: lambere, ‘lick’.”

“Licks but does not burn,” I said. “Not a flambeau. Just a muse of fire. A tongue that illuminates but does not consume. A mental fire.”

“A tongue and a mind may glow together. They may cut like metal or soothe like balm; they may bring meat to the table for your meal. They brook no blame.”

“This is all in pieces, elements,” I said. “The word in your mouth is coming apart and mixing up.”

“Flame is eminently mutable. Simply let it not be muted. And – ah!” he said, reaching for the volume, which I was about to close. I handed it to him, open. “Let it be,” he said. “If it is lambent, let it be, for you will see softly by its light. If it cannot be –” he waved his finger over the b, momentarily obscuring it – “what is left is a lament in the darkness.”

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flamenco

Posted on July 1, 2012 | 5 comments

Ellos comen flamas. They eat flames.

Out of the fireplace it whispered, crackled, capered. Tapping a pattern, it set its tight staccato: stop hesitating, start touching lightning, keep those charges arching; caught in the netting, what is the flutter, nothing but your heart there. Sing for your supper, dance till you’re tattered, pluck and slap and clap now – pain is your tutor, time is your torture, can’t you catch the rapture?

And in the echoing clockwork of the finger snaps and beaten boxes, sounding boards and castanets, and woven around the rapid ecstatic dance of the fingertips on the guitar, winds a voice, wailing in microtonal portamento and ornamentation of unequal temperament, the aching of a heart, a noble heart, a bright heart, a red bird burning in a net, flames in the chest curling out through the mouth, the pain writhing on the face: and the feet, the feet stamp, the feet hammer and tamp, as the body bound in flowing fabric arches and twists and strains like fire to reach the saving air, the feet beat the heart, beat the flaming heart, beat till the torture is rooted out, beat till the heart is in cinders and sparks, and the flaming flakes of paper fluttering up to the black-blue sky are flamingos, birds of the flames, pájaros de las flamas, flamencos…

This dance, this dance of the face, the heart, the shredding tension between heaven and hell, this dance of the fingers curling like waves and flame, this slow melismatic anfractuous dance of the voice, this ecstatic yet muriatic music, where does it come from? Is it Flemish, flamenco, or from the flaming bird, flamenco, or can we ever know? Its roots are Gypsy, Roma, but it is everywhere now, and where did it roam from? It looks a bit like Kathak dance from India. The microtonal sounds and ragged rhythm reach towards raga. But when your soul is searing on its grill, when you are trapped in the crackle of its lightning, when the hammering of your heart is played out by thumbs and fingertips and toes and heels in unreciprocating tempi, and your spirit is extenuated, flaco, lean, so you cannot even say amen, can you tell me then where it comes from but the flame that eats the flame?

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apodictic

Posted on June 30, 2012 | 1 comment

The ground on which my words were founded foundered. The descriptions and depictions had become unpredictable; I panicked; I portended aporia and predicted apocalypse: I espoused a doubt leading only to the conclusion that is the end, and by no means could I reach it.

One word of truth, firm, not relative! Or even an apophthegm, a didactic maxim. Can no one show me the way? Quick, apodeixis: an absolute proof. Where may I find it? Not in Metaxa or 80-proof Absolut. And not, for goodness’ sake, in apocope. No, say, in what disrobing room of the mind, what apodyterium of the brain’s bath-house, may what had been rooted and descending as a p turn and, abruptly apogeotropic, ascend as a d so that we may say “I see, I see”?

Do I decrypt the apocrypha, or pick up a dictionary? How is it that I may expect direction? I look away and find “away”, Greek apo, but it is already getting away from me: this “way” may mean “very”. Show me the way, then? It is the “way showing”: apodicticus, ἀποδεικτικός, established in incontrovertible evidence and thus truth of an adamantine nature: apodictic.

Yes, bedrock, a certainty particularly applicable to the purest of mathematics. Nothing moves, nothing is relative. But in bits linguistic, this is an impudent trick, a dupe; I appeal to apodioxis, the rejection of assertions as absurd. Language is polymorphous perverse, a social creation, and communication is a particular copulation of solipsistic consciousnesses. The frames of reference are never identical, the perspectives and experiences incommensurate. It is between these irreconcilables that the contact occurs, requiring respect and cooperation, at least enough to accept the phones or pixels as indexes of schemata and deixes to extending intentions. The apodictic must perforce by apomictic: an asexual reproduction, which is to say, a single source undilute, a parthenogenesis. In place of agape, apogamy. Incontrovertible because untouchable.

Purity is not the way of the word. One cannot create without loss and cross-contamination. In the tears excited by every apodacrytic exists a successful succubus. When you seek the way, you see not one, not strait, nor straight, but two roads, diverging because converging (diachronic misdirection?). And can you have genesis without disingenuousness? I will not speak here of apophasis.

As the smoke cleared and I caught a glimpse of my psychopomp, I knew that my search was not over but away. In language we stand not on rock; we are all pulling up each other’s bootstraps, and who knows where in time and space is the basis. So preempt the apodictic, and at its temple pronounce your apopemptic: a hymn of farewell, not to what never was but to the hope you kept. One is too lonely a number in any case.

I dropped the rock I had picked up; my doppelganger pocketed it. And that was where we stood. Our ground was what we held in common, or one after the other. I knew that he knew that I knew that he knew that I knew that the matter of facts was hypotactic, embedded, subordinate, turtles all the way down. In the beginning was the word, but you cannot find the beginning of words. We made our exit into the dappled crepuscule: it was evening out.

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