Language – Page 17

Paying Attention to the Momentous

September 11, 2010 by John 5 Comments

With apologies to Mr. Thoreau, I don’t honestly believe that the great mass of humanity lead lives of quiet desperation. Most people, I have come to think, live lives of simple routine, blended with dollops of making-it-up-as-you-go-along. They come to crossroads in their lives and turn one way or the other not because they’re desperate and not because they’re dazzled by a sunbeam highlighting a particular path. They choose a direction based on whatever information and other resources they’ve got available right then. Only in hindsight does it become “obvious” that they had to go straight, or left, or in sudden reverse, or whatever.

But fictional characters: ah, yes, things are a bit different with them. They plod along, unaware they’ve been ascending a ramp rather than a simple road, and suddenly they realize they’re at a fulcrum. The course of their lives hasn’t been up a mountainside to a peak. It’s been up a see-saw: to take one step further will throw them off-balance, if not dump them entirely (as Dad used to say) ass-over-teakettle.

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For Lack of Better Words

September 10, 2010 by John 7 Comments

[Image: “Zip Your Lips,” from A New Me’s photostream at Flickr]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

The Peninsula

When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all around the peninsula,
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive

But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log.
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog.

And then drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this; things founded clean on their own shapes
Water and ground in their extremity.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

…and:

It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

(Margaret Atwood, from The Handmaid’s Tale [source])

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The Breathing of Summer Mountains, the Hissing of Summer Lawns

July 16, 2010 by John 8 Comments

From whiskey river:

It was almost dark on an early summer eve, and the forest was never more enchanting than now, at dusk. At dusk the mountain begins to withdraw its force back into itself and become quiescent. If you too can become quiescent, so still that you can’t think of your name, you can feel this as a palpable fact. Just become so still that your mind won’t be bothered to remember the mundane, and then you’ll feel it like you feel the shifting of the winds. Then you’ll know when the mountain changes from exhaling to inhaling. That’s not so important in itself, but the mind that is quiet enough to notice is. The mind that is not always caught up in detail is your only treasure. Stop chasing details and become still to feel it. The mind that sees details clearly but is not caught by them is like a vast borderless mirror. That mind does not oppose itself.

(G. Bluestone [source])

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Starting Out Fresh

May 28, 2010 by John 12 Comments

From whiskey river (except for the last five lines; numerous other differences vs. the alternate source linked below):

Exercise

First, forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
and do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
and then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them
around after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backwards
starting with even numbers
with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
forgetting it all until everything
is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies, your dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?

(Stephen and Ondrea Levine, from Who Dies? [source])

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Touch and Enter

May 26, 2010 by John 3 Comments

In a comment on yesterday’s Towel Day post, Marta said:

The miracle of the towel! The man who realized this was a man to be reckoned with indeed.

That got me thinking: how cool it would be to come up with a… a something — an in-joke, an idea, a catchphrase, a little fictional detail, an entire story — which lodges in readers’ minds, gets passed around even among people who never read the original, and becomes part of the culture’s stock of unchanging raw materials.

Like towels in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, say.

Or — to broaden the focus to the almost 100% universal (First World) level: The Wizard of Oz. Not the book, either (sorry, L. Frank Baum) — the movie.

“I’ll get you, my pretty.”
“…and your little dog, too!”
“I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks…”
“Professor Marvel never guesses; he knows!”
“Auntie Em! Uncle Henry!”
“Some, where—” (You almost don’t have to finish the phrase.)
“If I only had a brain”
“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”
“First they tore my legs off and threw them over there…”

(etc. etc. etc. — all of which I or other people have used in conversations in recent months.)

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Pushing Your Writing, Pushing Your Mind

May 17, 2010 by John 7 Comments

Remember The Querulous Squirrel’s 100-stories-in-100-days challenge? Ambitious, wot? Supremely well executed, eh?

Okay, now start with a similar premise:

Write a story a day for an entire month.
Saturdays and Sundays included. Holidays, too.
No limit on word count. Just write a complete story each day.

Simple to say, hard to execute, right? Just as The Squirrel’s must have been.

So then add another huge level of complication: invent your own genre, in which you will write every one of your month’s worth of stories.

I’ll pause to let that sink in: your own genre…

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Just Wait

April 23, 2010 by John 8 Comments

[Image above from The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, which observes:
“I guess if you don’t just go grab a seat you may never get one.”]

From whiskey river:

The swarm of words
and little stories
are just to loosen you
from where you are stuck.

(Shitou Xiqian)

…and:

O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning… or wise… And still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.

(Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund [source])

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Lies, Blessed Lies

April 6, 2010 by John 8 Comments

[Image: Forked Tongue at Window Rock, one of a series of “Arizona Postcards” by Scottish artist James “Jimmy” Cosgrove. To view the entire collection, see this page.]

A science-fiction story I read long ago tells of a visitor from another planet who simply cannot understand why human beings lie. I don’t remember much about the story — no author, title, catchphrase, so I can’t even Google it easily — but I seem to remember that it went one level further: Once it had received (and reluctantly accepted) the explanations (to gain an advantage over someone else, to inflate one’s self-image, etc.), the alien asked, So then why do you write fiction, which serves none of those purposes?

I have no idea how I’d answer an alien with a question like that (or with any others, for that matter). In general, though, one simple answer is: We write fiction in the expectation that someone will read it. Even if only the story’s author will ever read it, without at least one reader I myself can’t see the point, either.

But still that ducks the question, which is really: Why do people read fiction?

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Worth a Thousand Words (Plus the Speed of Light in Parsecs per Month, Times Pi, Divided by Planck’s Constant, to the ith Power…)

March 31, 2010 by John 10 Comments

Per Tim O’Reilly, on Twitter… To quote the site where he found it:

To all of you nerds and geeks who — like me — have been unfairly and inaccurately labeled “dorks,” only to then exhaustively explain the differences among the three to a more-than-skeptical offender, I say: You’re welcome.

The simple eloquence of colored circles…

Apostrophizing the Enemy

March 24, 2010 by John 6 Comments

[Image at right from the Celestial
Heavens/Might and Magic site]

In a comment the other day over at the Querulous Squirrel’s treetop lair, I ad-libbed a suggestion for people facing what are commonly called “nervous breakdowns”: name them. Please forgive the self-citation (which feels to me like a breach of Interweb etiquette):

Every “nervous breakdown” should have its own term, because every one is different from every other — and its, um, its significance is too great to let it go unnamed.

Somewhere, no doubt, someone has collected the names of all the demons and imps of Hell. Maybe every one of us who’s had a “nervous breakdown” should consider assigning it the name of a demon…

I did some looking around and found just such a (brief) collection. It’s here. As I described it in the rest of that comment:

…names and descriptions to fit many moods and ways of regarding a breakdown, from the scary to the wry. There’s even a Leonard. “When I first met Leonard, he scared the living crap out of me. Now I know he’s just the biggest jerk I ever met.”

Then today I encountered, at Colleen Wainwright’s communicatrix blog, a post about (in part) remembering trying times gone by. In that post, Colleen referred to someone she called “The Resistor.” As you can see for yourself in her post, The Resistor is/was not one of her best friends. His or her story — what The Resistor had done to Colleen in the past — just sounded too interesting to ignore. I had to learn about that “that rat bastard” for myself, so followed the link she’d conveniently provided… and discovered that The Resistor wasn’t a person. The Resistor was (is?) a feature of Colleen’s own internal landscape.

I’ll turn the mike over to her for a moment:

The Resistor needs no one and nothing — except something to push against, and everyone else does a damned fine job of providing fodder. The Resistor is very well developed, very smart and very, very strong…

It is indifferent to pain, although it seems to find it interesting or even amusing. But it doesn’t derive pleasure from causing pain. Far from it. It enjoys pushing back, period. Hence, the Resistor’s particular gift at shape-shifting (and, perhaps, a wee bit of pride in its highly refined abilities in this area.)

…[My hypnotherapist] tried every way he knew of to bring the Resistor to the side of Light, much to the amusement of the Resistor, who patiently, if a little condescendingly, kept insisting that was not a possibility.

Can I possibly tell you how much I love this picture of The Resistor?

(While you’re there, by the way, be sure to visit via her generous linkage her posts on the other denizens of her self, as revealed through hypnotherapy: Monkey Brain, The Edge, and the rest.)

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