Words

It’s all true. Every word I've written has been plagiarized ... from the dictionary. I have only rearranged their order. These days, dictionaries have gone the way of encyclopedias and the thesaurus. Even spell check will soon be a relic, to be replaced by the dreaded AI. The world doesn’t hold still for a minute.

Words come and go faster than the last great idea I had. Some are on life support while others are screaming their first breath in the maternity ward.

The sentinels at the gate can’t agree on what to include. The Cambridge Dictionary added over 6,000 new words this year while Merriam-Webster allowed a mere 370. I think the lexicographers ought to have a softball game and settle the matter or shout each other under the table.

Words are wondrous things. I can’t say enough about them. A few squiggles on the page or on the lips can be life-changing. The marriage vow: I do or Hell, no, I won't go.  

There was a time when the well-turned phrase would get you re-invited to the next dinner party. Ask Henry James. I doubt if he ever ate at home.

Up until WWI, speechifying was conflated with intellect. During that crime against humanity, soldiers lost limbs and long-winded phrases died in the trenches. A generation was lost along with polysyllabic words; staccato jazz translated to clipped sentences. 

Concision entered poetry. Literature became stripped of frippery the same way the Bauhaus School brought unornamented Modernism to architecture. The old standard of florid sentences in which the subject was separated from the predicate by pages of commas and semicolons was no longer considered a thing of beauty.

Even if Faulkner didn't get the memo, Hemingway made brevity the new standard. It doesn’t get any shorter than his short story: Baby shoes for sale; never used.

When did minimalism become such a virtue? Are we a lazy people or just in a hurry on our way to nowhere? Is this payback for long-winded bloviating; those orators in the halls of Congress or men of the cloth intoning everything God has to say?

Now the pendulum has swung and some fine words are hanging by their thumbs. LOL. The internet has us writing in fluent acronyms. IMHO, this is a small step for man and a giant step on the wrong road for mankind. We may end up conversing in shrugs, nods and grunts.

On the other hand, nothing is more democratic than language. Each word is an agreed-upon utterance rising organically by popular consent. Words morph from other words and also die from exhaustion. Awe used to be my religion. Now it has become limp from overuse; an awesome shame. 

Brevity has shortened our perceptual span. Linguists believe that language precedes thought. Fewer words limit ideas. A broad vocabulary trains the mind to think in more nuanced ways. In less than a year our native tongue has been demeaned by simplistic terms and name-calling. Deceit leads to debasement. 

T.S. Eliot described poetry as a raid on the inarticulate. We are all poets and we struggle to capture those feelings for which words fail us. Let us find ways to express our vehemence against this tide, even as we revivify language to support and find soulful connections with one another.

Autumn Barely

The calendar says fall has begun. Indeed much has fallen but not the foliage yet. Harvest may have begun elsewhere along with swollen gourds. The only seeds I have sown yielded my three wonderful daughters. still in the summer of their lives. 

I know the season has turned over only because Trader Joe's has gone orange with all things pumpkin, from soup to nuts and more importantly, long-awaited ice cream. 

As for nature, autumn arrives noiselessly on its own slow clock. Unlike the maples and sycamores of Vermont whose rust and ruddy leaves die like divas ablaze in a golden deathbed scene, ours just get drained of chlorophyll, curl up and drop, then become fish and swim away in the great cycle. However we are still far from skeletal boughs.

I doubt if my demise will be operatic. Some might say: I thought he died years ago. In fact, maybe I did and it slipped my mind in which case this has been an afterlife beyond my expectations. In the meantime, I feel evergreen, still filled with pluck and spunk. My branches may be bent but are not quite brittle and most names etched in my bark are still retrievable.

In order for it to be autumn, I have to be in the mind of autumn. Here in the Southland, summer has a long lease. We still have days in the eighties even as we may yearn for a change of palette from green to burnt sienna. So we have to create markers that signify the season.

One such is the weekend football games which continue to infantilize me now and then or, at least, keep the child in me alive. Passion for my team has a short duration and is inexplicable, which is probably why I can't give it up. The outcome changes nothing. I have a penchant for some things that resist the rational. 

Football also brings its own weather. It's a way of feeling the brisk air. Put the kettle on. We need our small pleasures to keep the wolf from the door. If, as Emily Dickinson wrote, hope is a thing with feathers, there is a mourning dove nesting outside my window. 

I shall take this as a portent of change. Godlessness works in mysterious ways.

Invasions

In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, the opening salvo of WWII which ended up killing 85 million people. Putin invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022. 

Over the past nine months The United States has invaded itself. We are no longer the country I once knew, having traded golden knick-knacks for the Golden Rule. We used to be the land upon which God shed his grace and crowned thy good with brotherhood. Grace and brotherhood have been replaced with avarice and vengeance.

Louis the 14^th said: L’etat c’est moi, I am the state. This is the most succinct statement proclaiming the absolute right of kings. We are well on our way in our descent to monarchical rule.

Invasions are seldom contributions to mankind. However, there are exceptions. Almost one thousand years ago a French contingent from Normandy crossed the channel and defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings. It might be regarded as a food fight in which French toast bested English muffins, and the result was eggs benedict. Besides their French cooking and new-fangled weaponry, they introduced their Latinate-Romance language, forever softening the English tongue. And the Norman Conquest bequeathed me my name.

To stretch a point, another instance of a good invasion was the introduction of cowpox to treat smallpox. Edward Jenner is credited with this first vaccine. The word itself is derived from the Latin, vacca, meaning cow. In fact, the notion first came from West Africa where the disease was managed by allowing small amounts of live virus to colonize healthy people and stimulate the immune system to create antibodies. Indeed, smallpox is the first human disease to have been completely eradicated.

Thanks to vaccines, we have virtually eliminated polio, mumps, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, chickenpox, rubella, and hepatitis. Dictators tend to disparage science because it is based on independent thought and critical thinking. Evidence-based inquiry is deemed a threat while junk science and conspiracy theories are encouraged.

It is therefore not coincidental that our new regime has aligned itself with the anti-vaccine movement. Ultimately, the death toll from this senseless alliance can rival the aforementioned wars.

Rounds and Squares and Flakes

Consider the snowflake, each unique as a QR code, given all the possibilities for crystalline formations. Better yet, let’s talk about cornflakes, equally un-replicable. If a cornflake were an island, as it is in a bowl of milk, it would show one deep harbor after another. No perpendiculars. You have to admire it for that. It’s as jagged as the right-hand margin of a contemporary poem, asserting its sui generis voice.

I am gazing into my bowl looking for the meaning of life. It’s as likely here as in the cottage cheese ceiling or the book I just found on my shelf,  written by some guru in a loincloth and scrupulously unread. Some flakes resist sogginess almost successfully, others succumb to milk from cows or almonds.

Where are you going with all this? I don’t know but I’ll think of something.

Truth be told I left cornflakes behind along with Wheaties many bananas ago.  Now, I’m a Catalina Crunch and blueberry sort of guy. But those old orange, rectangular boxes deserve a special place in my thrill-a-minute-life. Wheaties were probably my first newspaper as I spooned and read about their designated heroes. For a street urchin as I was, the athletes on the box became my brief idols. There was a certain magic in those words. I was becoming knowledgeable about something my parents knew not. These days the only thing I read on the box is the carbohydrate and fiber content. 

To stretch a point, American history took an unfortunate turn when, in 1937, Ronald Reagan became a celebrity at least in Iowa when he won the Breakfast of Champions award for best broadcaster of baseball games sponsored by…you guessed it, Wheaties. From there it was a short step into the Oval Office. Presumably, he was gobbling Wheaties in Hollywood, and as Governor of California and then, and then. Of such stuff B-movies are made. Is this a great country or what?

Now it’s time to talk about how cereal boxes are stored in the pantry. My stepdaughter used to alternate her three cereals, flakes, rounds and squares on consecutive days of the week. If it’s Wednesday it must be Cheerios. This became Christie’s way of ordering through the small anarchies of life.

Friend Fred arranged all his cans alphabetically. As he tells it this was done in case he wakes up suddenly blind, he could grab the tuna fish and know it isn’t salmon. I call it the Artie Shaw Syndrome. The clarinet playing band leader and leader also of obsessive compulsives, insisted all pillowcases face the same direction. Eight marriages later he wrote about it. 

Fred can’t play Begin the Beguine but has other endearing qualities. He was miffed when his daughter and son scrambled his pantry as a prank. They even switched the Hi-Lo Flakes with Bran Buds. 

He was confronted with the chaos of life. But he recovered in time to email them that he was sitting at his desk with his will and an eraser. Humor is the best revenge. As for the turmoil of existence I have no urgent need to tidy it up. Earth is round, borders square and life is irregularly flaky.

Yes, I know, sophisticated people scoff at cereal. A few cups of coffee rev their motor. Call it my arrested development. But my morning bowl has gotten me this far. Every day snaps, crackles and pops, in no particular order.

Odysseus and His Odyssey

The new movie called The Return begins at the end of Odysseus’ twenty-year travail. Ralph Fiennes is washed ashore on Ithaca, haggard looking but ever resourceful and muscular, while Juliette Binoche is no less cunning as she ravels and unravels the fruit of her loom. The scenes of them together are well-worth the ordeal of watching the rest of the film with its gratuitous violence.

Constantine Cavafy's poem Ithaca calls into question, is it the  destination or the journey. The promised land may be illusory. We strive for some ultimate sense of returning home, which ain’t what it used to be. As Thomas Wolfe put it, You Can’t Go Home Again. Yet we all have our Ithaca.

The illusion has been paved over or seen now with new eyes. In baseball one travels around the diamond to reach home plate in a cloud of dust. Is he safe or out? Only the imp-ump-god knows. What’s a Homer for?

Was Odysseus safe? Not until he emptied his quiver of arrows into the eager hearts of Penelope’s suitors. On full display is our hero’s devious ways, hubris here, self-possession there, lust and fidelity in his many turnings. 

Why do we still read the Odyssey today? Maybe to see the soft clay we are made of. Odysseus is a model of Western man, blemished as he is, and his multitudes within; the entire aggregate of men in all their passions and follies. 

In the Odyssey he is alternately punished by Poseidon and saved by Athena. Yet he emerges as man, alone, without providential intervention. He is without a moral compass, a cork on the waves given to expediency without any ideology other than survival. There are no moral imperatives to guide him. No sense of the greater good nor any ethical standards other than looking out for number one.

He returns to Penelope because he needs the feminine principle to make himself whole. Warriors require the other to recover their humanity. Eros is the creative life force. Will the patriarchy ever learn?

Few of us reclaim the throne unless self-actualization can be seen as royalty. I would say it is. And that sense of a life well-lived comes from the journey itself. What greater adventure than this wild span of years full of stumbles, detours, overhead light bulbs, being fully met and with moments of reverence for the all of it.   

A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To Oblivion

Aside from Facebook, I have a list of 65 friends to whom I send my blogs. Google, in their infinite reach, tells me how many click on the link I provide.

I’ve been posting about two each week for sixteen years. On average, about 25-40 open and presumably read my ramblings. All of a sudden, starting about two weeks ago, I am being read by over twice the number on my recipient list.

Welcome, I think but who are you? I don’t know whether to be flattered or frightened. Imagine having 65 of your closest friends over and 150 crash the party. Food for thought is soon gone. Some of these strangers may even be wearing masks. 

Is that you, Igor? How’s the weather in Kazakhstan? Or are you stuck in some subterranean boiler room in an abandoned warehouse? Worst case scenario, I’m being scrutinized by recently-released thugs 3 floors under the White House. Maybe ICE is checking to see if my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island with an undocumented Kaiser roll.

Or could my new-found set of eyes be an array of Musk-made bots? There are no buts about a bout with a bot. One would think AI has better use of their time than scrutinizing the squiggles of an iconoclast in his 93rd year. Why bother? Soon, I shall wither away from natural causes anyway, unless I find myself first having lunch with a suicide bomber.

True enough, I've been vehement over the forensics leading to the demise of America. I had expected to go out hearing about the land that I love... through the night with a light from above and not a requiem for a country, disappeared. The wars which I thought were won against human bondage and fascism, seem now to have both been lost. 

I will try to ignore that uninvited goon-bot leaning against a lamppost across from my window at midnight, whether he exists or not. Instead, I'll gaze at the apostrophe of a moon, possessed of all the wonder over which it presides. 

After further research, Google tells me I have readers in China and Hong Kong. Next time, I’d better read the fortune cookie for a coded message. It's only fair, if I show them mine, they should show me theirs. I never give up hope that Lao-Tzu will turn up.

Instead, I usually get some version of, Have a nice day. Indeed, I shall, with gratitude for this lucky life, and moments still pulsing from every one of my ninety plus years, from column A and column B, the sweet, the sour and spicy of it all.        

Word of the Year

My vote goes to performative.  Of course, spoken words are different from written words and this is one I’ve never uttered but it keeps popping up in print or from the mouths of talking heads.

Gaslighting had its run and now feels sort of stale. I expect performative to have the same fate. On the other hand, as long as Trump reigns, the word fits.

When Donald first appeared on the political stage, he had already gained his chops on reality T.V. Since then, we have witnessed the transformation of politics into show business; lethal show biz at that. Now, only about a third of the country is laughing. Call it theater of audacity and mendacity. Call it performative.

He knows how to get his name on the marque. Bless him, as on Fox News, ridicule him or curse him as we do in my circle of friends, but it isn’t possible to ignore him.

Whether his antics, part ignorance and part arrogance, can be dismissed as a mere performance is no longer relevant. He may be playing the court jester but he is also the man on the throne. And each reckless and mindless edict has historic consequences wrecking countless lives.     

When he staged an illegal political photo op at Arlington cemetery that was performative but relatively harmless. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and now the Defense Dept. is also designed partially as performance. When he set up a camera crew to show him kissing the flag or the Bible that was also performance art, but his behavior goes much further than that. 

His announcement which threatened Greenland's sovereignty is both spectacle and a blatant violation of law. The destruction of a vessel and crew in international waters because it might be heading here and it might be carrying drug smugglers is also performative, but deadly. 

With a wink toward his MAGA minions he parades weaponry and paves over roses. To borrow from G&S Pinafore, He is the monarch of the realm / born to overwhelm / And ply his power as the office grants / And so do his children and his sycophants.

Historians will describe him as a narcissistic misogynist with arrested development, void of empathy and any discernible ethos, They will have to add performative to that list of adjectives.