Words
Words are hilarious. Hysterical, even. I am on the floor laughing, thinking about words.
I am sure you have played that game where you write a word - any word - three times and it starts to look funny. Hairy. Hairy. Hairy. Back Back Back. Or say it out loud - Shake. Shake. Shake. Booty. Booty. Booty. This provides endless hours of fun, even if you don't happen to be a cunning wordsmith like yours truly. (If you are not a cunning wordsmith, try simpler words: Box. Box. Box. Rack. Rack. Rack....) Everything seems funny when you say it three times.
You start to wonder who came up with these things. I mean it must have been someone crazy right, or someone with a grand sense of humor, who sat there with his quill pen and put letters together to make words, which would in turn be used to describe a thing, a feeling, or when they got really good, words to describe other words (onamonapea, now there's a brain buster...)
But really, who got to decide that a book would be called a BOOK, a chess piece called a ROOK, a glance called a LOOK, a shiver called I SHOOK?? Why isn't a ROOK a LOOK? (would we be able to see three moves ahead if this were true?) or I SHOOK a BOOK? (would this make it so cold, shaking people were very well read?) It is totally arbitrary, you see, which letters make which word, and its meaning from there on out.
Words get more hilarious, if you can imagine that. There are so many amazing misunderstandings in this world, and I think this is because WORDS, those little buggers.
Take the word HATE for example (a strong word, a good one to start with). Someone might say "There is so much HATE in the world," and you could totally misunderstand them. You could think they were discussing a street full of hippies and mushroom posters that glow in black light in San Francisco - HAIGHT street. Do out-of -towners then think we HATE hippies?
Or DATE. One could say "I love DATES" and you might be confused as to whether this person loved candle light dinners with red wine and shrimp cocktails paired with good conversation or if they had an abnormal infatuation with those abnormally large and abnormally shriveled raisins: DATES...
Or STATE. When someone says, "What a STATE I'm in!" Are they referring to their emotional well-being or the particular one-of-fifty arbitrary boundaries created by our forefathers that they have chosen to reside in? Could the United STATES actually be a group of emotional whackos that banded together to discuss their changing moods, their STATES? Oh my goodness, this is too much.
There are other funny confusions to think about:
MATE: Are you watching The Nature Channel or talking to your friend in Australia?
DIET: Are you watching your weight or telling a character from the Adams Family that he should no longer live (DIE-IT)?
STABLE: A house and two kids or a place for a horse to shit?
RACE: Something you run in or something you avoid talking about except when you talk about the presidential elections?
DOOR: Something you walk through or a singer of "Break on Through to the Other Side"?
SINGER: Vocalist or sewing machine?
BAND: Rock or rubber?
HOARD: Oversexed?
I could go on forever!
I could go on forever because words simply astound me. Words blow my mind. Words get me off. Words infatuate me. Words make me randy. See how many times I said the same thing, using, yes, WOOORRRDS??!!
I am infatuated with the fact that we (humans) have learned to communicate with each other in the way that we have. The simple idea that we can sit there and drink coffee and TALK....just TALK and TALK and TALK...and we actually know what the other person is talking about! This is WILD! This is RADICAL! Words kick ass!!!!
Right now I am trying to imagine a world without words. It looks something like this: blank billboards, empty calanders, notebooks full of sketches rather than notes, silent telephone calls, blank-paged books, songs without names, movies narrated by music rather than dialogue, millions of hand gestures, dramatic entrances and exits, honking horns and ringing bells, schools of confused pupils, millions of hugs and kisses....
It does not sound all bad, does it? A place where we do not have to discuss everything, put things into words, say the right thing, and, if you have my natural compulsion to write everything down, you would be freed from this as well. I think I might like it there, in the World of No Words, for the simple fact that I would be liberated from the lonely and gnawing vocation of writing, something I feel compelled to do because there are JUST SO MANY WORDS IN THE WORLD. I would not have to sit here at my computer while other people were laying in the sun or having brunch, not worrying about WORDS, not thinking about why they're funny or boring or beautiful, just living among real things: hand gestures, ringing bells, etc.
But what then? What could I do if I did not have words to fiddle with? Would I be an empty book? A song without a name? Would I be an empty calander? What if I could not say the word FIDDLE and imagine a yellow field dotted with orange poppies and a band of long haired musicians humming along to their folk songs. What if I could not write the word CRAWFISH and be reminded of fishing for those red, long-clawed creatures in the river that runs through the Santa Cruz mountains. What if I did not know the word WEATHER and could not make small talk. Or if I did not know how to charm people with PUNS and PLAYS ON WORDS. Or could not make up my own words. Or learn words in other languages. This would be disasterous!
With words, I can put things in order. With words, I can work things out. I can write down a problem and then solve it with words. I can learn where things come from and what things are with words. I can learn what one word means from other words. I can trace where that word came from. I can know that the word SOOTE meant SWEET when Chaucer wrote it, and that it was DULCE when Paz wrote it. But most of all, words bring HUMOR to my life - and that is what really fascinates me. That words - EGG. EGG. EGG. - can make me laugh, just as they are, little letters in a line.
I am sure you have played that game where you write a word - any word - three times and it starts to look funny. Hairy. Hairy. Hairy. Back Back Back. Or say it out loud - Shake. Shake. Shake. Booty. Booty. Booty. This provides endless hours of fun, even if you don't happen to be a cunning wordsmith like yours truly. (If you are not a cunning wordsmith, try simpler words: Box. Box. Box. Rack. Rack. Rack....) Everything seems funny when you say it three times.
You start to wonder who came up with these things. I mean it must have been someone crazy right, or someone with a grand sense of humor, who sat there with his quill pen and put letters together to make words, which would in turn be used to describe a thing, a feeling, or when they got really good, words to describe other words (onamonapea, now there's a brain buster...)
But really, who got to decide that a book would be called a BOOK, a chess piece called a ROOK, a glance called a LOOK, a shiver called I SHOOK?? Why isn't a ROOK a LOOK? (would we be able to see three moves ahead if this were true?) or I SHOOK a BOOK? (would this make it so cold, shaking people were very well read?) It is totally arbitrary, you see, which letters make which word, and its meaning from there on out.
Words get more hilarious, if you can imagine that. There are so many amazing misunderstandings in this world, and I think this is because WORDS, those little buggers.
Take the word HATE for example (a strong word, a good one to start with). Someone might say "There is so much HATE in the world," and you could totally misunderstand them. You could think they were discussing a street full of hippies and mushroom posters that glow in black light in San Francisco - HAIGHT street. Do out-of -towners then think we HATE hippies?
Or DATE. One could say "I love DATES" and you might be confused as to whether this person loved candle light dinners with red wine and shrimp cocktails paired with good conversation or if they had an abnormal infatuation with those abnormally large and abnormally shriveled raisins: DATES...
Or STATE. When someone says, "What a STATE I'm in!" Are they referring to their emotional well-being or the particular one-of-fifty arbitrary boundaries created by our forefathers that they have chosen to reside in? Could the United STATES actually be a group of emotional whackos that banded together to discuss their changing moods, their STATES? Oh my goodness, this is too much.
There are other funny confusions to think about:
MATE: Are you watching The Nature Channel or talking to your friend in Australia?
DIET: Are you watching your weight or telling a character from the Adams Family that he should no longer live (DIE-IT)?
STABLE: A house and two kids or a place for a horse to shit?
RACE: Something you run in or something you avoid talking about except when you talk about the presidential elections?
DOOR: Something you walk through or a singer of "Break on Through to the Other Side"?
SINGER: Vocalist or sewing machine?
BAND: Rock or rubber?
HOARD: Oversexed?
I could go on forever!
I could go on forever because words simply astound me. Words blow my mind. Words get me off. Words infatuate me. Words make me randy. See how many times I said the same thing, using, yes, WOOORRRDS??!!
I am infatuated with the fact that we (humans) have learned to communicate with each other in the way that we have. The simple idea that we can sit there and drink coffee and TALK....just TALK and TALK and TALK...and we actually know what the other person is talking about! This is WILD! This is RADICAL! Words kick ass!!!!
Right now I am trying to imagine a world without words. It looks something like this: blank billboards, empty calanders, notebooks full of sketches rather than notes, silent telephone calls, blank-paged books, songs without names, movies narrated by music rather than dialogue, millions of hand gestures, dramatic entrances and exits, honking horns and ringing bells, schools of confused pupils, millions of hugs and kisses....
It does not sound all bad, does it? A place where we do not have to discuss everything, put things into words, say the right thing, and, if you have my natural compulsion to write everything down, you would be freed from this as well. I think I might like it there, in the World of No Words, for the simple fact that I would be liberated from the lonely and gnawing vocation of writing, something I feel compelled to do because there are JUST SO MANY WORDS IN THE WORLD. I would not have to sit here at my computer while other people were laying in the sun or having brunch, not worrying about WORDS, not thinking about why they're funny or boring or beautiful, just living among real things: hand gestures, ringing bells, etc.
But what then? What could I do if I did not have words to fiddle with? Would I be an empty book? A song without a name? Would I be an empty calander? What if I could not say the word FIDDLE and imagine a yellow field dotted with orange poppies and a band of long haired musicians humming along to their folk songs. What if I could not write the word CRAWFISH and be reminded of fishing for those red, long-clawed creatures in the river that runs through the Santa Cruz mountains. What if I did not know the word WEATHER and could not make small talk. Or if I did not know how to charm people with PUNS and PLAYS ON WORDS. Or could not make up my own words. Or learn words in other languages. This would be disasterous!
With words, I can put things in order. With words, I can work things out. I can write down a problem and then solve it with words. I can learn where things come from and what things are with words. I can learn what one word means from other words. I can trace where that word came from. I can know that the word SOOTE meant SWEET when Chaucer wrote it, and that it was DULCE when Paz wrote it. But most of all, words bring HUMOR to my life - and that is what really fascinates me. That words - EGG. EGG. EGG. - can make me laugh, just as they are, little letters in a line.
home
Getting older means not only that you add more years to your life, but that you add more homes. You move out of your parent's house. You are out on your own, you forge your own way, you must create your own home. You pay dues in a dorm room. You lease your first apartment. You have roommates, you have grocery lists, you have a window that looks onto the sea. You have a set of keys to the front door - but you have a sneaking suspicion that you are not HOME when you open it.
You move again. You move to a bigger place, a city, maybe, or a house with a garden. You buy cheap furniture or expensive furniture. You put photgraphs in frames and hang paintings of your father's or posters of things you care about. You chop onions in the kitchen, bring flowers home. You get a bedside table and a reading lamp. You can fall asleep easily here.
You find yourself referring to your new place as "home" - so have you done it? Have you built your own? And where does this leave your old home(s)? Are your old homes - your first shitty apartment, your parents home, your dorm room - still considered you homes, as you once referred to them? What does "going home" mean? Does it mean taking two subways and walking up four flights of stairs to your New York apartment or does it mean flying back to California and having your parents pick you up from the airport?
I have just recently moved back to my parents house for the summer. What a lovely place it is, my parents house. Here there are sprawling gardens and ancient, loving oak trees. The earth breeds firey nosturshums, hydrangas as big and as light as balloons, fertile succulents, reproducing. Inside there are wood floors, windows that let all of what's outside in, a round table - round as a full moon - to sit at for dinner. There are bowls of fruit waiting to be eaten. There is much beauty here, and much love.
Living here again feels simultaneously natural - I am a child again, I am being nurtured, I am home - and strange: I am living in the same place that I grew up in, but I am different. Here I live the in the framework of my old life, and in the literal framework of my own house, but all of the things inside of me have changed. The way I think has changed, the way I look at the world and the way I talk to people. I have had many other homes, slept in many other beds, woken up to many other kinds of light. To move back into an old house brings both comfort and distress; coming home means evaluating all of the people that have lived here before you, who are all the former versions of yourself.
Poet Philip Larkin wrote:
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
But is it home itself that is sad? I am not so sure. Because there is not a less sad place that I could imagine than here: this high-ceilinged house surrounded by open fields and shrowded in light. I cannot imagine a place with more life: my mother humming, the lively dinners made fresh, the newspaper thrown around the breakfast table in the morning, the birdfeeders, inviting. I do not miss my dorm rooms or my tiny apartments in Brooklyn when I am here. I do not miss anything, really, because it all seems to be here, at home, where things are growing, where I grew up.
What is hard then, what can be sad, is sifting through the memories: jumping on the trampoline after dinner, the pantry is where I hid, the summer I lived in the loft with a lover, the way the sheets smell and being barefoot on the bricks. With my sisters: the sprinklers were on, we were all in the backseat of the car, when the earthquake hit we were jumping rope, we had our own language. The tough parts: when Karen had a seisure and we had to leave the house, my grandfather dying in his bed upstairs, were picking flowers and the neighbor yelled at us not to pick her flowers but they were for Mother's Day so we cried.
Yes, digging through these memories is hard work. Moving around, changing homes, had become routine for me, and this moving and changing was what I focused on. It was easy to pick up and move when I was not attached to the place I lived. It was easy to think about the present moment when I was traveling or living in a new city. I did not question myself or my past. My cheap furniture was easy to part with. My bedrooms were easy to box up - my mind was always on the move.
It is sometimes harder to be still- being still means you have time to think about all the moving you have done. It is sometimes harder to be comfortable, as I am comfortable at home, because being comfortable means you are attached to something.
You attach yourself to a place. Home: your parents, your siblings, doing their dailys - your former selves, your grandfather's empty room, the flowers you could not pick.
You move again. You move to a bigger place, a city, maybe, or a house with a garden. You buy cheap furniture or expensive furniture. You put photgraphs in frames and hang paintings of your father's or posters of things you care about. You chop onions in the kitchen, bring flowers home. You get a bedside table and a reading lamp. You can fall asleep easily here.
You find yourself referring to your new place as "home" - so have you done it? Have you built your own? And where does this leave your old home(s)? Are your old homes - your first shitty apartment, your parents home, your dorm room - still considered you homes, as you once referred to them? What does "going home" mean? Does it mean taking two subways and walking up four flights of stairs to your New York apartment or does it mean flying back to California and having your parents pick you up from the airport?
I have just recently moved back to my parents house for the summer. What a lovely place it is, my parents house. Here there are sprawling gardens and ancient, loving oak trees. The earth breeds firey nosturshums, hydrangas as big and as light as balloons, fertile succulents, reproducing. Inside there are wood floors, windows that let all of what's outside in, a round table - round as a full moon - to sit at for dinner. There are bowls of fruit waiting to be eaten. There is much beauty here, and much love.
Living here again feels simultaneously natural - I am a child again, I am being nurtured, I am home - and strange: I am living in the same place that I grew up in, but I am different. Here I live the in the framework of my old life, and in the literal framework of my own house, but all of the things inside of me have changed. The way I think has changed, the way I look at the world and the way I talk to people. I have had many other homes, slept in many other beds, woken up to many other kinds of light. To move back into an old house brings both comfort and distress; coming home means evaluating all of the people that have lived here before you, who are all the former versions of yourself.
Poet Philip Larkin wrote:
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
But is it home itself that is sad? I am not so sure. Because there is not a less sad place that I could imagine than here: this high-ceilinged house surrounded by open fields and shrowded in light. I cannot imagine a place with more life: my mother humming, the lively dinners made fresh, the newspaper thrown around the breakfast table in the morning, the birdfeeders, inviting. I do not miss my dorm rooms or my tiny apartments in Brooklyn when I am here. I do not miss anything, really, because it all seems to be here, at home, where things are growing, where I grew up.
What is hard then, what can be sad, is sifting through the memories: jumping on the trampoline after dinner, the pantry is where I hid, the summer I lived in the loft with a lover, the way the sheets smell and being barefoot on the bricks. With my sisters: the sprinklers were on, we were all in the backseat of the car, when the earthquake hit we were jumping rope, we had our own language. The tough parts: when Karen had a seisure and we had to leave the house, my grandfather dying in his bed upstairs, were picking flowers and the neighbor yelled at us not to pick her flowers but they were for Mother's Day so we cried.
Yes, digging through these memories is hard work. Moving around, changing homes, had become routine for me, and this moving and changing was what I focused on. It was easy to pick up and move when I was not attached to the place I lived. It was easy to think about the present moment when I was traveling or living in a new city. I did not question myself or my past. My cheap furniture was easy to part with. My bedrooms were easy to box up - my mind was always on the move.
It is sometimes harder to be still- being still means you have time to think about all the moving you have done. It is sometimes harder to be comfortable, as I am comfortable at home, because being comfortable means you are attached to something.
You attach yourself to a place. Home: your parents, your siblings, doing their dailys - your former selves, your grandfather's empty room, the flowers you could not pick.
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