Like the Knife of the Carver

Language is the principal tool with which the Eskimo make the natural world a human world. They use many words for snow, which permits fine distinctions, not simply because they are much concerned with snow, but because snow takes its form from the actions in which it participates: sledding, falling, igloo-building.  Different kinds of snow are brought into existence by the Eskimo as they experience their environment and speak; words do not label things already there.  Words are like the knife of the carver: they free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside.  As a man speaks, not only is his language in a state of birth but also is the very thing about which he is talking. 

---Edmund Carpenter, "Arctic Realities." Taken from the exhibition pamphlet for "Upside Down: Arctic Realities" on display at the Menil Collection, April 15-July 17, 2011. 

Modern

"Anna is 'modern'---I believe that's what it's called when you read unsettling books and admire hideous pictures."

---Edith Wharton, The Reef (1912)

They

"Who's 'they'?  Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"

---Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)


Indeed. 

Wine of Christ

"We'll see how the surgery and histology go.  Then we'll start with chemo the week following.  A little light chemo:  vincristine and----"

"Vincristine?" interrupts the Mother.  "Wine of Christ?"

"The names are strange, I know.  The other one we use is actinomycin-D. Sometimes called 'dactinomycin.'  People move the D around to the front."

"They move the D around to the front," repeats the Mother.

"Yup!" the Oncologist says.  "I don't know why--they just do!"

"Christ didn't survive his wine," says the Husband. 

"But of course he did," says the Oncologist, and nods toward the Baby, who has now found a cupboard full of hospital linens and bandages and is yanking them all out onto the floor.  "I'll see you guys tomorrow, after the surgery."  And with that, the Oncologist leaves.

"Or rather, Christ was his wine," mumbles the Husband.  Everything he knows about the New Testament, he has gleaned from the sound track of Godspell.  "His blood was the wine. What a great beverage idea."

"A little light chemo.  Don't you like that one?"  says the Mother.  "Eine kleine dactinomycin.  I'd like to see Mozart write that one up for a big wad o'cash."

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)

Moore's story originally ran in The New Yorker; while there are many passages that more adequately capture the subject matter, tone, and unique style of this piece, oddly enough, this is one that I recall from my initial reading of the piece in the magazine over a decade ago.  Moore's depiction of the typical Oncologist as part mathematician, part "mad, overcaffienated scientist" is exemplified through this dialogue in which the doctor's superficial and somewhat lighthearted description ("Yup!") of the chemotherapeutic agents stands in stark contrast to the desperation, confusion, and enervation of parents in the pediatric oncology ward.

The story is told through the perspective of "The Mother," a writer whose point of view shifts precariously between the darkly comedic and the abject.  Her eighteen month old son has been diagnosed with Wilms' tumor, a kidney cancer, and the reader follows her on her dizzying journey into the pediatric oncology ward and the experiences of parents who endure the ineffable.  The narrator's stream of consciousness disorients and then reorients the reader, revealing that what seems as surreal as a nightmare is actually a reality.

The next entry will also come from this piece. 

"Up!"

There is Command in the Word of the King;
Justice in the Word of the Law;
Reverence in the Word of the Scripture;
But Rapture in the Word of the Babe.

On this 6th
day of July
18 97

Baby Spoke its First Word

Saying

"Up"

---F. Scott Fitzgerald's baby book (entries recorded by his mother Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald)

Reprinted in The Romantic Egoists: a pictorial autobiography from the scrapbooks and albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr with art editor Margareta F. Lyons (1974)

Unraveled, Mended, Unraveled, Mended

     "From a needlework book, I learned to cast on.  In the test piece, I got the gauge and correct tension. Knit and purl came naturally, as though my fingers had been rubbed in spiderwebs at birth.  The sliding of the needles was as rhythmic as water.
     Learning to knit was the obvious thing.  The separation of tangled threads, the working-together of raveled ends into something tangible and whole--this mending was as confounding as the groom who drives into a stop sign on the way to his wedding.  Because symptoms mean just what they are.  What about the woman whose empty hand won't close because she cannot grasp that her child is gone? 
      [...]
     Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep.
     Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat."

---Amy Hempel, "Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep"

In this story, knitting is a metaphor for the narrator's painful feelings of loss following an abortion--a symbol of her attempts at self-repair.  Knitting fascinates the narrator for its "compression of language into code," the shorthand instructions that only she and  others who study the craft can comprehend.   

Yet knitting is not merely a motif for loss within this story.  The knitting patterns  or "codes" also capture in microcosm the work of the short story itself---its compression and encoding of the human experience, line by line.  In the course of the story, not only yarn, but hair, pasta primavera, and tinsel, become fodder for the narrator's obsession with knitting. "That was the great thing about knitting," the narrator observes, "everything is fiber, the world a world of natural resources."  Similarly, ordinary happenings and tragedies alike become the substance of fiction which captures human unraveling at its darkest moments, yet also offers the glimmer of the possibility of wholeness (however piecemeal) as do the final lines of Hempel's story:

"K tog rem st.  Knit together remaining stitches. 
Cast off loosely." 

Thus the story is hardly limited by its subject matter.   Fiction compresses and encodes life--- the patterns are recognizable. 

Dementia

The word dementia has its root in the Latin dementare, meaning "senseless."  Yet I have found my senses heightened folllowing the loss of intellectual force.  My responsiveness to odor is so strong that sometimes I think I've become a beagle.  Intense spices---Indian, Thai, Mexican--feel exaggerated in their richness; I can become exhausted and confused by eating these foods.  My skin often tingles, sometimes for no discernible reason, sometimes in response to the slightest stimulus.  The same process that stripped me of significant intellectual capacity and numbed my mind seems to have triggered an almost corresponding heightening of sensory and emotional awareness.  Sometimes this can be a maelstrom, sometimes a baptismal immersion.  So when "demented" breaks down into "de" for "out of" and "ment" for "mind"--literally "out of mind,"---I interpret the verbal construction as having positive connotations. Not loony, but liberated.  Forced out of the mind, forced away from my customary cerebral mode of encounter, I have found myself dwelling more in the wilder realms of sense and emotion.  Out of mind and into body, into heart.  An altered state. 

--Floyd Skloot, "Wild in the Woods:  Confessions of a Demented Man" in In the Shadow of Memory (2003)

In 1988, Floyd Skloot contracted a virus that invaded and damaged his brain. Here he describes his loss of "intellectual capacity" in terms of a gain in "emotional awareness.""  Skloot's account is not a saccharine one, however, and his description of his enhanced sensorial perceptions and feelings (throughout the book as a whole) is at turns ironic, humiliating, surprising, bittersweet.  I love his attentiveness here to the etymology of dementia and the way that his reading of the word through the lens of his own experience draws our attention to the ways in which we tend to privilege the intellect.  If clarity of thinking illuminates our world, it does so only by limiting what we can perceive. 

One Delicious Compound

We also, I say, ought to copy the bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us...we could so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

---Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 84 "On Gathering Ideas"

Seneca discusses the art of commonplacing and the alchemy of composition.  His words reassure the shaky and insecure young writer that although he/she gathers pollen (quotes) from flowers (the writing of other authors) the "honey" he/she produces from this raw material will indeed be something new--and more importantly, something delicious. 

[Note Seneca's  reference to the word care in this quote.  The word care and the word curate have the same root. To care for something is to preserve or maintain--but it also suggests selection, arrangement, and exhibition. Thus copying quotes is not meant to be a derivative act but a generative one--much as a museum exhibition makes a new argument through the presentation of pre-existing objects, so too do authors produce new ideas by drawing upon those already in existence. ]

Joy

"IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY"
   
                          ---Jenny Holzer Untitled (In A Dream)


Note that joy and happiness are not exactly the same thing.  Look HERE and closer HERE, and  HERE and my favorite, HERE.  (scroll down)

The Word of the Street

[...] "Don't you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn--what is the word of the street?"

Then he went on to explain, in a mixture of English, Italian and hand gestures, that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there.  If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought.  Whatever that majority thought might be---that is the word of the city.  And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there. 

"What's Rome's word?" I asked.

"SEX," he announced.

"But isn't that a stereotype about Rome?"

"No."

"But surely there are some people in Rome thinking about other things than sex?"

Giulio insisted: "No. All of them, all day, all they are thinking about is SEX."

"Even over at the Vatican?"

"That's different.  The Vatican isn't part of Rome.  They have a different word over there.  Their word is POWER."

"You'd think it would be FAITH."

"It's POWER," he repeated.  "Trust me. But the word in Rome---it's SEX." 

---Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

In this scene from Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on why the city of Rome, the first leg of her year-long journey, is intensely pleasurable for her, yet does not afford her a sense of belonging.  As her friend Giulio explains, experiencing such a sense of place requires that one's own "word" coincide with the "word of the street."  Gilbert's "word" as she notes is "SEEKER" and thus she is out of sync with Rome's own point of orientation.  She will remain a visitor and not a resident--she is "not fully living" in Rome.  In the conversation that follows, Gilbert identifies New York City's "word" as "ACHIEVE," and distinguishes it from the word of Los Angeles, which is "SUCCEED."   Stockholm's word is "CONFORM,"  and Naples' word is "FIGHT." 

Gilbert's distinction between "achieve" and "succeed" rings true.  This is one of those examples of words that we typically think of as interchangeable, yet are essentially different. In reading this, I'm also reminded of Henry James's efforts to distinguish between jealousy and envy, which I wrote about here.  [Donald Sutherland's comment to Mary Tyler Moore in "Ordinary People" in which he declares that she is "very determined" but "not really strong" curiously comes to mind as well. ] This kind of exercise forces us to be precise, to think about what words mean, what they reference.

But the larger point of the passage is to reflect on the differences between space and place--to contemplate what makes a space "fit" with our own sense of ourselves.  This is the difference between habitability and visitability.  I've tried to think of a single word that describes my own hometown city (Washington DC and the metropolitan area that is its extension.)  I think the word is "ANGLE." I'ts not suprising then that I have little desire to return except as a visitor. I am not sure of my own word--but it is not "ANGLE." 

Kismet

Kismet.  [Turk. kismet, Pers. quismat, a. Aarb. qisma(t) portion, lot, fate, f. qasama to divide.]

Destiny, fate.

1849 E.B. EASTWICK Dry Leaves 46 One day a man related to me a story of Kismat or destiny.  1865 MRS. GASKELL  in Cornh. Mag. Feb. 219 It's a pity when these old Saxon houses vanish off the land; but it is 'kismet' with the Hamleys.  1883 F.M.CRAWFORD   Mr. Isaccs i. 19 The stars or the fates...or whatever you like to term your kismet.

---Definition courtesy of the Oxofrd English Dictionary

Today's quote is a definition of one of my favorite words--Kismet. As the quotes above suggest, this word of Arabic origin entered the English language in the mid to late 1800s.  In English, kismet suggests a kind of magic, good fortune, crossing paths, the perfect alliance of the stars, an overarching order.  It has a romantic quality, suggesting that things are "meant to be"--despite all evidence to the contrary. 

The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

In this quote, taken from his autobiographical work, A Small Boy and Others, James helps to explain the difference between two words that we often assume to be synonymous. James identifies his own state of suffering to be one of envy...the slightly less vile version of these two green-eyed evils.


...if jealousy bears, as I think, on what one sees one's own companions able to do--as against one's own falling short---envy, as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. They were so other--that was what I felt; and to be other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the question....It wasn't that I wished to change with every one, with any one at a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.

---Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913)