HOW TO USE A BOOK

I grew up with books themselves, which impart a physical aspect of knowledge that never leaves you, of choosing, holding and using books, a mind fed by books with the heft of pages turned by hand and dog-eared with book-learning, if you can get that anymore, which seems to be less and less likely the longer I live; you can see it in the oncoming verbiage, so much of which is undergrowth...

That's how it felt when the other day I was wording on the computer, where I now mostly always handle words - workwise, not creativitywise - only now and then eccentrically making notes out in the infrastructural wilds, scribing cursive with pen and ink on paper, like a caveman sparking fire with stones in a cave in winter.

Anyway, I was working via ratatatty keyboard from words written in penbase, when I had to use an online e-thesaurus that had been developed to serve the TLDR mentality that is sponging through young minds of today, so the word that I knew from pen- and-book-based experience, but could not call immediately to mind - a problem Roget also had - was not in the e-thesaurus, even though I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the web page and then left-clicked through all the Nexts. 

So at a virtual impasse, leaning backward in real time I reached over the keyboard and my actual desktop to my actual bookshelf, and grabbed my trusty old Roget's. It was heavy with reality, tatty from so many wrestles with meaning over the years , but it was a way of life that my hands knew well: they were old friends, those pages and my fingers, met again and delighting in the encounter, romping together through those magic fields of hard-copy intelligence.

My fingers knew it to the roots, how to leaf at the back, to get to... right... about... there: the Rs, without even looking, the soft, well-used, hand-familiar pages feathering open in that always pleasant way, somewhere near or even at my objective, and I found my word, for it had been a common word, not too long ago, my finger expertly scanning down the long list of nuance to the desired meaning...  

They really knew and used words when they made this book, and they knew who they were serving; this was before words were handled like allegedly southern-fried alleged chicken allegedly from Kentucky... This was like walking through a meadow of meaning spun from all the mind by the sun of creativity, alive in all ways and as rich with ancient understanding as a wild strawberry...

Then back to the pixel plasma, even more aware of what is waning as we change focus, turn our eyes away... 

BIRDWORDS

For the barnswallow family (Mom, Dad and the two post-nestlings), the becalmed evening sky isn't offering much in the way of soaring insect snacks, so the four spend the time preening. For the parents, that means routine elegance of motion; for the gawky newbies, who don't yet know how to do a professional job at the beak-through-feathers thing, it's an awkward business. And they really need some preening: from here it looks like they still have a lot of poky kidfeathers.

Then when that's all done to respective satisfactions, from their darkling perch atop the wire the four whir down and scour my plum and weeping cherry trees, their wing flutters and bouncy bustling rustling up small insects from the leaves and twigs as they venture in along the branches toward the trunks, looking for gourmet caterpillars along the way, chattering as they go, about all sorts of important things. I wish I had a barnswallow dictionary.

INFOLDINGS

I was just musing the other day, probably while folding laundry, on how the respective meanings of all the words I've listed below (and others that didn't then come to mind) hinge upon a very finely nuanced aspect of the root.

Few (if any) of them were simply coined; they evolved into the common parlance out of a deep and tacitly shared semantic understanding that was never expressed but was instantly understood, much as the words themselves are now.

That depth is no longer explicit in the words as they stand, or as they are are spoken and heard, until - while perhaps folding laundry in a notably foreign country - you get at the root and think how it really is that the words mean what they mean; then how awesomely appropriate is each word's perspective on the meaning and life-relativity of 'fold'!

comPLICation (complicity, complex, comply)
exPLICation (explicit)
imPLICation (implicit, imply)
supPLICation (supply)
rePLICation (reply)
duPLICation (duplicity, duplex)
apPLICation (apply)
simPLICity (simply)

(plicare - Latin for ‘to fold,' as also in ‘plex/ply.’)

ENDLESS BREATH

There are spells within time and language by which words are transformed and no longer hold precisely the old meaning because of their new shape, which causes them also to be pronounced differently in the language of the current tongue, and then some generations down the etymological expressway there is an exclamation of surprise at the discovery that a given word, so native to the tip of this very own tongue, stems from a tongue that spoke the word differently a long time ago, a word that in its turning came from an even longer-ago tongue that spoke another of the same language altogether, passing the word along the length of breath from the hum of beginning, just as all things and people and tongues have been passed along without cessation if they exist today, and transcending the surprise is the enlightenment that 'your' language is not yours at all, but a borderless portion of a vast, living, autonomically shifting mindlight aurora that illumines the earth and outlives us each and can never be pinned down as so many have so humanly vaingloriously tried to do, and that this one endless breath that is language, as it breathes through you is breathing you too, breathing you into meaning, for you think along the lines and seams it allows you, as dictators (from the Latin root dicere, "to speak"), for example, have always known, and that the freedom and flexibility in your language correlate with the freedom and flexibility in your life; you are as free as your language, and as confined, unless you go beyond its edges into the wilds...


[Adapted from the version originally published in Kyoto Journal "Word" issue, #29, 1995]