EthicalDative

Late-Breaking from on High

Posted on August 7, 2023 by JMN

It may be that God doesn’t talk only to Their anointed few; I’ve had word from that Rascal myself.

Here’s what I believe They said:

I DIDN’T CREATE LIGHT WITH A THIRD-PERSON COMMAND AS YOU HAVE PROPOSED IN YOUR LITTLE WEB LOG. I USED MY SIGNATURE IMPERATIVE FORM, IN WHICH I “LET” AN INTENTION, AND THE MOTIVE FORCE FOR IT TO HAPPEN IS MY OWN INTESTINAL WILL. FROM WHERE YOU STAND IT’S “MAGICAL” OR SOMETHING. KINGS AND CERTAIN SONS-OF-BISCUITS TRY TO APE MY COMMAND STYLE, BUT THAT LOT ARE JUST GASSY IF YOU ASK ME. DON’T TELL THEM I SAID THIS.

God booms! My ears are still ringing. I offer up thanks for this revelation in the only mumbo-lingo I know: Much obliged, Commander, and have a rip-snortin’ day!

Posted in Anthology | Tagged Branded Figments, grammar, language | 2 Comments

‘The Tongue Has No Bones.’ Yeah!

Posted on August 6, 2023 by JMN

There’s no mistaking a language which can uncork a grave accent, an acute accent, a circumflex accent and a dieresis, all in the space of a single written utterance, as not-French. As I coax these diacritic delicacies from my keyboard in frank extase of Francophilia, my fluent touch-typing slows to a tortoise gait.

French is called the “most Germanic” of the Romance languages, while English, intensely Gallicized, ranks as the most Roman of the Germanic languages. The swirls and eddies of the cross-tonguing, the churn and spurn of embrace, are involving.

Of questionable relevance, who doesn’t know that “yeah” isn’t written “yea”? A substantial few, it seems. Nay to “yea” except when voicing a vote, says the insufferable formalist.

The tongue has no bones is a Moroccan saying. I’m not sure what it means in that culture, but the truth of the organ’s bonelessness is non-negotiable in most circles.

That’s me for now.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language | 3 Comments

Christian Wiman: ‘Ars Poetica’

Posted on August 5, 2023 by JMN

2.
These lost and charnel thoughts
less thoughts than bits of stun
I suddenly find myself among;
that are the me I am when I am not
sleeked to reason and pacific despair
speak to me of a pain that saves,
some endmost ear to shrive the mind.
(From Christian Wiman, ‘Ars Poetica,” The New Yorker)

What’s the grammatical subject of “speak”?

In part 2 of Christian Wiman’s brief but diamond-dense poem, I deduced that the subject of “speak” in the penultimate line is “thoughts” from the first line. I couldn’t absorb the other messages until I had settled the matter. The strophe is tortured syntactically and salted with “bits of stun” such as “sleeked to reason” and “pacific despair.” The figure-me-out structure and stretched pairings echo the torture of a mind reckoning with mortality, that mind’s inkling of “a pain that saves,” and its cry for an “endmost” ear to broker absolution.

Absolution for what? Perhaps for the wavering of “the me I am,” triggered by contemplation of “a plum and othering dusk,” before the demands of a faith requiring that I “be the being this hard mercy means” — a state of renunciation evoked in the cascade of plangent “if” clauses terminating strophe 1:

…
If I could let go
If I could know what there is to let go
If I could chance the night’s improvidence
and be the being this hard mercy means.

In commenting, I’ve turned the poem upside down as it has turned me. Poems of this sort, read studiously, yield a measure of enlightenment and fulfillment. What exactly is chanced in the “night’s improvidence” sits beyond my candle power.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, poetry, reading | 1 Comment

A Light Meditation

Posted on August 2, 2023 by JMN

Que la lumière soit! Et la lumière fut.
¡Que la luz sea! Y la luz fue. (Que haya luz. Y hubo luz.)
Let light BE! And light WAS.

I realize God’s literal words were, “Let there be light.” Thinking about religion grammatically grounds me in my belief system. I’m tempted to call the 3rd-person imperative — “Let this or that happen” — the “God command,” because it’s an act of instantiation — the willing of something to materialize.

In human dimension the command is hard to contextualize. I can say to the chickens, “Let there be eggs!” It doesn’t work, and I don’t have chickens, but consider this example:

He sits alone in a chamber of Holyroodhouse and says, “Let there appear Camilla!”

Clearly Charles is not willing Camilla into existence; he’s demanding in king-talk that she come into the room. Camilla will appear only if there’s a butler within hearing distance (there always is) who will go fetch her. The command, while expressed as sovereign will, is actually an act of delegation proffered to brocaded livery.

Not so with God. When God created light, only God was in the room. But there is the trinitarian aspect of the Godhead to consider. Technically Their command was proffered to the void, but for the comfort of us grammarians God may be considered to have addressed one of Their other Selves in the issuing of it. A crucial difference between God and King Charles is that Camilla was fetched, whereas light was poofed into existence.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged grammar, language | 4 Comments

Who Was the Poet That Said…

Posted on August 1, 2023 by JMN

… Something like: The bird-of-paradise that’s flying up your ass is also flying up mine?

You know how, now and then, you simply need a particular poem in order to carry on?

“Marvin” something? I’ve tried to track down the poem without success. Was it in Hayden Carruth’s anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us?

Posted in Commentary | Tagged poetry | 3 Comments

The Pollution of Advertising

Posted on July 31, 2023 by JMN

There will always be too much to do, no matter what you do. But the ironic upside of this seemingly dispiriting fact is that you needn’t beat yourself up for failing to do it all… Instead, you can pour your finite time, energy and attention into a handful of things that truly count. You’ll enjoy things more, into the bargain.

The article debunks “multitasking.” It’s a figment of society’s tormented hive-mind. Focus. Do one thing at a time, it adjures.

What’s this? A hyper-groomed gnome smirks from the screen, creepily avuncular, repulsively unctuous. It’s an ad for an investment house. No way this simulacrum of a male life-form is real: AI-generated then; a digital confection. Press the button to LEARN MORE.

No. I’m focusing on this article that says: … The way to get more tasks done is to learn to let most of them wait while you focus on one.

There’s the gnome again.

Advertising is the locomotive of consumer capitalism running rampant and unchecked, of course.

And again. Press the button…

Ads are a soul-sucking drip of raw sewage fouling every channel of communication.

Last chance to LEARN MORE.

And, in their insidious way, ads work. I really liked this article’s message, but what am I writing about? The gnome.

(Oliver Burkeman, “Stop Multitasking. No, Really — Just Stop It,” New York Times, 7-29-23)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged miscellaneous | 8 Comments

‘Shouldn’t Be Hard’ But IS

Posted on July 30, 2023 by JMN

It shouldn’t be hard to agree that the highest purpose of the First Amendment is to protect speech we like the least — speech we are sure is pernicious, bigoted, obscene or potentially harmful to health.

Thus spaketh Bret Stephens, conservative opinion writer for the New York Times.

Can we also agree that another “high purpose” of the First Amendment is to defend speech that is true?

(“Speech We Loathe Is Speech We Must Defend,” New York Times, 7-11-23)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged miscellaneous | 3 Comments

A Drumbeat

Posted on July 28, 2023 by JMN

I can’t remember the journalist’s name (Jon Pareles?), but several years ago I read an article about James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” In the recording, Brown puts the spotlight on his drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who plays a brief but memorable drum solo. “Ain’t it funky!” Brown intones during the catchy, hypnotic riff.

According to the journalist, Stubblefield’s creation became a standard rhythm used in hip-hop and other genres. He cited songs in which it appeared, and one of them was Sinéad O’Connor’s “I Am Stretched on Your Grave.”

I put “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” on my special playlist as soon as I heard it. Its appeal is hard to codify: an ethereal chant melding majestic salt with sorrowful sweetness. It’s a piece of music I don’t tire of hearing.

Along with “Maccrimmon’s Lament” sung by Fiona Hunter, “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” enshrines a voice whose soulfulness lifts me up.

Sinéad O’Connor, present in song: 1966-2023.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged music, personal | 2 Comments

Accent and Affect

Posted on July 27, 2023 by JMN

I heard a Nebraska state legislator say, “I’m extremely from Nebraska.” The adverb was novel. I’m from Texas, but not “extremely.” If I’d been raised in Terre Haute I’d be a Hoosier (but not extremely). What arrests me more than birth-accident proclamation is how locale inflects idiolect.

Katherine “Kitty” Carmichael, Dean of Women at Chapel Hill (North Carolina), hosted sherry to a group of graduate students at her home once. She said of her southern accent, “Wherever I go, people don’t listen to what I say, but to how I say it.” Her remark held bemused resignation. This patrician academic was not of a mind to shrink from her roots.

Author Barbara Kingsolver, a Kentucky native, spoke similarly in a podcast interview by Ezra Klein. When she entered Depauw University (Indiana), fellow students pestered Kingsolver to say “syrup” and “mayonnaise,” smiling at her Appalachian twang. “People heard my words, not what I said.” She began shedding what she called her “Kentuckian affect.”

I worked on losing my Lone Star affect from an early age. My aim was to light out for parts unknown and cloak myself in alien tongues; didn’t want to be pigeonholed by a drawl if I could help it. Now that I’ve washed up in Texas again, the mixed vowels and languid enunciation have seeped back in. My cloak is frayed.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged dialect, language | 7 Comments

Etel Adnan: ‘Words Are Social’

Posted on July 26, 2023 by JMN

Etel Adnan, “Untitled” (1961/62)…Credit… Etel Adnan. [Published in New York Times, “Etel Adnan’s Bittersweet Arrival at the Guggenheim,” 12-2-21).

Lebanese-American painter-poet-novelist Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was interviewed by Gabriel Coxhead for the June 2018 issue of Apollo.

In the 1970s, having returned to Beirut to work as a journalist, she was forced to flee to Paris when the civil war broke out… Living mainly again in California, she published numerous volumes of poetry and prose… such as The Arab Apocalypse (1980), Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) (1993), and In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005).

“If I were just a painter, maybe my work would have been different, more encompassing. But my writing is rather pessimistic, because of the angle of history I got involved with, being born in Beirut. Also, it’s because words are social. I think it’s more natural if an event bothers you to express it in words. Art also is a kind of language – but it’s a language of feeling. When I paint, I am happy. I am both an optimistic, happy person, and caught in and aware of tragedy. And although I lived in California most of my life, I never had a spell of time where I could forget about the problems of the Middle East. Every morning the newspaper would remind me.”

Posted in Quotations | Tagged art, language, painting, poetry, writing | 4 Comments