Prosaic Prose

Like poetry, "anthropology is comparison or know nothing"...
Comparison is a meandering bent and that is a temptation
to psychosis or to sin, a drop off or out from a straight and narrow line.

But on further exploration, an adventure of a kind, one should surely find
the barbaric is the final evolution or stage of termination for each and every line
of prosaic interpretation, not to mention a big bang blasting every civil hyphenation.

What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that 'music' and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it... And from the inability to think poetically – to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense – derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.

The joke is that the more prose-minded the scholar the more capable he is supposed to be of interpreting ancient poetic meaning, and that no scholar dares to set himself up as an authority on more than one narrow subject for fear of incurring the dislike and suspicion of his colleagues. To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind...

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to keep civilization alive. The scholar is a quarry-man, not a builder, and all that is required of him is that he should quarry cleanly. He is the poet's insurance against factual error. It is easy enough for the poet in this hopelessly muddled and inaccurate modern world to be misled into false etymology, anachronism and mathematical absurdity by trying to be what he is not. His function is truth, whereas the scholar's is fact. Fact is not to be gainsaid; one may put it in this way, that fact is a Tribune of the People with no legislative right, but only the right of veto. Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

– Robert Graves, 1946

Fiction & Taboo

Fort's principle: "People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

– Colin Wilson, on Charles Fort

"Of course high among virtues are the honorable lies of Governments. Whether virtuously said, or accurately reported, I don't know:

... if anybody could ever distinguish between righteousness and exploitation and tyranny.

One of the engaging paradoxes of our existence – which strip mathematics of meaning – is that a million times a crime is patriotism. ...If we could have new abominations, so unmistakably abominable as to hush the lubricators, who plan murder to stop slaughter – but that is only dreamery, here in our existence of the hyphen, which is the symbol of hypocrisy...

And almost all liars are conventionalists.

The one quality that the lower animals have not in common with human beings is creative imagination. Neither a man, nor a dog, nor an oyster ever has had any. Of course there is another view, by which is seen that there is in everything a touch of creativeness. I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either. Though I have classed myself with some noted fictionists, I have to accept that the absolute fictionist never has existed. There is fictional coloration to everybody's account of an "actual occurrence," and there is at least the lurk somewhere of what is called the "actual" in everybody's yarn. There is the hyphenated state of truth-fiction. Out of dozens of reported pearls in stews, most likely there have been instances; most likely once upon a time an old fiddle did turn out to be a Stradivarius; and it could be that once upon a time somebody did get a ring back fishwise.

But when I come upon the unconventional repeating, in times and places far apart, I feel – even though I have no absolute standards to judge by – that I am outside the field of ordinary liars...

"GOOD MORNING!" said the dog. He disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor.

I have this record, upon newspaper authority.

It can't be said – and therefore will be said – that I have a marvellous credulity for newspaper yarns.

But I am so obviously offering everything in this book, as fiction. That is, if there is fiction. But this book is fiction in the sense that Pickwick Papers, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species, Genesis, Gulliver's Travels, and mathematical theorems, and every history of the United States, and all other histories, are fictions. A library-myth that irritates me most is the classification of books under "fiction" and "non-fiction."

And yet there is something about the yarns that were told by Dickens that set them apart, as it were, from the yarns that were told by Euclid. There is much in Dickens' grotesqueries that has the correspondence with experience that is called "truth," whereas such Euclidean characters as "mathematical points" are the vacancies that might be expected from a mind that had had scarcely any experience. That dog-story is axiomatic. It must be taken on faith. And, even though with effects that sometimes are not much admired, I ask questions...

Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native. There are scientific dervishes who whirl amok, brandishing startling statements; but mostly they whirl not far from their origins, and their excitements are exaggerations of old-fashioned complacencies...

It seems that my reasoning is that, under some circumstances, if something is highly unlikely, it is probable. John Stuart Mill missed that...

Said Dr. Hastings H. Hart, of the Russell Sage Foundation, as reported in the newspapers, May 10, 1931: "Morons for the most part can be the most useful citizens, and a great deal of the valuable work being done in the United States is being done by such mentally deficient persons."

Dr. Hart has given very good newspaper space for this opinion, which turned out to be popular. One can't offend anybody with any statement that is interpreted as applying to everybody else. Inasmuch as my own usefulness has not been very widely recognized, I am a little flattered, myself. To deny, ridicule, or reasonably explain away occurrences that are the data of this book, is what I call useful. A general acceptance that such things are would be unsettling. I am an evil one, quite as was anybody, in the past, who collected data that were contrary to the orthodoxy of his time. Some of the most useful work is being done in the support of Taboo. The break of Taboo in any savage tribe would bring on perhaps fatal disorders. As to the taboos of savages, my impressions are that it is their taboos that are keeping them from being civilized; that, consequently, one fetish is worth a hundred missionaries.

– Charles Hoy Fort, Wild Talents

The Fortunate Wheel

A golden rule's unneeded when one notices surroundings: "what goes around comes around, no worries". Augustine found so abhoring, a pain to privilocracy – mid-age peasants knew full-well from pagan stories told from old that chance is only half of it, the other's steared to make one's destiny.

Chance is fickle, so they say, though it can help decisions because faith believed in all the way presents but one direction. But as a starting point, we say "so what if it is?" When you come around again it's likely fallen quite a way.

This points to Lady Tyche or Fortuna's spinning wheel, casting out lines like spiders inviting vitals to grab on and calling crawling feet a rudder if in lieu of boat, to help one's fate along.

Or globe she's spinning with her fingers like a basketball or underfoot creating day and night. In middle ages, a game of ferris wheel or rolling heel for gypsy wagons with a compass for an orphan – it's compassion, never any kleptomania – to remind it's not just chaos makes a cornicopia and sometimes like the snail, chew with much less haste so's not to forgoe taste: there will be plenty but not if you'd stand still, waitng till you're more than twenty.

The tiller is as well a weaver's beam some call a transom but sometimes it's a club not made by joinery or ransom, and a transit views a steady rod or two or stadia and makes a road as if a star to steer by.

Where six hundred seven feet's a single stadium and the rod is sixteen and a half (or ten for shorter craft), the same for any cranium or tub we call a boat and the rod is the handle of a rudder and a perch or pole.

Pull the oar or turn the sail from transom, tiller shift and tell a tale concerning it in case your mind's adrift. Viewed from a perch a pole shift's just a turning of direction and if you're six feet high a league is to the sea's horizon.

The wheel is great if taken as a symbol, but as a tool for getting there from lake or stream or ocean, nothing's more impressive than a boat & oar or sail – now that's quite an invention – like a symbiosis with a whale, like to cross a scary stream land-lubbers grabbed the milk-cow's tail.

Divination presents a chance for wandering perusal; the oracle – it's like a koan – removes the rut beneath the wheel and in that spell enlarge your perch upon the universal. Blow your mind with this: sometimes beauty isn't just an ordered academia but sublime as any in- or outer spatial psychedelia.

And as for time there's none at all or ever not enough except in Math-time most would call real and that's when things get tough. Myth-time's simulteneity for sums and differences. Math-time's that old religion 'cause when infinitude is ever added to finality the sum is cross-eyed, absolutely certain death, and no one recognises but the dead who may know all or nothing to surprise us. Time goes nowhere yet still a question for the square and hip; going is for mariners by foot or truck or ship.

A Prophetic Chicken Madrigal

As with prophetic chickens who will read to you the news,
a systematization of beliefs ain't always true –
that confuses what it is, with what the calculus can do.
Neither madness nor from wine, this thought it comes from Wittgenstein.

But that may be irrelevant Ludwig he so advised:
the cause one finds is the solution even when it's mythic,
illustrating the successful one who's psychoanalytic
still relies on self-fullfillings underlying olden magic.

chorus

And not even mystically prophetic,
when put in words like autopoietic,

but if it works, where is the fowl
affronting any set of civil ethics?

Have you observed when those you love have died?
no one but you remembers they existed
no obit to them ever will acknowledge
unless of course they've graduated college.

We're trained the past is ever out of reach,
"it never really was", they even preach,
or did but "that's beside this point of mine,
and 'mad' be called to entertain myth-time".

Introduction to Black Polish, "a sometimes decipherable memory" of '68

"In order to analyse the rules for the formation of objects, one must neither, as we have seen, embody them in things, nor relate them to the domain of words; in order to analyse the formation of enunciative types, one must relate them neither to the knowing subject nor to a psychological individuality. Similarly, to analyse the formation of concepts, one must relate them neither to the horizon of ideality, nor to the empirical progress of ideas."

– Foucalt

So what if an invertibrated cockroach has juicy innards and an epidermis like fingernails? Your soft and supple skin is no sign of freedom from malignancy no matter the polish or hardner applied – it's just formaldehyde, not reverse english – whether scratching an itch or gouging out my eye 'cause that mosquito was no biting seductress, a glance in the wrong direction's always like a growing mutation, but only on the face of things reminiscent, and not there-by necessity, unpleasant. Only when you turn around at night has what was left behind become in front all right.

So what if the praying mantis had no free pass through pearly gates until decapitating the old man for saying rice shines no brighter and rocks no harder after any rumble in a tumbler? He lost his head for a hard roll in the bread bag, you spineless spider of revenge some would call my mother. Never mind to confuse a flour sack for silk and I'm supposed to say "it's pretty"? A sacrificial lie's not always over guilt – sometimes there are feelings underneath your tramping foot.

So speechless, dead posies grow in The Tumultuous Sea between audition and reception – I call them "poetry" – as a swell, wave or undulating resonance between noisy mounds wiggling "kathump, kathump" like the bottom of a boat. Should you fall off, it may not be a pretty pose except to slithering sharks whose spines are soft but well constructed like a high school yearbook with her glossless image on page 71, observed by Billy Bibbit.

So the black-death dots up close they spread out and at a distance, go gray, a shade we knew was blond instead, like daffodils all 'round a grave. The lips concealed the teeth so one could not discover what's inside her – to smile or no was a question to consider. There was always a supple depression about it one could not avoid sinking into forever. Never just distraction – that is, t'was unenhanced – we'd only met without an introduction – that is, it was by chance.

So each sequential miscarriage was a bloodied flush of miscreantic me. Could it be that call-up from my daughter, the one thought not to be was not another "whoops! wrong number", worried that I'd get too cold, my wits too long away at sea, a void of blackened columbines or lillies in the fray? Who has died? 'Twas never thee! If I should find it here and then again or there, why's it wrong to say it's everywhere, when still a memory's in my eyes, in this dismembered corpse which even you could never recognize.

So is it then my own remorse which clouds the daylight skies?

MY OLD SAL

In lieu of any salary, how 'bout this: a salutation with some salt for surging salivation sweat beneath some solar radiation? O'er the shoulder's just a cue to thank the heavens this old earth's still got an ocean and not a cursed expenditure or nuclear explosion.

– Salamander of Thump, 68 a.d. 'Güde Luk'

Theses on the Copula

1 the comma may prevent a coma when in any well written sentence structure the minor difference which makes a major different is often found in placing absense or presence of a general copulation without which words might be seen running together 2 such is rank for the ear on its own there must be a pause which refreshes a tone that changes breath time out from between an utterance and that is the cleavage of syntax from whence emerges meaning or meanderly direction while a coma is a mere stop period 3 it is the same thing for baby making but then not from the mouth or ass which maybe drool with vomitus first and excrement last 4 the difference between poetry and prose is not found in their form or pose but without maleable muscle the rigidity of bone is only alone for ever lying in the tomb or monotone 5 tumors are malignant when the skeletons jelley or muscle cement otherwise why the bother pitting one ever at the other like misapplied gender corrupting our grammar but whose to say what is spelled out must be heard as well hogwash like children seen but not heard and vice versa when its bedtime 6 it should be a song and dance and not a war directing a flick that is not a simple trick of horror when conflict is waiting in reserve for what one does with trading partners or for charging rent for a single space or spot to briefly contemplate 7 foramen magnum a hole in the head like the objective in syntax less the neck and neck attach other bodies to our skulls thinking only of a win and to double space 8 is the copula a thing of necessary purchase or just a matter of provisional periods waxing and waning with in flowing spirits and outgoing err 9 clearly some texts should never be read aloud if one wishes for clarity or demand repitition otherwise we insert our breaks wherever we think to appropriate it is not always a condition of thievery but qualification 10 who says the meanings in the word uninterupted and not a matter of interpretation when we can do it out loud without effort and better without too much thinking that always comes later considering any reason is almost always all of the above

Where "law" is merely the appearance of surface-regularity, there emerges a lexic metaphor and mindful nomadology – on the face...

"Seldom we find," says Solomon Don Dunce,
   "half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
Through all the flimsy things we see at once
   as easily as through a Naples bonnet –
   trash of all trash! – how can a lady don it?
Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff –
owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff
   twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it."
And, veritably, Sol is right enough.
The general tuckermanities are arrant
bubbles – ephemeral and so transparent –
   but this is, now – you may depend upon it –
stable, opaque, immortal – all by dint
of the dear names that lie concealed within 't.

– Poe

...probability. Like the synchronicity of falling stars, ports of call and flowers blooming out to sea. Or islands as holes in the solidarity of water (Buckminster-fuller) or a sucking vortex like a pepper-mill grinding life into mince-meat before it can bloom, thrust out of context and then spewed and quasi-renewed (The Kalevala). Like, the name is not the thing – how many comrades are named "Mary"? When Wittgenstein accused Freud of merely constructing a mythic narative, Siggy might have answered, "What other kind of discourse is there?" Regarding the sentiment that the time-lines of things are not the be-all and end-all of language or history, Foulcalt says this:

"Let there be no misunderstanding: it is not the objects that remain constant, nor the domain that they form; it is not even their point of emergence or their mode of characterization; but the relation between the surfaces on which they appear, on which they can be delimited, on which they can be analysed and specified.

[...]

What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.

[...]

The analysis of lexical contents defines either the elements of meaning at the disposal of speaking subjects in a given period, or the semantic structure that appears on the surface of a discourse that has already been spoken; it does not concern discursive practice as a place in which a tangled plurality -- at once superposed and incomplete -- of objects is formed and deformed, appears and disappears.

The sagacity of the commentators is not mistaken: from the kind of analysis that I have undertaken, words are as deliberately absent as things themselves; any description of a vocabulary is as lacking as any reference to the living plenitude of experience."

– Foucalt, The Archeology of Knowledge

Homely but Goodly Dwarf Blues

The opposite of pragmatism is not disposal, an active dis-position, giving no respect to space at all. But could it be a will to distributivity, to spread out like waves in the manner of water? In order to catch it, pragmatics stand still: should you miss the boat, then call for the scapegoat.

Just as likely, there's no nominal (stand-offish) "divinity", but in dreaming and art an aesthetic perspective is empirically "divine" (a cut above, not a mere welt) as measured by one's taste or an other's salivation: salvation comes only with a dash of salt. Or is divination drawing a lot? You take what is gotten or dash off to pout.

Goodly for Xeno is oddly godly, obtaining only two-bits of zero. One could even say "something" rather than "nothing", and that may be a useful consideration but not a side by itself – that would be too gaudy. Word-play's no incitation to war, just etymology without respect to time and grammar – not an injustice, it "just is" non-linear.

Like in latin, our "theo" was called "divus", a great divide, an original divot. 'Twas really "diversion", otherwise, nothing to write "h-o-m-e" about. It was, there and then, thought god was a sharpy, a sword slicing sky off away from the ground, hence the "demi-urge" – a prime vivisection and not a bang-job. But then again, when we say "to shear", they'd have said "for sharing".

Nordic dwarves were invited to keep them, like pillars against gravitude (we now think it's "motion", one through the other), from ever coming again together. When they went underground from the Roman erection (or its constitution), there was first heard "the sky is falling", to which an answer came to all there about, "down but not entirely out".

The Square, or Civil Rectification

Never uncovered by tooth-brush or trowel in rectangular pits is the four dimensional object, which is just another square tinked to a cube, an imposing language game playfully fumbled with toothpicks and elmer's glue (or their 'virtual' analogs) instead of the more appropriate lips, teeth and tongue – a labial-dental lingua and not a matter of currency in french or any other "whence?" A seven-sided cube is more misnomer than multidimensional body past three. Four-d is a mathematical possibility but begs the question, not unlike the problem with "energy", "just what is a dimension, anyway?"

In archaeology, the fourth dimension is the excavator. In linguistics, it is air in and out of a chest and not a branch of semantics at all. Pollution is what happens to air when it loses its commodity value. But fallout is always marketable.

Where is the tactile sense in that beyond feeling one's own head set to vibrate at its sides or its gullet? Should the function of any discourse be exorcism – the removal of spells or ephemeral presence – and more appropriately labelled de-curse as a medical practice? Then what of enchantments and anonymous presents? Such is the cornerstone of impossibilist discourse in a materialist philosophy which must exclude any relative artistic impression (whether or not expressed in the past), just to preserve its sacred integrity, still glued to good and bad magic and their rectification, but rarely discussed except between nations with the grammatic accusative.

While the dreamer has no aversion to hands-on experience or the reality of bricks (seen often, in fact, promoting them both), dream and mythic poetry remain, still undistinguished by the realist but only within that great void of intolerable nothingness – "does not exist!". That is the picture of conservatism always and only painted by the most progressive of think-tinkers.

Mental Scales & Truth

"I make out my case thus—

There is an exact balance in the distribution of causes of pleasure and pain: this has been satisfactorily proved in my next paper, upon “Cause and Effect,” therefore I shall take it for granted. What, then, is there but the mind to determine its own state of happiness, or misery: just as the motion of the scales depends upon themselves, when two equal weights are put into them. The balance ought to be truly hung; but if the unpleasant scale is heavier, then the motion is in favor of the pleasant scale, and vice versa. Whether the beam stands horizontally, or otherwise, does not matter (that only determines the key): draw a line at right angles to it, then put in your equal weights; if the angle becomes larger on the unpleasant scale's side of the line, happiness is the result, if on the other, misery.

It requires but a slight acquaintance with mechanics to see that he who would be happy should have the unpleasant side heavier. I hate corollaries or we might have a group of them equally applicable to Art and Models."

– The Germ, June, 1848.

If the preraphaelites armed with moral certitude could have merged symbiotic with the symbolist's sense of mystery and the ineffable, we'd have the perfect re-synthesis of myth-time and dream-time, or for William Blake some bigger space to reincarnate, but then the Angles and Francs never could find a common exchange-rate, not til Baudelaire brought Edgar Allen Poe to the french mêlée for such as S. Mallarmé to emulate. Of course, there is no going back nor even forward, truth to tell, we're stuck with the 'pataphysic world of Jary's Doctor Faustroll.

– see The Symbolist Manifesto by Jean Moréas .

Intellectual truth is a moral sentiment followed by an emotional outburst enforced by a huff and a puff and a blow yer house away.

And then again, from Bierce's devil's dictionary,

TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.

FIB, n. A lie that has not cut its teeth. An habitual liar's nearest approach to truth: the perigee of his eccentric orbit.

When David said: "All men are liars," Dave,
Himself a liar, fibbed like any thief.
Perhaps he thought to weaken disbelief
By proof that even himself was not a slave
To Truth; though I suspect the aged knave
Had been of all her servitors the chief
Had he but known a fig's reluctant leaf
Is more than e'er she wore on land or wave.
No, David served not Naked Truth when he
Struck that sledge-hammer blow at all his race;
Nor did he hit the nail upon the head:
For reason shows that it could never be,
And the facts contradict him to his face.
Men are not liars all, for some are dead.

– Bartle Quinker

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.

Blood-letting vis à vis Tampon, Dagger & cause célèbre

The gods' champeen, Perseus retired a Gorgon
for the will to power, to purchase, to own,
o'r gorgeous Medusa, who lived in a hollow.
With resolute gall, oh he'd have us all swallow

a parthenogenetic'ly virgin birth
to cover his own tenacitus girth
or recite "There once were three ladies from Perth..."
Percy [from perthein, “waste, ravage, destroy”]

incanting his auto-divinity,
decapitates leaderless society,
twixt bosom and throat, with a nip & he bellers:
"Girls should be girls cause boys will be fellers!".

The practice of blood-lust has no native function
nor bearing on farming before extreme unction,
except to feed "free" folk (as locketed pris'ners)
lies t' absolve guilt from its holy practitioners.

Handle with caution, 'plies even for pigs.
When rhyme don't come easy, sing as a jig.
A bazillion times hotter than fresh chickenshit,
blood ain't good manuer for a farmer's tool kit.

The so-called "blood sacrifice", told to the gathering,
(read silent to hide over-length of the quatrain),

as the first female farmer's most sacre-red offering
is nonsense, bogus and quite unreliable:
even cold cow turds compost for a while
for a growing vegetable to find 'at all palatable'.

Discharged menstrual leakage, (no thrill for a thriller):
used to be known as 'potential seed killer' –
no aspiring father'd be seen no-wheres near,
and though bits there and here may well keep away deer,

but the oder is hella attractive, it's clear,
to the family dog or a big-tooth predator.
A praetor can make quite a mess of things
along with the wasps well dispos-ed for stings.

Only a city-boy would dare to deduce
that the women in menses would call for a truce
if the boys went to war and brought home their own blood
so the crops could grow big for the sedent'ry brood

from the blood of war victims to cover the crops,
what's more under cover's the push for more cops,
to oversee strangers & kids in a show
and this sort of work makes the gardens to grow.

Not sunshine and water and tending with care,
the point is to introduce want, dearth and scare.
All holes in a head should be filled with red ochre
if one's to avoid the dreadly black ogre,

hailing hellos 'cross iron-city's domain,
ironicities banal, mundane and profane,
like nuked top rawmen ooze fuel from their plane.
calling it "swell, japanese acquisine".

For rural development and feeding the needy?
Fie! All just game for politically greedy.
One up and one down, no communist plot;
secretion's eufemist for blood and for snot.

I'd bow and I'd scrape and I'd take off my hat,
if ever a farmgirl could swallow all that,

(like taboo is for social cohesion or glue
or only in marriage it's holy to screw)
which the experts on civilised hist'ry suggest,
so's not to in-sully, but I'm only in gest.

And as Johaan Huizinga announced so implicitly,
a threat against any pre-planned objectivity,
word-play's the proof against segmented time –
"If it ain't very funny, why should it rhyme?"

Wail, waled whale or pique, peaked peak?

Vainglory or pride, it is said (but it's snide), 's an excessive display of something in order to draw in attention, the satisfaction of a job well done and its communication; feeling fine on getting feel-goods from others, including enjoyment of luxury and by linguistic extension, lust or desire or a comfortable pension, gives birth, (said always without a smile) to gluttony, gulability and ever to be guile. It may well be that virtue is the abject intolerance toward every irony.

No either-ors about it: from any perspective of matter or material, the matter is that æther IS other, unless it's your mother. Today's teaching "meaning is always provisional", coming not from nothing. Words are always optional as long as the context is fitting. Sometimes the context IS the metaphor (see "unbend, v." versus "unbending, adj." to illustrate that an ancient allegory (of a tight bow or loosed arrow, or rope setting free the sail) adds more than any present isomorph or grammatical partition to confine a pregnant whale or restrain its plump position. The blow-hole thing is an air of relaxation or uptight personality: which would you more likely choose, door 'a' or cop 'b'?

Association is a gift, like we can say "clouds bring rain" but not "clouds cause rain" without appearing naive. The most obvious causations turn out to be merely a matter of sequence, the consequence of juxtapositions taken from, in and of themselves (always a questionable proposition, like the ego of a president or king) or disregarding their material, historical or etherial contexts, like, "Is there air?!?"

With polysemy, that wide, poetic region of multiple entendre (mis-labelled "licence" – as if we need permission), and given generalised uncertainty (or the mistrust of others' truths/dogma) there can be no theoretical unification. Unification is empirically impossible without bondage or constraint, and therefore, only brings naivite or ingorance of the world beyond those imposed boundaries. This makes grand theory itself, a joke, given that no one has ever witnessed an identity, much less an identical pair of them. The analogue ('away from word', or the parodic 'in word only'), is only a posited expression of similarity, that is, a reminder. One may conclude there is no theory but fleeting eclecticism, and that is the dada of free association.

– Dream-Time, (aka 'Body Language')

Poetic License = Free Association:

In traditional poetry, meter is rythm and therefore fun (play's not beholden to necessity, law or excuse, for one). It opens a channel, throat or gutter radiating from a formerly lonely or sleeping sense or masticatory organ to a whole-body involvement which may proceed to subliminally shake like a dance, laughter or even a sob. This is the source of the err that poetry is merely emotional – poems are always more. Just like constellations, they can be useful in arriving at predicted destinations in timely fashion. Before the days of kitchen clocks, the Ave Maria was sung to properly time the boiling of an egg. It's not just gutter-talk, it's an incantation (that cause-effect's irrelevant with unranked association does not eliminate an emerging implication).

Rhyme is rythm's kin. A key like polysemia or polyphony, it's like a marriage broker who imposes no contract but simply provides introductions all around, hoping the magic or machination works and connections lead to an all out engagement. Modern poetry, foregoing rythm and meter or classical forms is more provisional. One engages the other, then moves on. If reproduction is intended, paper, pen or a more mechanical recording device is necessary in lieu of perfect memory. The limeric or slogan is short and sweet and may help generate multiple offspring in lieu of one's former partner. It is an insemination or germ like an asexual sperm. I get that providing's a gift for seeing, but I wonder how a gift like a map or tallisman (a form of rudder) or magic spell intended for going and coming be considered a sacrifice? I suppose one foregoes one spot to get to another, but was it ever a forgone conclusion?

The Trickster is champion of paradox, portraying it always possible. First princely pal of poetry, the metaphors are real, the reality of precision and functional alignment is the joke. In the hands of a regimented regime, well remember that a joke is just one man's pronouncement of "yoke". As Guy Debord reminded, when in doubt, all meaninings, intensions or entendres are correct. Subjectivity is only a matter of personal taste, proclivity, a choice and never necessarily or despotically structuralist programming. This resonates with Rasputin in regards to sinning: "try them all and not one will take you like a steady diet of heroines shot". Contrary to every imposing dictionary, the confusion of heroin and heroine makes them both more meaningful. Their isolation always precludes children, the key is the rush in the chamber. Both provide the fix, and may, heroically, save the day. It's a double edge sword, into and out of a cave like lucky Loki and Chaos, his mater: queen Mab's womb, or a tomb for that matter. "Prior to any emergence or synergy, a'fore crawling out t'other flank we, all will fall in the pit or mere ('lake')", – by the always nefarious, William Blake.

nefarious, adj
evil: utterly immoral or wicked
[Early 17th century. < Latin nefarius < nefas "sin" < ne "not" + fas "divine law"]

– from the dictionary

Literally, "illegal" in Latin, but elsewhere and before sinful pissing, nephele was just a cloud or kidney. Figuratively "nephish": like life of the kidneys, full of piss and vinegar ready to burst so consequently afterward dead-like (a cooked fish out of water, and thus, dis-elimen(a)ted or cleaned & deotherized, just like the ever ubiquitous æther).

The dictionary thus fails to illustrate the etymologically hypocritic rendering of energetic life (signified by a healthy kidney-function and the know-how of clouds which piss rain) to crime, sin and punishment, but warns us not to confuse hear and ear or rain and reign (both produced from shadows), just like to, two and too (all referencing a relation between/of one and/to another (in common) position, number and chance resonance or synchronicity):

"Do not confuse the spelling of air, ere, err, and heir, which sound similar. Air is the most common of the four words, as in the air that we breathe, an air of superiority, to air an opinion. Ere is a literary word meaning "before" (as in ere long), err is a verb meaning "make a mistake" (as in to err is human, err on the side of caution), and heir is a noun meaning "legal inheritor" (as in the heir to the throne). "

Yet how often do heirs scarcely manning chest-hairs which procure them the title: "Herr" meisters grow arrogant airs ere err interferes and they come to arrears, mis-hearing the jeers, inferring them cheers from inferiors?

Then, like to be too prodigiously wined thereby prodding officious other's whines, there is:

affair [12th century. < Anglo-Norman afere , Old French afaire < à faire "to do"]
afar [far away: at, to, or from a great distance]
after [not afore] or
afore [ Old English onforan < foran "in front, before"]
afear [ Old English afræred , past participle of afræren "frighten" < fræren "to fear"] more likely "not free"
afire [blazing or on fire or passionately interested in something or other] as asses,
æser [gods, assyrrians, residents of asgard and other dry politicians & unforbearant draughtsmen as calculators of windage bringing forth austerity or drought for the fair farm-folk and fishers]
afer [American Foundation for Equal Rights or the Romanian Railway Authority; but with wind, a færy or ferry coming in from the southeast carrying warmth, as opposed to a mere inference or it's deferral to an ass. In all other contexts, see Lips, the perequisite of positive affirmation ('ne?' in Niponese illustrating the translingual equivalence between yeah and neigh (no mere whining whinny but inflected nevertheless) juxtaposed to an utterance' end) and the blowing of hot air elsewhere, eh?]

Afer m (Afra f, Afrum n)
From Africa (the region of modern-day Tunisia)
The term is derived from a Punic term for the country in which the city of Carthage was located. It is possibly derived from an ethnonym, viz. an indigenous tribe encountered by the Phoenician colonists. Perhaps related to Punic `afar "dust", or alternatively from Berber `ifri "cave", denoting cave dwellers [or from the womb?]. Flavius Josephus derived the ethnonym from the name of Abraham's grandson, Epher. The name is perhaps related to the tribal name Ifran recorded by medieval Arab authors.

– wictionary

In 15th -19th century english spelling, 'S' = '¦', (our 'f' would be spelled 'ph', and sometimes the gutteral 'gh'), but in the phonology of the difference which makes a difference, an f is the negation of s, (the cynically cyclidean sibilant^[1] and snake-charming Cynthia), just as a line through an open circle means closed with the emphasis of finality, a coppish authority obstructing affinity: it is no mere coincidence that confideration negates consideration, the fed said, conside and confide were once, before the days of Noah Webster, siblings, in fact identical twins considerate of the humoungous differences between them. Siblings of a side are prooved different lest they could not confide their secrets, one to the other. What would be the point? Webster defeated the age of poetry and revoked its license so that the federation, in hermeneutic or rosicrucean fashion, could set on the seat of government in the perfect simulacron or dissimulation of consensual democracy arising from the Fairy Queen's monarchy. A fed by any other name also said "In the beginning was the word" and proceeded to make it so. In an earlier age, the archon merely operated the rudder, with or without directions from afar (there was that matter of plotting an arc to follow a star, among the Minoans women's work by far), well illustrating the equivalence between the tillerman and teller of tales, tall sails and no clerical accountant at all. But indubitably, only free friends fertilise fecundity, and then, anything goes.

[1] Sybiline hiss: Whether 'twixt the lips, 'tween lip and denture or palette and tongue, it's no adventure – what blows through them's the same as your own. – see Sisyphus, a prophetic curse on kings & patriarchs: what goes up must come down.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n.

A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor – whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" – although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation – sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion – the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

  God said [or was it Aristotle?]:  "Let Spirit perish into Form,"
  And lexicographers arose, a swarm!
  Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,
  And catalogued each garment in a book.
  Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:
  "Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise
  And scan the list, and say without compassion:
  "Excuse us – they are mostly out of fashion."

– Ambrose Bierce