April's husband, Gene Fowler, writes...

It's not really a secret art, of course, and there are no secret arts except in the opinion of those who don't notice a lot of what's going on. Everybody knows about "mere" words to be contrasted with God knows what and cast aside.

A while back a friend who not only should know better but who does - except maybe for a mood that came over him while he was slinging words pretty effectively, brought to life - using words - writers and poets who'd folded their hands and quit the game. He said something about words failing them.... I mostly went after any thoughts he might have of following these none too good examples of players who'd seemed to do well in the game. But the comment on language failing anybody gnawed at me. It doesn't happen. Language, which most people call words and some call mere words, doesn't fail anybody. It's a tool. Unlike a lot of tools, it doesn't break even if you misuse it, like a steel screw-driver might. It's a tool that takes skill for it's different uses. And it's not the right tool for everything you might want to do.

Anyway, I built a "signature section" for use on some emails. I assume you've all seen emails with "signatures". A horizontal line and under it a quotation (usually) or an aphorism or a royal seal or something. Anyway, I built one. Everybody has html mail-handling programs by now, so I started it with a picture. A squirrel standing on its hind legs with a walnut in it's front paws. Very scholarly look. I captioned the picture: "Crackin' the books".

Under that I had a couple quotations. I sMEREd 'em a little....

"Ask not what your language can do for you. Ask what you can do for your language." - Jack Kennedy, wordsmith.

"There stands the book" - Van Morrison ("Pay the Devil" album)

Pay the Devil was Morrison's country album and the song I grabbed was "There Stands the Glass"....

Word and book, a couple devices for storing language. We don't talk, listen, write or read word by word. Or build a library book by book. These are, though, storage units. So mere words means mere language. Let's fool around with it a little. And with words. A word is a kind of book, a kenning, and it's physical innards are the flow of phonemes and it's physical outards are all those other flows of phonemes in the phrases and on up into larger whatevers. But, what else is packed into a word?

Take daisy, a kind of flower. Yellow center and petals, white or another color than yellow. C'n look like a sun and it's rays. But we don't call it day's sun which would imply it's being out on a sunny day and not covered by a darkened welkin.... We call it day's eye (tightened down to daisy). An eye in the sky suggests a sky-god's omniscience - watching from the highest vantage point. A scholar might suggest Ra, the Egyptian (or a related) sun God. And Jehovah, the faceless (that's scary) God is, of course, pretty much Ra with his bright mask removed. All that's fine for scholars with their systems of links, but we want the homey advantage of, say, mothers, who need to keep an eye on kids racing into the great outdoors, stretching apron strings to their snapping point. "See that great Eye up there? It's going to follow you where you go and watch you for me. When you come home I will know where you've been and I will ask you questions and if you lie to me the Great Eye will tell me and...."

So, we've a primal underlay of all God-mythologies in that little emblem of the sun TOGETHER with it's name, a packed "mere" word....

We glance at the daisy beds spreading away from the path and, maybe, we see little suns, maybe we think "daisies", but, probably, we don't much notice the mental activity, the language, and just enjoy the beds of color under the fresh air and the greater, but unnoticed in itself, sunlight.

We learned to say words, undergoing a process we've forgotten. And later we learned to read, write and ...spell. We learned, then, to pronounce words and again used a process like that we used to learn to say words, because our teachers, when working consciously to teach, used the process they used to cover pronouncing words. We used phonemics, usually miscalled phonetics. We play the sound or phoneme, meaningful sound, sequence. K...a...t.... Later, we'll learn that different people, from different places, born there at different times, play those sounds ...differently. Here, only the "a" has much potential for individual riffing....

We c'n caress our mere words, then, as physical things, made of sounds that we make, and we speak a word, hearing it, and feeling ourselves making it, knowing that way the HEFT of it.... And if we don't do this, sometimes even as we're talking, or listening to others talking, we just don't exercise what some call the poet's "ear" and which involves, implicates, the whole body, the body of reflexes, and the mind....

Now, what about MAKING words...? Not pasting together roots, affixes, whatever, maybe borrowing from other languages or a jargon to get labels to use. But truly making words and managing the music and what's packed in, making words the way humanity, in our innards, makes all the words we have, in English some 600,000 of them. Maybe you've felt yourself almost doing that, doing the riffing I mentioned a couple paragraphs back. Creating a touch of a new dialect? Forcing a heard rhyme where one didn't usually happen? Just putting new English on the ball...?

Let me tell you about making a new word. I did this in the winter of 1966-7. Bucky Fuller (geodesic domes, synergetic geometry and such) was driving Hilary Ayer (my companion of the sixties) and me from San Francisco up to Belvedere to Sam's restaurant for lunch. Sam's was a great place for lunch (in good weather) because there was a great plank-deck outside where people pulled up their yachts, tied 'em up and came to lunch. Bucky's, Intuition, was on the other ocean. Anyway, he was driving us up there and he invited me to enter a contest he was rounding up people to compete in. He wanted a pair of words to replace "sunrise" and "sunset". These words, Bucky said, robbed us of a great beauty, being pre-Copernican. What he meant, as I'd say it now, was that the words were made by and in people who lived on a flat Aristotelian-Christian world, Earth at its center and all else, all that marvelous live show "up" (well, really "out") there being pasted on a great, spinning dome.

The sun doesn't rise, but our hoola-hoop horizon disc rolls forward and so, in a sense, "down", and the sun is before us. In my 9th shaman song I wrote that

Night's wing falls
opens a thunder of sunlight

and at night, the western edge of our horizon disc rolls "up" (so, the up and down are ours, not the planet's or world's) and, in the shaman song, I wrote that

Night's wing hides the sun

the pair of horizon-contours a pair of wings (perhaps of our souls)....

That "thunder" of sunlight (and usually "thunder" calls up a sense of darkening, of storm and dread) is, of course, in the sound, the music ...of language.... Later, Clarke and Kubrik reached for the same sense in film, with music, in their 2001 opening.

Bucky's "award" would be $500, five months' rent on our Haight-Asbury apartment. I said I'd give it a whirl and for the first time began thinking about how I'd shape up a word by feel. Now, I've got to speed this up. Over the hours that afternoon, while out, away from where I'd begin tapping keys on a typewriter and, probably, subvocally playing words, I was thinking about the ballads they'd play in.... And I felt I didn't want just post-Copernican front-edge of the Renaissance words, but words for now. In those terms, it'd be post-Einsteinian.... I ended up moving from the world of the Medieval (and earlier) ubiquitous "farmer" with his field running east-to-west so the sun traveled the length of the field with him, to the contemporary and equally ubiquitous "film maker" handling a storage box with a lens and shutter on it working sort of like a model of his, or her, attending.

The film-maker, a post-Einsteinian gent (or lady) finds his primal mythology in our earliest attending to one thing and not another.... We take in, say, a sunrise ...even if we don't see it, but know it's time for it locally. And we talk often of this taking in when we refer to a "double take" or even, in a compacted word, a "mistake". So, we have the film-maker. Thinking he's got a good chunk of attended to experience in his box, he yells, "That's a take". And, as we might say "cut that out", a film-maker will yell, whether or not he'll call what he's got a take, "Cut". No room for phonemic heft here, but both words are defined chunks, the opening and closing of the shutter heard, and the vowels level and sinking. So, my words were "suntake" and "suncut".

My words are made as words are made in our, in people's, innards, though the process is laid out clearly, was pretty much consciously undertaken. They're useable. But, they're stiff as a new pair of shoes and need breaking in, wearing. But, suncut is tempting because we know the atmospherics often attending sunsets, the colors involved. So, juggling the different uses of cut, we've potential for some interesting riffing.... Anyway, I can't use the word in a poem. But, I'm sure that before we had "sunset", we had "the sun set for a spell on Earth's porch...".

So, when I walked around Tamalpais with my friend Roger Stephens, on his way to Viet Nam the next day, and his lady, whose name I do not recall, and we saw the day ending I wrote...

...
Afternoon late, fall, earlier overcast
pulled back
and coming on time for a sun cut
by a rearing horizon

no sunset here
sun flashes, sun flooding, sun
pulses
a lessening, a loss of color
the horizon coming in

in slow motion
a series of paintings so hard

brushes are ripped from our hands
our hands
smashed, crippled, made claws
to hold, as stands hold, what we are given
...

...time for a sun cut
by a rearing horizon
...

A rearing horizon, reminding, maybe, of Picasso's horse in Guernica, carrying the feel of Earth's roll, rolling Roger toward Viet Nam.... If ye don't hear those "r"s rolling through the second line, you're still too far from the word to hear the phonemic music....

In 1912, Ezra Pound published his The Seafarer, translating some chunks of an Anglo Saxon poem. He went to five beats, from the original four, to make a poem of his time. He played with the kennings and used old or new ones like whale-path for, maybe, currents in the sea. My poem is for a later time, ours, and my Seafarer is from maybe Melville's time or earlier, with small wooden ships. But I do a very different thing with kennings, exploding them into live experience and finding still other kennings within exploded ones. Below, I could have minted a kenning, spray-eagle to catch the sound in the spray of breaking waves, but exploded it instead, but with the experience playing around me I minted spray-winged...,

Fearin t' drown an' m' feet near froze.
Th' night wind 'd come up cold,
make a man's eyes int' ice.
I'd look int' th' sea, stare in th' sea.
I'd see faces a uncles an' cousins
an' fancy I saw th' face a m' sweetie.
An' th' faces 'd break, split an' grin,
th' laughin of a albatross in th' water.
Ice on m' hands an' m' eyelashes.
Th' whole winter, haunts wooin
me, gamin me in m' grog.
Storms, on th' hard bord we followt;
off th' cliffs, ice feathers
fell on th' stern; th' eagles 'd scream
spray wingd.

Gene Fowler
g_fowler@earthlink.net
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