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JYazS
Journal of Yazdehan Studies
Number 4 : 1999
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D. I. Swopes
Eleven times eleven words to make a story out of
abstract
Shame (bêabrûyî) swung her axe, crack!, and the bald crown of skull cracked wide, and from that axe-cracked crown flowed red red reason, and tasting of that bitter electric redness (riakxrai), the word-consumer R’s claws abruptly retracted from the tight crack into which they, polytropic pentatentacled puppets (PPP), had wedged themselves. He regarded his reflection in the door’s safety glass — his shell had recalcified in an instant; no blood was visible oozing from the scab; no fellow passenger stared at time’s fresh pink seam. His was neither the first nor the last case (the etiology of which will be explored in a suitable spot later in this paper) that we, stolidly perched schizomythologists of underground effacement, would have cause to witness; yet no one but he, the word-consumer R himself, could know the extremes to which his ailment might be inclined to drag him if given the chance — which accounts, perhaps, for the undeserved embarrassment he had lavished, despite nosological ignorance, on his lapse.
introduction
An impeccable salt-gray feline,
lepastically (from Gk. λέπας 'scaur, crag', λεπάς 'limpet', and λεπαστή ‘limpet-shaped drinking cup’)
sprawled across a native female’s warm, obliging, velvet-clad lap, yawned and stretched forth a beatific paw to bless with a coy bloom of talons the fringed hem of the
word-consumer
R’s calico coat. Cat’s paw taps coat at left, conjurer palms coins at right: such were the eleven concise words (in our cursory translexicization) the
word-consumer
R would have consumed had his position of
ostiose (from L.
ostium, ‘door’) reflection been consumable — alas, it was but basely livable, grossly endurable, vilely (and here, inquisitive lexical digestion, having stumbled upon a curious flat rock (
fersç) lying in the middle of the plain of the
word-consumer
R’s recently aborted repast, lifted it with an involuntary gasp and recoiled at the sight of a naked pink Mesopotamian
girtablûllu, prim claws raised like geminate fig leaves, venom-tipped tail bashfully curled — the
word-consumer
R let fall the stone at one belch, swallowed in an attempt to crush the disgraced ischnurid, gulped once, twice, and was relieved to see it scurry back under the shelter of the dropped eructative rock) tolerable until the next stop should free him from this airless vitrine in which he suddenly found himself to be but one fool among the many crammed here for display: coude à coude with the above-mentioned conjurer practicing immaculate coin-birth on his bloodless palms; patella to fibula (the inverse, really) with the wheezing, mysteriously noseless shadow of a
ktar-drunk tourist (himself enviably hip to slim hip with the pretty cat perch (natives rarely bothered to don
globersh garb the first few days of the festival)); and rump to pendulous rump with another fat masked tourist, festiphallic beak intact, gobbling to her fellow
poulardes flocked unsteadily around the slimy central pole.
methods and materials
Was that all? No, that was not all, but that was all he could somatically sense; in one case, transitively so. Shall we enumerate the other performers in our little glass cage he could perceive in the visual mode while he instinctively fingered the reassuring smoothness of his chin (the author, having found the leavings of virility rather wan this morning, had contented himself with shave but no shower, no search for a less reverberant turn of phrase) and let his gaze fondle, now one, now another oval image — peeled, polished, soft-boiled, supple — in the reflection’s nested series of screens? Yes, let’s. Unfortunately, three things now happened at once. This is not an unusual occurrence, three things happening at once, but it seldom transpires that people perceive more than two things taking place at a time, or even one thing coming about alone, or especially possess the words to relate such a sticky web of veiled phenomena were it to be spongily sailed into whilst one was traipsing gaily down a pellucid forest path. The
word-consumer
R, however, being a well-trained creature who wore well his authors’ reins (nous sommes ce qui nous consomme, as certain Flouzianians would put it) possessed a perceptual mechanism of such refinement (scorpion shows a timorous claw) that he was able, often for moments at a time, to sustain a level of attention which allowed him to perceive three, sometimes — if, as he chanced to glance up from
topchan rug and book’s page, the particular bolus of tea and crumb backing down his esophagus had bestowed his pink mouth with an especially savory oblation before departing for darker regions — four things happening at once. The words of his native language,
Yerisoan, in fact, which were also the words he most habitually took with his tea, were the perfect lexical
lube for this mechanism.
For example, Latin, stale mother of tongues, must content itself with the mundane, lonely res to indicate that which Yerisoan, tongue of fertile mothers, is able to cloak with five elegant sibling gowns, depending on which state of perception and expression of state of perception it happens to be inhabiting. The core term, manna (cognate with Nr. man ‘thought, thing’ and Tg. man ‘meaning, reason’), indicates the basic singular res, such as that clutch of human hair, black proximally, red distally, asleep on the lip of the platform which the word-consumer R happened to notice as he stepped across the gap between platform and train and onto the scribble-tiled floor of the subway car several stops back, the basic singular thing in its unperceived state, that is, before the word-consumer R saw it, for, as soon as he saw it, that is, apprehended it with thought, it became mes, the perceived thing. This process of manna becoming mes is minus, the event of perceiving a thing (manna) which now is transformed into mes. As soon as the word-consumer R saw manna (mes and minus), he realized that he was perceiving it, that is, mopsi, which is the perceived event of perceiving. If the word-consumer R were now to tell his friend Mr. K, confirmed bachelor, upon the topchan in the terraced garden of the house of whom he shall tomorrow be taking tea, about this mopsi, or were he now to embroider some scholia of his own in the margins of the book he had hurriedly crotched beneath his sweating armpit as he shouldered his bag and dashed vainly from his seat to the closing doors of the subway car, in order that he, or another, could later consume the sweet words inscribed therein that described it, this mopsi, he would be engaged in mustig, the communication of the perceived event of perceiving the perceived thing (or thought). It was now precisely three mopsi (Yerisoan sprightly indicates number in the verb, or verbal prosthelexic, rather than ploddingly in the noun) with their associated mes and minus, which confronted the word-consumer R.
clitalysis
Just before the two trains’ contradictory vectors (
mes1) of acceleration (
minus1) cancelled (
mopsi1) a reasonably focused succession (
mes2) of snapshots (
minus2) into a cinematic scramble of avant-garde
oiselerie (
mopsi2), the
word-consumer
R innocently observed the maniacal leer (
mes3) of a mad(wo)man (
minus3) most insanitarily wielding (
mopsi3) the reflected needle (
mes3') of a mechanical pencil (
minus3') in one of the backlit cars of the train behind him (
mopsi3'):
mustig (as the
word-consumer
R imagined he would relay over tea tomorrow afternoon to his friend
Mr. K, confirmed bachelor, on the bright rugs of the latter’s
topchan): between graphite-crunching stabs into the pages of a book he was engaged in marginal, perhaps even interlinear, intercourse with, the mad(wo)man’s crooked, scarred, cyclopic thumb pressed the needle’s erectile bud with an obscenely jerkful click and shake. As it would just about anybody possessing a perceptual apparatus sensitive enough to perceive three things (and a variant of a third) at once, but even more so if the possessor
was, like the
word-consumer
R, suffering from
sinemota [
1], the image of this disgusting sight, burned into the backs of his eyelids,
caused his heart to flutter and his head to spin and the scorpion to dart out from under
the rock and strike with a loud, paralyzing belch (
mes4). Much taken aback, the cat in the
lap looked up; her keeper concentrated more intently on deciphering the palimpsest of
ancient scripts beneath her feet; cauled triplets dissolved on the conjurer’s palm; a watch’s
bearded face peeked out from under a sleeve at a shadow’s lack of nose; and turista intacta
and her gobbling gang were engrossed in the spectacle taking place on the seat which the
word-consumer
R had so precipitously vacated only moments before: a brazen puppet,
ensconced behind a moth-eaten velvet curtain, was now wriggling its jerky body, festively
swathed in a tiny fringed, multi-colored coat that was remarkably similar to the one the
cat had blessed, up over the curtain’s top and, dragging itself suggestively back and forth,
singing
Nuskalo ecyi pshr!, a traditional
Yerisoan ktar-swilling tune. Feigning nonchalance,
the
word-consumer
R glanced at his own watch.
analysis and discussion
Spinoza has said that Omnia corpora vel moventur, vel quiescunt. That is a difficult thing to
translate into the language of this book. Francophone Flouzianians get around it so much
easier, as they do so many things, by swivelling their greased and supple soit into position:
Tous les corps sont soit en mouvement, soit en repos. It is precisely that soit that our language
lacks, that liant soit, if you will: lithe and pliant and spiralling up the trunk of thought like
a tendrilly clinging creeper, binding neither this nor that to one thing or another, or maybe, or perhaps. The
Yerisoan, however, say it all in just one word: orgyoygro, ‘body’: a
hollow core of repose, surrounded by three lectal layers of movement and be(com)ing™:
the palatal endolect provides the slippery, lexical inner lube: the growling bi-ply mesolect
the strong middle muscle of turgor: the strolling open ectolect the outer rims of widelipped
adventure: and off the word rolls so blithely from the throat to the tongue and orgyoygro!
Indecent whiff of soft-boiled egg. Olnzi ian ktar (I could use a jigger myself). The
train shuddered to a screeching stop.
The train shuddered to a screeching stop and we philosophers, pollexical pitons fastly fixing
us rudderpost to rumpperch, bravely resisted momentum’s temptation, the robust muffling
bosom of which our pole-clinging clucking cousins, however, could not avoid, with a
choristic yelp of Irixesrmiwa!, crashing bodily into, initiating an arrhythmic matrical saltation
which sent the stump of what otherwise would have been the unsheathed sword of
the tourist’s black festival beak glancing harmlessly off the
word-consumer
R’s left thigh.
From his ostiose helm of mirrors, the
word-consumer
R trained his salty eye feetward at
the fumbling sea — typical of those possessing a bibulosity factor of sufficient magnitude,
the
word-consumer
R well knew from his reading of D’Laumes (ref.), the snub-nosed
tourist had managed to defy the predictable laws that bind the uninebriated firmly within
the causal bubble of this our orderly universe: he had pitched himself against the subway
car’s suddenly arrested direction of travel rather than with it, plunging his ktar-marinated
elbows deep into the clucking bow wave of felled poultry. High above the roiling sea,
sheathed in their rabbit skin life-vest, bobbed unscathed the breasts of the warm cat shelf;
her live accessory regarded with arrogant indifference these drunk and tumbled tourists;
the conjurer, another imperturbable native, continued without pause his practice; the
word-consumer
R grasped more firmly the door latch and refondled his nest of reflections,
poking a curious ocular finger deep into the glass, stretching taut the focus until, with a
childish thrill, he felt the glaucous membrane burst: beneath a lamp on the sooty wall of
the tunnel, complete with purple umbilicus and bloody placenta, the birth-pangs of a stillborn
script. A digital palpation of chin seeded cogitation’s condensation with questions:
syllabic? alphabetic? ideographic? cuneiform? Dove-feathered clouds gathered and grew
swiftly dense as the train, jerking doubly, resumed its course. A thumb of sunlight piercing
briefly through a stratous break illumined a patch of stiff sedge previously hidden
between the castellated dunes of jaw and jowl. The
Yerisoan have a saying which may not
be irrelevant here: Man hest ers-e (all vowels in
Yerisoan are pronounce à l’italien).
The astute reader will already have recognized, in the truncated nominal man-, the manna
we have elucidated above. That leaves us to deal with the nominoverbal root hest-, the
crypto-objective ers, and the clitic -e. Depending on whether this latter is interpreted as
being representative of the urdostoist or the eurynderast case, three paths lay open to us,
each of which corresponds roughly to an established proverb of emanating from the
bucolic pastures of Flouziana. In the urdostoist, the copulative form man- of the nominal
manna is firmly assigned its habitual meaning, that is, ‘thought, thing’; the copulative form
hest- of the nominoverbal root hest- is invariably assigned ‘bone, leave, abandon’; and ers,
‘trace (‘piste’ en flousiane), talon’. Thus we have, alternatively, Pensée sans mord, chose en dehors
(Thought without bite (or claw) leaves the thing outside) and L’os de chose est l’as de piste
(Thought’s bone is the trace’s ace). If, however, -e is interpreted in the eurynderast, there
is only one possibility open to us, as this case immediately severs the nominal shadings
from hest-, rendering it purely verbal, thus, ‘leave, abandon’ and causes ers to switch from
its meanings of ‘trace, talon’ which cannot possibly bear the burden of the noble eurynderast
to that which can: literally, ‘cheap blue sky’ meaning ‘to die (as process)’. Thus:
C’est autre chose ad patres (And dying’s another thing (or think)). It is precisely this latter,
more uncommon meaning which concerns us, for it was this sky (‘cheap blue’ indicates
just the sort of sky one often encounters in X during globersh: scudding billowy clouds
breaking apart to let shafts of sunlight through to illumine the tintone rooftops) through
which the thumb of sunlight poked, illuminating the patch of stubble which surprised and
disheartened the
word-consumer
R.
Consolation, however, was readily at hand in the
form of the
Yerisoan saying Man-o warg-in go-on-s (g is always hard when transliterating from
Yerisoan).
Two translations are possible. In both instances, man-o is our familiar thought or thing,
this time in the arist case. In the first instance then, warg-in (‘place, shelter’) is in the
erautist, go- is ‘speak, speech’ with the enclitic -on- signifying negation, and the postclitic -s
the exist case. The literal translation is thus ‘A well-placed thought says nothing,’ which in
rural Flouziana we may render inelegantly as Chose à l’abri bien, chose qui parle rien. In the
second instance, the negatory enclitic -on- is no such thing at all, but is rather clandestine
partners with -s, who passes its exist sense onto the -in attached to warg-, glomming the
erautist and transforming it irretrievably in the meantime, thus rendering the whole -ons
into the urdostoist. The meaning is therefore, ‘A well-placed thing says “thought,”’ which
even the most lexically secure Owlstain townie, being unable to place double inverted
commas inside single ones (three things at once, let us recall), finds impossible to express
since Penser en français c’est mieux que rinçer is not quite what the
Yerisoan has in mind, this
particular
Yerisoan being the
word-consumer
R as he looks at the tunnel wall blurring past
him, patches of light, reflections, and ponders the lunch he will have tomorrow, the second
day of the festival of Anim û Kali, in the terraced garden of the impeccable hôtel particulière
of his friend, Mr K, confirmed bachelor, whom both meanings of the saying suited
perfectly.
It is precisely at this particular spot where your average author would be tempted to trim
and hem, cuffing a charcoal gray three-piece with a chapter’s terminus, providing no more
decorative alleviation to the eye’s tired ear (Reader, it shows!) than the simpering gracenote
of a golden-camel-speckled blue tie, the tinny arpeggio of argyle socks, the facile
ostinato of a pair of scuffed oxfords. As you’ve by now discovered for yourself, this author
is no blunt-thumbed stitcher of bland flannels and pre-cut plots, but a nimble-fingered tailor
of flamboyantly belted, polyspecular SNEs. Chocolate-satin folds of gilt-edged silk
brocade shimmering like the sun-in-rain cascade of iridescent vineslimosa petals; shadowy
chiffon, viridian velvet, harlequin cashmere or pavonian vicuña in sapphire, scarlet, saffron,
sloe; crimson-violet (riakxrai) scintillations of tessellated tlaatlaata (a type of dreamy
taffeta native to the Tetrastics); aromatic bouquets — evoking incense and arrack in an
amber-walled cha’abran on the Caspian coast — of fire-dappled guermessuts (a downy silk
damask, gabardine, or grenadine originally manufactured in El-Garbh on the outskirts of
Basra); ivory, fur, leather, pearl, mahogany, bone, Nile cotton, Euxine linen: — these are
the fine, good things from which I fashion my characters and my chapters and any sort of
outfits, furnishings or accessories they may perchance desire to sport, inhabit, or simply
visit.
Dr Avílano Bimkov, for example, an independent lexical therapist from Tixpu, a rancid
suburb of Agua Prieta, — a man who for many years has lobbied unsuccessfully to subsume
sinemota, PPR2, defined by the Rituals Inventions Theories Manual (Owlstain: Institute
of Sociophysiology; hereinafter, RITM) as abnorm conid recedeatism, under a more inclusive
patholexicological rubric he terms pninalgia, and who has managed, with the collusion of a
shifty-eyed part-time proofreader (PPRSE), to forward his case even so far as the editorial
offices of the eleventh and most recent edition of the Encyclopaedia Patholexicalia (Agua
Prieta: Tiliar; hereinafter, EP), whereupon it was promptly shelved, untranslated, an inappropriate
footnote to a spontaneously abolished appendix, — Dr Avílano Bimkov is sitting
at his teakwood desk inlaid with a meandering pattern of linden and cherry sriyantras
melting into curly maple chevrons, writing in a rotund magenta hand with a tortoise-barreled
Yellow Steel™ widepoint on a sheet of beige vellum set aslant on the resilient rectangle
of the desk top’s cordovan escritoire. Sharp coils of authorial crinosity spring forth
from the spiralling chartreuse and solferino stripes of the velvet tights that sheathe his
ample thighs; a rose-brocaded throw pillow strategically placed between ischium and
throne eases ink’s passage from pen, sweetens thought’s prodigal pelvic thrusts. Otiose
and alone, he rules from a mahogany-muled swivel rocker with lion’s head finger rests. A
fez of fringed ocelot keeps warm his occiput; moroccan slippers, his bare toes. Draped
over his hunched and ruminatively naked shoulders is an astrakhan-lined hussar’s coat
hand-woven by Tagma weavers from gold filaments and indigo-dyed alpaca yarn. His
neck is cushioned from the Tixpuechu cold by a silk and linen shawl, primrose embroidered with erxewani and marigold vineslimosa blossoms in the abstract state of semitumid
yazdehanity they exhibit annually on the second day of the Festival of Anim û Kali.
It is eleven o’clock in the morning and, presumably, PPRSE has been packed off to the
gray wastes of Paris, Prague or Peoria (PPP), which fact does not prevent me — for the
sake, as promised, of elaborating upon the etiology of the
word-consumer
R’s predicament
— from here reproducing, replete with its palate-clinging chirr of Tixpuechu quaintness,
Dr. Bimkov’s plaint in full. Feel free to sample the kirsch-laced squares of dark chocolate
in the ammine-blue bowl of Og-Firrsan pottery just to the author’s left.
Years ago, Mr K, confirmed bachelor, at as part of his ritual of confirmation, had sworn
off words entirely. He neither read nor spoke, neither wrote nor answered the phone (he
does own a phone, but, at the ritual conforming his taking of vows, he ceremonially
unplugged it; his guests, if they have need, use the booth on the street corner). And his
health glowed because of it: great big mane of curly black hair, as opposed to the battle
ground atop the
word-consumer
R’s own head, in which the infantry of his mother’s
father’s genes (light, bald) were successfully holding ground, even gaining it, against the
cavalry of his father’s mother’s (dark, curly): full flowing beard, as opposed to the lexically-
gnawed moustache the
word-consumer
R barely managed to keep from wilting under
his nose (and how deceptive were the patches of stubble on his jowls — they never coalesced,
always remained sparse, salt-burnt oases among a bleak desert). He spent his
clean, quiet days, in his clean, quiet hôtel particulièr in Kitik’ali, North X, cultivating his
model rockets and his bachelorhood, his games of chess and his garden where he never
took sugar nor milk with his tea, never, in fact, took tea at all (bearing in mind how one
thing lead to another), which, however, never prevented him from offering it to his guests.
For despite the fact of his never speaking nor reading nor writing nor answering the
phone, people found his presence soothing and reassuring, and fortunately for them, Mr
K, confirmed bachelor, had not sworn off the listening to words. So people told him
everything. Oh, how much did the
word-consumer
R have to say to him tomorrow at
lunch, he could hardly wait! About his wife M and his daughter N! About the disgusting
beggar he had seen at eleven in the morning on the first day of the festival of Anim û
Kali! And did this event — this mopsi, this mustig — have any importance? For he knew
that events of pivotal importance often happened, were by law, by LAW, bound to happen,
at eleven in the morning, or sometimes the evening, in the books he often took with
his tea: Onze heures venaient de sonner à la Bourse... (Zola, L’Argent): Une nuit, vers onze heures,
ils furent réveillés par le bruit d’un cheval... (Flaubert, Madame Bovary): At eleven in the morning
on the first day of the festival (globersh) of Anim û Kali, the
word-consumer
R,
engrossed in the consumption of words he was lapping off the spotted tea-mat (topchan) of
a book provided him by the word-producer S, missed his stop. This was not the first time.
But perhaps it would be the last. (Ha! ha! Man hest ers-e.)
conclusion
The trained shuddered to a screeching stop and the
word-consumer
R unlatched the door,
allowing its two wings to pop open and himself to step out onto the pimple-lipped stage
and into the awaiting noses and elbows of a crowd of cheering ktar-drunk Yish and Zian
tourists. It wasn’t him, of course, whom the tourists cheered, but their luckless compatriot
who, lagging asthmatically behind when they had all (almost) squeezed through the closing
doors of the subway car, had managed to get nothing but his nose into the car before
the rubber blades of the guillotine snapped shut, leaving him floundering noseless on the
platform to await the next train, his mask’s nose safe in the ktar-drunk hands of his laughing,
hooting, ruthless companions. By some trick of telepathy known only to (especially
drunken) tourists (a trick related to being able to defy the laws of physics), they had
awaited him at the exact spot on the platform where he was destined to dismount, and
now they dragged him off to the party, tossing the orphaned black member from one to
another, and which, for some reason, he tried to retrieve, jumping and diving for it on the
thin space of between drop down to rails and waiting chairs, and thus it was that the
word-consumer
R was jostled into the space between the platform and the already departing
train, into which space he plunged up to the knee, thus having his leg slowly amputated
at that spot as the train pulled away and just then the driver saw in his rear-view mirror
a screaming, fringed, writhing and wriggling calico coat being dragged along by the
train as if it were puppet, tourists trying to pull him out and the driver stopped the train
(for reasons of ktar, no one inside any of the cars had sense enough to pull the emergency
brakes) but it was too late: the scorpion of sinemota (abnorm conid recedeatism, indeed!)
planted inside him by the words he consumed had struck, immediately paralyzing his
heart and brain. At the risk of making this chapter two pages longer, let me just add that
the noseless tourists shoved into his pockets two detached pages of the book that had
been crotched in the
word-consumer
R’s sweaty armpit and which fluttered to his, the
tourist’s, feet once the train had stopped. Traumatized by the shock, despite the immense
amount of ktar he had consumed, of having witnessed the death of a native in North X,
the tourist returned to his village in Y the next day, vowing never to return to the infamous
festival of Anim û Kali, never to taste another drop of ktar (though not abstaining,
of course, from the local Yish equivalent (ksar)), and never learn a word of
Yerisoan. The
blood-stained pages were discovered by his illiterate wife in the pockets of her analphabetic
husband a few days later and immediately used as to start the cooking fire. We do
not know if the
word-consumer
R ever consumed the words that graced these pages, but
we certainly may (in our translation):
High in the neemom tree, a bluejay squawked irexisrmiwa! and flared its cloaca. The
word-consumer
R looked up. Irexisrmiwa! again and a flashing wing tapped a sloppy kiss
against the carpet in a shaft of sunlight between broad-lobed leaves. The word-consumer
R looked down. At a longitude midway between his nostrils, at a latitude three syllables
north of the tropic of his crossed legs, a glaucous eye of bird shit stared him in the face.
His beworded brow furrowed; his lexical moustache bowed beneath the weight of his
word-thick breath. It was the second day of the festival of Anim û Kali and something had
gone terribly wrong. Verify provenance.
The alexigenic splotch obscured the blue warp of vicarage just where it straddled the red
woof of extemporaneous. Filigrees of black thread incised the late morning glare; gold the
shadow. Yawning in arched mimicry of the
word-consumer
R’s tea-starved sigh, the
neemom tree exhaled multiply behind her modest fan of leaves. A crow sliced silently a
gibbous cake of cloud. Oh my daughter! (whose name a certain code of decorum forbids
us to enounce (never mention rope in front of a hanged man, and all that (cut to manuscript:
Ever since she had attained an age at which she could safely negotiate — black Og-
Firrsan teapot in her right hand, ammine blue rose-fluted teacup in her left — the steep
stone steps leading through the hedgerow from the upper terrace of her family’s glebe in
south X to the lower terrace where her father sat cross-legged on the carpets on the
topchan beneath the neemom tree)
Oh my daughter! your tea my words crave to round them;
Like chocolate deprived of sugar I sit, bitter
But sorely tempted — and so I taste)
Oh my daughter! thou globersh drupe! vineslimosa
That on the second day of the Feast has fruited
Wetly, sweet and green! — And shall I steal?)
Thus were the words produced by S for R consumed — daughterless, tealess, joyless,
voraciously nonetheless, with a tadly touch of depraved edacity, might we add, while his
daughter, heedless of the see-law, I mean tea-law, by which she’d been patrically bound,
dawdled with a dandy in a dugout dinghy on the river that the word-producer S has so
poignantly portrayed in the pages of a work-in-progress we have been privileged to purloin,
I mean, peruse (why this sudden ppp proliferation, we’re rather hard pressed to pronounce):
A river ran through it (the valley, that is) and a bridge crossed this river that
divided the terraced southern slope of Mount P (again with the Bloody Marys!?) in Y
that constituted north X from the terraced northern slope of Mount Q in Z that composed
south X. On this bridge, a hiving market thrived openly amongst the madding crowd that
thronged it whereupon I established a stall whence I peddled my produce — words —
which were my wares thence I transported carried them in a sack bag from my shack in
Kitik’Ali, north X. Mustn’t offend his host with their sight. Back into the bag.
The word-consumer S, I mean R, looked up. Verify provenance. His host Mr K, confirmed
bachelor, was consulting with a servant in the entry way. The summery autumn
sunlight of a spring day before noon in blackberry winter danced warmly onto him
through the heavy hearted murmur of neemom leaves all aflutter light-headedly scratch
while a bluejay winged graveward behind an overtaking crow and the globersh drupe
fruited and the vineslimosa fell ripe in a strong northern breeze surprising a cat slouching
caféward at the author’s, I mean, the word-producer S’s heels while the
word-consumer
R
end of patience “kissed fourfold the four posts of the topchan before stepping down from
it onto the thick crackling of dead neemom leaves beneath his feet.” Sadly he ascended the
stone steps to the terrace above.
notes and references
- Sinemota. — A soi-disant “peril of profligate reading.”
From Gk. σινάς ‘destructive’; σίνομαι ‘rob, plunder; harm, hurt, do one harm or mischief; to pillage or waste a country, to waste or destroy the crops’, and realted σινήσομαι and σινόμενος.
Patrolius, in his Ionis Astra (second cobla, line 2), described the ravings of a ravenous overreader of Rumi thus, “et sinemota ludict soto Rumi tradine oru,” and modern patholexical
nosology defines sinemota succinctly and a bit obtusely as “abnorm conid recedeatism.”
See also Sapph.12; Hom. Od. 12.139; Hes. Fr. 117; Hom. Od. 6.6; Hp. Mul.
1.52; Hdt. 8.31; Hdt. 7.147; Hdt. 4.123; Hdt. 5.81; Hp. Morb. 4.41; Hp. Morb. 4.53; Gal.
15.662; IG22.1126.42 (Amphict. Delph.); Orph. A. 211; Hom. Od. 12.114; Hom. Od.
11.112; Theoc. 1.49; AP6.262 (Leon.); A.R.1.951; A.R.1.1260; Hdt. 5.74; Hdt. 6.97; Hdt.
8.31; Xen. Cyrop. 5.5.4; Hdt; 1.17; GDI5040.28 (Crete); Tab.Heracl.1.129; Xen. Cyrop.
3.3.15; Plat. Laws 936e; Hes. WD 318; Hom. Il. 24.45, v. Sch.; Phld. piet p.93 G; Hdt.
2.68; Xen Horse. 12.9; Thphr. HP 9.18.3; Thphr. Mnemos. 57.208 (Argos, vi B.C.); Hdt.
5.27; Hdt. 7.147; Hdt. 9.49; Xen. Anab. 3.4.16; Xen. Const. Lac. 12.5.