Friday, July 12, 2019

Onomatomania

Yes, gone, last night's, per tradition, maybe you saw it





ONOMATOMANIA

Thomas Lux

the word for the inability to find the right word,
leads me to self-diagnose: onomatomaniac. It's not
the 20 volume OED I need
not Dr. Roget's book, which offers
equals only, never discovery.
I accept the fallibility of language,
its spastic elasticity,Onomatimani
its jake-leg, as well as prima ballerina, dances.
I accept that language
can be manipulated towards deceit
(ex.: The Mahatmapropaganda, i.e., Goebbels);
I accept, and mourn, though not a lot,
he loss of the dash/semi-colon pair.
It's the sound of a pause unlike no other pause.
And when the words are tedious
and tedious also their order - sew me up
in a rug and toss me in the sea!
Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry
is a corpse colder than the Ice man,
they've all been dying for thousands of years,
yet people still write, people still read,
and everyone knows that nothing is really real
until it is written.
Until it is written!
Even those who cannot read
know that.

1 comment:

  1. 0)i missed it the ephemeral posting, but have seen it in previous years - best wishes to the one it is dedicated to, and those dear to that person

    1)speaking of novels, as lux's poem does, i have read few in my adult years - standing out in memory over decades are the bridge of san luis rey, by thornton wilder

    software, by rudy rucker (still in print in a tetratology volume - frankly, i didn't like the sequels nearly as much - looking at blurbs for his recent work i find myself attracted to the historical novel about bruegel)

    1.7)late this month i am visiting nova scotia - in the early 1990s a cousin in law from there, whom i hope to see at the cousins' reunion, recommended robertson davies to me - i have a few of his on the shelf but haven't read any

    2.3) and speaking of nova scotia, if the sea level rises a lot it may become an island in the next few decades - catastrophically affecting the economy of the province if the railroad across the isthmus of chignecto is flooded out

    https://www.amherst.ca/isthmus-of-chignecto-transportation-link-study.html

    2.6) the article on this isthmus by our friends at wikipedia mentions the historical conditions which resulted in some of my ancestors going to the province - 'new england planters'

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmus_of_Chignecto#Yorkshire_emigration

    3.9)and speaking of the human condition, i now see that my earlier idea that peace was occasionally interrupted by war was naive - it is war that is occasionally (seldom, and actually only apparently) interrupted by peace

    3.96) or, to put it another way, peace and war do not exist on the same level - even after the hot dog vendor has made you one with everything, change must still come from within - and speaking of which

    4)would anyone reading these comments enjoy listening to the audiobook of 'the mind illuminated' - read aloud not by the author, but by someone who sounds quite a bit like him? maybe, maybe not - but as i write this it can be found at youtube


    5)now i go to read something from the blogroll on the left here = 'my chernobyl vacation friend' from nyrb

    ReplyDelete