THE EGO OF STORY
I am the storyteller am
the protagonist I am the
listener who reconciles the three.
We like to hear stories of
ourselves like to see pictures of
ourselves and so of course we find
ourselves in the three.
I am the consequences am
The relativity am the
equilibrium that hangs among the three.
TIME & SIGHT: THROUGH THE MIRROR
OK, I’ll bite: what if we can’t walk through mirrors because our reflections are in the way? If we could somehow hide ourselves, somehow become clear and vast and constantly rotate around ourselves, turning on our atoms, maybe we could approach and breech. Speed will make us harder to see—but what we see and what the mirror sees are two different things. Mirrors reflect; they are a second stage on which this reality exists. Spinning speed will blur us to a human watcher but a mirror will pirouette with the best of them. Anything that is possible in real time is possible for a mirror to see because it does not see with its eyes but with its whole face. There is no eye-brain coordination, just an eye, no lag in the live broadcast because there is no broadcast, a mirror is a static thing which displays others’ dynamism.
Maybe we could sneak up on it in the dark? But light is only an impediment to the human eye, light lines the perimeter of our range of vision. To a mirror, dark is the same as light, only less complicated. Mirrors are not slaves to the light, are not slaves to making meaning as we are; no analysis, no biases, no opinions, only purity, only truth.
You can only see the present in a mirror. You can wave and remember the placement of motion, but by then it is a memory. You can try and wish a glimpse into the future but you will only see a reflection of your current understanding embodied by your hopes reconciled by your best guess projection. But mirrors really only tell you on thing: now. One of the problems with sneaking up and walking through is that as we approach we get bigger and bigger until we reach our full size. Maybe if you were to stand far enough away—to become small enough of a threat—and if you knew a way to skip a few bars of time and how to run in the void between light and darkness, to be cloaked in neither—you could get in. If you ran fast enough.
GERMANIC, ROMANCE, & ROOTS
Borrowing words from other languages is part of “the cosmopolitan character of the English vocabulary” (Baugh and Cable 303). English is a smorgasbord (Swedish) and cornucopia (Latin) of tributes to ways other languages express certain phenomena, some directly plucked and repurposed:
From the French come apéritif, chauffer, chiffon, consommé, garage; from Italian come ciao, confetti, and vendetta…German has given is angst, festschrift, gestalt, schadenfreude, weltanschauung, zeitgeist, and zither. (Baugh and Cable 303)
The French words reveal as much as they hide in pronunciation—garage becomes a mirage of “age” becoming “ahhj,” a softening of the consonants and intentional blurring of the tongue—consonants become rocks in the river of the word, reference points between the flow of vowels between. The Romance is apparent in the French and Italian cadence of harmony as the words moan rather than give sharp cries. The German words seem each to be hammers of hard sound, stretching their stokes to the fullest. While chauffer’s sharp edge is softened by “chau,” implying a chuckle of “ch” behind the shovel of “sh” that dominates the pronunciation, schadenfreude contains a blur of “sch,” forcing them all to be spoken together—nuance v. impact, question v. command.
WORK CITED
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. Fifth Edition. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc., 2002. 303. Print.
PAINT // WRITE
I paint because it is fun and easy. I write because it is fun and difficult.
ON SOLAR PANELS
Tonight will be the third night I watch my solar powered Christmas lights detect nightfall and start shining. Talk about Science Fiction—the lights came with a small solar panel that faces south and collects light even on overcast days.
Solar energy is something that I have always wanted to work. It makes such good sense—plants are all solar powered, trees and grass and even we, to a certain extent, are solar powered. But always, standing in the way, are the arguments that it is both too inefficient and too expensive to be used on a large scale. I think of the Florida summer sun flattening the ground, of Arizona sand on fire to the touch. A lot of this hotness is lost.
And I think of waves pulling away from shore and then running back, dancing away and back, to and fro, clockwork afloat. Can these muscles of the earth not be harnessed? Check out this article about Desertec and Solar energy from CleanTechia.com: Solar Energy from the Sahara.
The Unapologist Philologist 