(Should look up etymology of whoosh.) From 19th century, the machine age. Did anything really “whoosh” before then? Did Homer describe the chariots’ “whoosh”? (whistle of arrows perhaps.)
Word ‘book’ is from ‘beech’ apparently and French ‘livre’ from a Latin word indicating a tree’s interior bark.
“Kicking the bark” — if I could know the etymological roots of each word and part of a word in that phrase, what might it tell me about the action described by the phrase? “Kick” as a sound implies an idea of kicking and the sound “bark” implies an idea of bark, and how do those ideas measure up to the action I’ve just performed? If “kicking the bark” were “sludging the ferb” would that be what I had just done?
(One could imagine a temple as a place where etymologies would ring out. Not the etymologies of altar, prayer, of religious topics, but of air, ceiling, and rug. In holy places one breathes in not air but the etymology of air.) Where one breaths in together the science of air and the science of the word of air.
Metamorphasis — Kafka story — (Max Brod title?) — Metamorphases — the Ovid work. The “dark matter” of continuous perception — our heads filled much more of the emptiness of space than our actions and most of all our talking would seem to indicate. Where the universe is hypothesized to be full of black unfound mass, we have sight, sound and tactile sensation, seeming to be something but actually insubstantial. Perhaps looking into outer-space is like confronting a human mind, wherein stars are words. Walking around with nothing in my head; other times, all my “thought” is a rehearsal — the mind doesn’t “think” but is just “backstage” with ideas tried on, parts repeated.
Chain link fence for backyard of John’s old house put in. Junk car with good music playing out of it I can’t place. Asia-pacific man middle-aged medium height, little hair, phone in right hand: “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” A deer manifesting on your right: his long brown solid flank observed. Remembering, all of sudden, I was kind of a screwed up guy — a simple but acute case — though I wouldn’t really know it until later. I would just glimpse it now. Will seem like just the prick of a pin could do it, make me a person without a hangup. I would be delivered of my cartoon status…. “Not just familiar with everything along here but with everything’s shadow along here,” I think as I see once again those shadows of conifers which are like crenellations to the shadow of the fence, “their passage through the year and day.”
Couldn’t tell sex of driver with certainty. Curly hair, overweight, thick glasses. The question of what quality observed would have made that figure — androgynous in its quick passing — seem of one gender or another. Bosom, lip, mustache, a slender finger. Eyesight prejudicial that way: makes you feel like you, a speck of the world, contain the world. A speck in this speck makes you think you know it all: the speck of a thought in the speck of a head in the speck of a person that calls itself “knowing.” Bottom of Abingdon hill: “Feels like I’ve been thinking for the first time in a while –why” (It was the Dostoyevsky passage I’d read today. “World seems so full” when there are things to think.) Dostoyevsky: we are responsible for everyone else. (The earth is what a full thought looks like while without a thought we’re like outerspace, both too much and too little.)
An extraordinary heat generated by my “knee compression sleeves” as I step outside. These knee sleeves are a marvel to all the people in the coffee shop and all the people all around here. Heh buddy what do you go on your knees? (“Sparks from Knee Sleeves” might be the sort of song I write, bring it to a guy, “got this great hit on my hands” and he’s like “what is it” and when I tell him, “Sparks from My Knee Sleeves”, he grabs me by the elbow and says you stick with me kid, funny how it is those everyday things everyone can relate to like your baking hot “knee compression sleeves” that propel you to fame in the end. Only now the guy I trusted has ripped me off: he’s got my fame and fortune too, which who cares, but he’s running off in my ‘sleeves’ –)
Science, while seeming like a good deal, has brought humanity nearer to the brink of destruction than anything else thus far.
What were the thoughts that inspired your dejection today? (Good, now pack all that up because no one wants to hear it.)
Older woman using a weed whacker where a lawn mower would make more sense. Reminds me of the time I used the dust broom to clean the customer area instead of the dry mop so that a colleague had to take me aside to point out that the big one was a little faster. How the sound of its whirring sputters as it encounters what sounds like a thick tuft of grass.
Customer’s password recalled: “Hen.”
Everything seemingly reasonably well-mowed except the two maximally unruly tufts that stand at either side of that sewer’s opening, there in the median. Here, a square of concrete bordered by a longer trapezoidal wedge of it as the sidewalk fans around the street corner. Question: imagine this is the story of a person walking, that these are the thoughts of a person as he walks, how would one best measure the ratio of steps to thoughts? Or just to give us a start somewhere: would it be truer to say the spaces between words are analogous to the physical steps or that the punctuation between phrases was more analogous? Initial [step] response [step]: the spaces look more like steps and the words look more like thoughts but actually one can think a lot in a step. A whole walk of thought can occur within a step, as it were, while words are only the unpacking of a step. One doesn’t think a lot in a step but it takes a lot of words to describe what one has thought and a lot of repetition to give a sense for how it happened.
The gentle steps the Latin man made as he approached the stop light, the Ethiopian man’s flat sandals in the dust. How big the sky could seem when walking down 28th Street where they had lost some trees: Why would you observe such tedious details but for the thought that life is mainly composed of such tediousness — and that life is good? “life is tedious and life is good.”
Then there are cars. Many cars, it occurs to one. Both ways. “One hears their passage through the air, whoosh, but only sees their passage over ground–” often true.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 