Posted:19 May 2010 17:56 +0100
<p><center><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);"><strong><span style="font-size: xx-large;">W o r d s</span></strong></span></center></p><p><strong>2day the author, who has been perusing "<a href="http://www.abbreviations.com/acronyms/CHAT/78">chatspeak</a>" in an online glossary, feels like being obvious. And the most obvious subject to write about after observing the tragi-comic modern demise of written communication into a jumble of apparently incoherent letters and numbers, is words. Proper words, that is, and the most obvious way to start talking about words would be to quote St John and the somewhat absurd primary statement of his gospel,<q>In the beginning was the Word</q>, for how could the word have existed before language?</strong></p><p><strong>Inevitably, the next place the mind wonders to is the <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGolem&ei=rWL1S86hIYaZOM_ulZQJ&usg=AFQjCNEaJcQQmSzgZ9z8w3vY6Ii7dVBHIQ&sig2=k3eHjCqs6wPYfxCsQ9-Nig">golem</a> myth, that bulky, blundering, post-clay beast that comes to life when you place The Word in his mouth, or by writing the word <i><a href="http://www.hebrew4christians.net/Glossary/Word_of_the_Week/Archived/Emet/emet.html">emet</a> (truth),</i>on its forehead. It can be deactivated by removing the word from its mouth, or by erasing the aleph (e) from the word emet, creating the word "met", meaning death.* Note that Aleph is the first letter of the semitic alphabet, inspite of being referred to as "e" here.</strong></p><p><strong>In Jorge Luis Borges's short story <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aleph_%28short_story%29">The Aleph</a>, (this first in the collection</strong><em>The Aleph and other Stories</em><strong>(1949)), the aleph is an object that contains infinity allowing anyone who views it to discern space and time in complete detail, this is contrasted to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zahir">The Zahir</a> (the final story), which exists on the other side of the spectrum, an object that essentially negates infinity by making the viewer become obsessed with it alone until the rest of reality ceases to exist.</strong></p><p><strong>The word is the beginning, and as the beginning it must also be the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the aleph and the zahir, the a and the zed. That is why, who can deny it, the Apocalypse was written by Saint John, and also why St John's Wort is called St.John's Wort, for the<q>Wort</q>is not a viral carbuncle which can only be eliminated by getting a virgin to urinate on it at full moon. Oh no! It is the German word for word. So since St. John's Wort calms the nerves, one could assume it refers to the hypothetical word at the end of The Apocalypse, i.e. serenity, or oblivion. So this apparently randomly named herb has more depth to it than anyone would have dreamed of: What's in a Word? A Wort by any other name would smell less sweet (especially afteradministering the traditional method of treatment mentioned above).<br /></strong></p><p><strong>And, yes, of course words smell, and taste, and anything else we want them to do, for words have the power to bring anything to life; and we can make soup out of them. Or if we are German, salad.<em>Wortsalat</em>, is just another term for gibberish, and eating words certainly would save money. Words are creation, the lifeblood of existence. So much so that, as we established, they existed before themselves, they create and negate. Beat that, as my nephew Sky would shrewdly add.</strong></p><p><strong>That inevitably takes us to the realm of the poppy, the sleep drug: opium, the portal to oblivion. Paradoxically, St. John's Wort, when taken by a body in opiate dream, instigates cold turkey. And that too, has meanings beyond the superficial appearance. Life (opium) is the dream, death (St. John's Wort) ends the dream. But if the dream (opium) is happy, the afterlife (St John's Wort: comedown) is unpleasant; and if it is unhappy, the afterlife (St. John's Wort being taken to numb depression) is a relief. How very Ying Yang.</strong></p><p><strong>But talking of heroin, the German word for Cold Turkey is<q>Affe</q>, meaning monkey. I have often wondered what on earth could be meant by that. The English term clearly refers to those glum post Christmas days, when people crawl around with that rainy, dissolute feeling, invariably hung over, if only due to relative overdose. But monkey? During my youth in Wales, people would make utterances à la<q>My mum went ape, she did</q>, meaning she was angry. Maybe like a mad gorilla. Do people coming down from heroin throw oranges at passers-by? They sweat and <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1yfvq_cure-lets-go-to-bed_music">shake like milk</a>. I've never seen a monkey do that to date. Not that I spend a lot of time engaged in monkey-observation, but still. The most effective way of describing cold turkey in German would surely be<q>Ich hab Affe wie Sau</q>,<q>I have monkey like sow</q>; note the acute use of animal references in all these terms.</strong></p><p><strong><span style="font-size: larger;"><object width="425" height="344"><param value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-sg5c9Kc4m8&hl=en_GB&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999" name="movie"></param><param value="true" name="allowFullScreen"></param><param value="always" name="allowscriptaccess"></param><embed width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="flash-gone-1"></embed></object></span></strong></p><p><strong>The oranges monkeys throw are round, like words. Words are round because like eternity, or eggs, which are another subject altogether, they have neither beginning nor end. I dream of a world in which monkeys bombard us with eternity and heroin addicts find infintiy in eggs, but at least this world contains the song<q>Ich hatte ein Wort</q>, in which <a href="http://www.blixa-bargeld.com/">Blixa Bargeld</a> tells us:</strong></p><p><em>Ich hatte ein Wort<br />ein rundes, rund wie eine Orange<br />es hat mitunter, mitternachts, den ganzen Innenraum mir erhellt<br />die Frucht war nach der Natur bewachsen<br />einem Foto des Mondes neben dem Bett</em></p><p><strong>I had a word</strong></p><p><strong>a round one, like an orange</strong></p><p><strong>sometimes it lit up my complete interior at midnight</strong></p><br /><p><strong>its fruit was overgrown as in nature</strong></p><p><strong>a photograph of the moon next to my bed</strong></p><br /><p><strong>His word is round, like and orange, like the moon, symbol of the eternal cycle of things, life and death. So next time someone tries to pretzel your brain with the annoying cliché:<em>What came first, the chicken or the egg</em></strong><em><span style="font-size: larger;">?</span></em> <strong>Just ask:</strong> <em>What came first, the pretzel, or the brain?</em> <strong>or:</strong> <em>Did the moon wax before it waned or wane before it waxed?</em></p><p><strong>The verb<q>to wax</q>is directly related etymologically to the German<q>wachsen</q>, to grow. Who knows why wax is wax in English and Wachs is wax in German, but as long as we can wax lyrical and our words are dynamically overgrown, who really cares? One word makes many words, and yet all the words ever coined are still sometimes never enough to describe the simplest things, like the termites that raid the pit of your intestines when smitten, leaving your tongue lashing to articulte your emotions like an inebriated tadpole. And that is why the Word is God, for The Word is no word at all, in the end.</strong></p><p style="text-align: center;"><img src="../img/love-god.jpg" alt=""></img></p><p><strong>* Met is mead in German:</strong><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 128);"><strong><em>Care to come round for a cup of death?</em></strong></span></p>