A long slow fall toward light this morning, so slow it seemed undecided whether to enter or just go on dozing at the horizon. Finally, a burnished orange fading fast to yellow climbing up and up to meet the pale blue, and daylight arrives, with the sweet sound of mourning doves and mockingbirds, awake and filling the trees with song and the flutter of wings.
Yesterday I skipped the post because of school and then I went to the Library for the Men's Book Group, and, yes, I did say Men's. First there was only one book group at the library, but the men found they did not so much enjoy the books that were selected for reading. I rather think they were too full of . . . women's stuff, so they formed their own book group to read . . . other things. What they read for this month appealed to me and so the librarian, when asked, said anyone could come to the Men's Book Group if they read the book and wanted to talk about it.
So, I went, and we talked about The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. I have always been fascinated by dictionaries, any kind, and I own quite a few of them, including the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, awkward to use, but full of such an abundance of weird and wonderful words. Winchester's book is about the creating of the OED and the contribution made by a madman, an American Army officer incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane. When I started reading, I expected more about the construction of the dictionary, but the story was actually more about Dr. Minor, the army officer, and Professor Murray, the editor of the OED. Most of the discussion centered on the madman, his life and how he was viewed by the society of that time, and his contribution in the form of tens of thousands of entry slips bearing sentences from various sources used to help define the range of meanings for the words included in the dictionary. I had not realized that much of the dictionary work had been done by volunteers, from all walks of life, who read books and pulled out sentences to be used, and sent them by post to Oxford. The organization of a task like that, hundreds of thousands of words defined and illustrated in all their shades of meaning, would take a genius and a very persistent and meticulous person, which Professor Murray evidently was, yet Dr. Minor, for all his paranoia, which had caused him to shoot an innocent man. was very similar, if mostly in the daylight hours to the professor and they became great friends, as much as they were able. It was a book that seemed to acknowledge that even in the most constrained circumstances, people are able to contribute to something meaningful, to make of their lives something more than those circumstances. For June, they are reading The Perfect Storm . . . perhaps I will continue to attend if they continue to read books that appeal to me <smile>
For today, a dictionary poem, in honor of the OED, and it's impact on the history of one of the world's most influential languages . . .
Sleeping with the Dictionary
I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.
Harryette Mullen
I have spent nights like that, reading the dictionary, especially when I first got the OED because it was so full of words I never heard of before. Like armozeen, the black silk used to make cassocks and mourning garments, which I stumbled across while I was looking for something else and turned into the name of a dark elf character for a game I play, it was perfect for her, dark silk and mourning, or the cause of mourning <smile>, mysterious and arcane as the word itself. This poem cross-pollinates the almost erotic allure of words and their possibilities, with actual erotic, making me recall the idea that the mind is the most essential organ for sex, without its imagination actual sex would be reduced to the mechanical. All the sly allusions in this poem make me chuckle and realize that to write this poem the poet had to have made that particular connection with words when she started writing, and then she just had fun seeing how far she could stretch it, which was pretty much just about as far as she could. The poem made me realize that I was not alone getting . . . lost in the dictionary!
The sun has risen far enough now to light most of the back yard, the shadows there are tinged with bright edges. The birds still out there singing and excited, bouncing from one tree to another. They sound like the kids let out of class all noise and cheer bursting with energy! Some mornings I fall into the sin of envy for all that energy!
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