What's the Word?

The first time I ever said the f-word was in the 2nd grade. I don't know where I had heard the expression, but I probably learned it from school. My parents cursed but I never heard them use the f-word until adulthood, and even then I found it kind of shocking to hear either parent say it.

The incident involved a frog. We lived in a house at the end of a canal, and among other marvels of sea-creaturedom I saw countless frogs, some of them blooming out of tadpoles and others seemingly born fully-formed.

Leopard frogs were a favorite of mine. I still get a little pique of excitement when I think of how brightly colored they were, and how fast and far the Leopards could jump. Other frogs waddled around in a comparatively slovenly manner but to me the Leopard was sleek and smart.

Enter, then, what remains the biggest frog I have ever seen. As big as a basketball this monster sat like a water-filled balloon outside the garage, on dirt behind a bush, not moving and not even seeming to think. Its broad, frowning mouth reached from one end of its body to the other and its motionless eyes stared, seeming to follow me even as they seemed not to move. Its too-fall feet seemed like irrelevant nubs, like insults. How could they lift something so disproportionately huge?

This was not a fun frog. I could not play with it or watch it jump around. I waited for it to return my stares in a sentient-seeming way. I tried to imagine playing with this unwieldy beast, and visions of trying to roll this blubberful blob around in the grass or on the driveway didn't make me laugh, they made me sour. In my squeaky little voice I muttered "Oh fuck you" to this mass, summoning all the disdain a 2nd-grader could muster.

I stepped away from the playless, warty globule, feeling defeated, feeling I had been schooled with a blunt, ugly lesson, feeling like I must have owed this frog something for it to have made such a crassly torpid appearance in my little life.

The word "krill" represented one of my great vocabulary triumphs.
I was something of a wordsmith in high school. My writing vocabulary went beyond mere SAT words and rambled into obsolescence and occasional incomprehensibility.

It was not in an English or Literature class, though, where my knowledge of krill was the tonic that sated the confusion that filled the room when the teacher asked us what whales ate.

He asked the question more artfully, I think, but the he asked this question to show that enormous whales do not generally eat enormous things, but oodles and oodles (and oooooodles) of tiny things.

The question was asked and I saw the others in the class flipping madly through their class notes and textbooks, whispering "What the hell do whales eat? Huh?"

Confidently I raised my right hand and, with the knowledge of one about to deliver a shocking bolt of news I raised both hands in a half-halleluiah gesture and said "Krill."

Every single student turned to stare at me for a moment. The teacher was a bit chagrined, not because I knew the answer but because no one else did.

This was a science class but I knew the word from crossword puzzles, not from studying.

I do not own a desk. I type these words sitting at a table which I sometimes refer to as a desk, but which is in fact a large table made of wood. It was sold to me by a friend who also helped me assemble it. He called it a "work table",  a name which could mean a lot of things. I work at this table with the throwaway plastic tools of the digital crafstman but by appearance this table seems better suited to a basement or garage filled with chain saws and sandpaper.

The table is flimsy. I warn visitors not to pound or lean heavily on this table. Despite its appearance of strength I suspect that these 2 hands (and those 2 hands of he who sold it to me) assembled this platform in such haste as to make it a perilous platter.

As with most of my affairs I would probably need to build this thing at least twice before I got it right.

The expression "built with my own two hands" has always rung hollow to me. I may have first been introduced to the expression at summer camp in 1978. After a rabble-rousing series of song-singing and foot-stomping in the cafeteria the camp's Director diplomatically delivered a speech in which he praised the enthusiasm of us campers and the counselors who so energetically sang Native American tribal songs and chants, but he suggested we be careful about how much abuse we gave to the building. "I built this cafeteria with my own two hands," he said, suggesting with self-deprecation that this should not give us any particular confidence in the integrity of the structure. "I don't know if these walls are designed to withstand the kind of energy you men showed last night."

Indeed, it was an exceptional outburst. The walls and floor and roof of the cafeteria shook as each group of camers took its turns singing its song.

There were four groups of campers, each named for an Indian tribe, and each group had a theme song that invoked its name. The tribes were (in order of the members' ages) Chickasaw, Cherokee, Catawba, and Tuscarora.

My favorite song was the Catawba. The words, usually accompanied by hand-clapping and foot-pounding, were:

MMM, mmm-gawa, Catawba got the power! Sing

Repeat ad lib. At the cue of the camp counselor the song ends with:

PEACE!

For some of the chants a camp counselor would lead the singing -- in the style of a miltary drill sergeant who sends out the first line of a song as the members of his platoon respond with the next lines.

This question-and-answer format gave the Chickasaw chant a distinct character. A 20-something year old camp counselor would, with his deep basso voice, shout out "WE ARE CHICKASAW!" and in response a chorus of 10-year-olds with squeaky, pre-pubescent voices shouted "WE ARE CHICKASAW!" The deep-voiced leader would next say "MIIIIIGHTY MIIGHTY CHICKASAW!" and the youngsters joyfully and high-pitchedly responded with "MIIIIGHTY MIIGHTY CHICKASAW!"

I have been thinking about the history of the universe, the history of our planet, and the histories of all interdependent globes (planetary and earthly) whose revolutions rely on those of others.

How, I want to know, does history treat the floatation of human memory, flirtations of recall adroitly omitted from routine accounts of our selves, gently edited out of our attempts to structure our own reputation?

Is it the responsibility of the memory-holder, of the individual in charge of these units of record, to make these ephemera indexable, searchable, inheritable? Connectable.

These flashes of memory float in the oceans of time, lingering with material stubbornness and inaccessibility, depriving other lost memories the chance to connect, the opportunity to resolve mysteries unknown to each other.

This infinite matter passed through the morning jumble of my mind, during my wake-up conversation-with-self in which I imagine myself closing the open ends of a puzzling line of questions, in which I imagine myself sealing a discussion roiled with inexplicable vagaries and residual blossoming conspiracies. I, in my continuation of the dream state, felt that spark of genius which connects the unconnectable, only to wake up completely and rediscover how the genius of the dream state is often nothing but a dull thud of wit to the wakened mind.

It reminded me of a Czeslaw Milosz poem, "A Treatise on Poetry", from 1957, which contains these verses which impressed me to golly. This is from Part III, which is called "The Spirit of History", and it depicts history itself traveling through the infinite ephemera and un-recorded experiences and events of our planet.

— "King of the centuries, ungraspable Movement,
You who fill the grottoes of the ocean
With a roiling silence, who dwell in the blood
Of the gored shark devoured by other sharks,
In the whistle of a half-bird, half-fish,
In the thundering sea, in the iron gurgling
Of the rocks when archipelagoes surge up.

"The churning of your surf casts up bracelets,
Pearls not eyes, bones from which the salt
Has eaten crowns and dresses of brocade.
You without beginning, you always between
A form and a form, O stream, bright spark,
Antithesis that ripens toward a thesis,
Now we have become equal to the gods,
Knowing, in you, that we do not exist.

"You, in whom cause is married to effect,
Drew us from the depth as you draw a wave,
For one instant, limitless, of transformation.
You have shown us the agony of this age
So that we could ascend to those heights
Where your hand commands the instruments.
Spare us, do not punish us. Our offense
Was grave: we forgot the power of your law.
Save us from ignorance. Accept now our devotion."

Milosz next refers to undocumented history as "the possessions of time" and captures what I, for one, feel is the ceaseless, continuous escape of experience into the limitlessness of time.

Any time I walk past the Brasserie restaurant in midtown I laugh because I remember how a friend thought the place was called The Brothery -- as in broth (not pronounced like "brother" but like broth-er-ee). He thought he was meeting someone for soup and was surprised to find it was an extravagent (to him) French restaurant called the Brasserie. He was confused to imagine that a place in midtown specialized in soup or, stranger yet, broth. He imagined a menu of 100 pages listing broths from all corners of the world: broth done African style with smashed peanuts; broth done southern style with smashed crackers; cajun broth with picante sauce? When he told me about the Brothery we discovered that neither of us really knew what broth was. I thought of it as prison or orphanage food while my friend thought broth was a more robust product. We were both wrong to think of it as an independent, singular foodstuff. I think I confused broth with gruel, and he might have thought broth was something like stew.