Inventories

 

Inventories
           
An Abecedary

 

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Earlier this year I ran across a reference to a book by Aaron Angello called The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications. In his introduction to this entertaining and offbeat book, he had this to day about its origins and evolution:

... I had a sketchbook, and at the top of each page, I wrote, in order, a single word from Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet. I sat in the chair, looked at the word for that day, then for several minutes I just thought about it, completely out of its context. Once I felt I was filled with that word—as if the word filled my body, not just my mind—I began to write. Usually, I had no idea what I was writing. For the most part I started from a place of what I like to call “the beyond consciousness,” from a place where I didn’t “know” what I was composing, so to speak. I wanted to access a mental space that allowed for spontaneity, without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats so famously said. Occasionally, partway through a piece, I would do a bit of research (i.e., look something up on my phone), but generally, I just wrote. I paid no attention to whether I was writing a prose poem, an essay, a story, or something else. I didn’t even care if it “made sense.” My only rules were that I had to write in prose, I had to fill the page, and the piece couldn’t overflow onto the next one.
    I’m not certain why I chose Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet instead of, say, a poem by Emily Dickinson or John Ashbery, or any other bit of text for that matter. The experiment would probably work just as well no matter the source....Once I’d finished a draft of the manuscript—once I’d written a page for each of the 114 words in the sonnet—I put it aside for a while. Then, over the next few years, I periodically revisited it. I edited the pieces mercilessly. I rewrote some. I cut with abandon. I thought about how the pieces resonated with each other and what themes and memories I came back to again and again in those 114 days of writing every morning. I tried to take daily individual ruminations and make them work together as a kind of long lyric essay.

Something about the built-in randomness of Angello's way of working in this book appealed to me, and I decided to give it a whirl. Instead of beginning with a sonnet or other pre-published work, I opted to build upon a project that had occurred to me in one the generative sessions of semi-consciousness that often come to me in the morning hours when I'm lying in bed not fully asleep and not yet fully awake. I had begun running through the letters of the alphabet and selecting the first five-letter word that occurred to me. Later that morning I went to my laptop, created a little table with four columns and 26 rows and printed it out. Then I began penciling into each cell in sequence the first five letter word that occurred to me, proceeding in alphabetical  order. When I had completed the four lists, I typed the list in the first column into a new document, and, following Angello's example, began doing freewrites under each. It took me several weeks to complete the first draft of the entire document. Then I undertook the revisions. I have often found that having one or more formal constraints to work against gives me a way of making purposeful decisions about what to cut, what to add, and what to re-arrange when I am revising. My first-draft paragraphs had ranged from 75 words or so to more than 130, so I made an arbitrary decision to work toward having 26 paragraphs of exactly 100 words each in my final draft, which is what you will see below.

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Amber

There's honey, of course. All those busy bees at work, all those waxy combs filled with golden sweetness. Apple juice. Maple syrup. Yellow ochre in the watercolor pan. Insects from a hundred million years ago, preserved in pine resin. The waves of grain beneath the spacious skies of the country whose praises we are exhorted to sing, and whose history we are encouraged to whitewash, the same country in which a child named Amber was abducted and killed, giving rise to the cell-phone alerts that bear her name. So much beauty, so much terror; so much sickness, so much hope.


Brush

Near miss, narrow escape from danger. Soft touch. Gesture. Caress. Instrument of re-presentation, the means by which a world can rendered in black and white, as in Japanese and Chinese ink painting, or ideograms can be deployed on paper, as in calligraphy. Also the means by which the world can be rendered with colored water on paper, or paint on canvas. Used in cleaning: Soak, scrub, rinse, repeat. Used in personal care: the cleaning of teeth, the parting and styling of hair.  Going further into the country, a term used for small bushes and trees that are difficult to penetrate.


Color

Conveys feeling, George likes to say. Upon hitting your eyes, color generates emotion subliminally. Which spills over into language. As when I am blue, or seeing red, or accused of being yellow, green with envy, or black-hearted. Children love to color. Give them crayons, fingerpaints, watercolors, and watch them go to town. More problematically, there's the whole sociology of skin color—black, white, yellow, brown, red—and how those colors have been coded and interpreted and responded to historically and in the present moment. Do you have a preference? My grandson wants to know: What's your second least favorite color?


Dense

Parsing the sense of dense. Case study in denotation and connotation. Heavy, thick, compacted: examples being lead, iron, rocks of any kind, cement. Castle keeps. Hardwood. Used to describe certain texts that are hard to decipher or hold in the mind: Faulkner's writing is too dense for my tastes. As opposed to, say, Hemingway or Rupi Kaur. Also used as a descriptor for someone whose head seems to resist incoming data: He can be a little dense sometimes. The opposite of dense in that sense would be bright, or intelligent, or quick on the uptake. Water is denser than ice.

Early

Too soon. Or perhaps optimally prepared, with anticipated obstacles avoided, thereby freeing you up to read or dance, nap or take a walk. Just before sunrise, lying in bed halfway between sleeping and waking, skirting the edges of a dream, perhaps pondering whether to throw off the covers and rise to greet another day,  or just turn over and cocoon under the warm covers for another few minutes. Or, conversely, the time just after midnight, those wee small hours that Sinatra sang about way back when. Or a premature arrival: a surprise that may (or may not) be pleasant, depending.


Fault

As in at. As in foot. As in my, or your, or his, or her, or their, or nobody's. As in gap or chasm, as in mountains sliding into the sea. As in the distance between what was hoped for and what transpired. Who or what is to blame for the way I am feeling right now? Who is going to pay for this? After an accident, determination of responsibility, insurers relying on investigators to decide who made the first, or most telling, mistake. Followed by lawsuits that will determine whether money must change hands, and if so, how much.


Giant

A creature of legend or myth. Goliath, for example, slain by a boy with a slingshot. King Kong. Paul Bunyan. Anyone acknowledged as a leader in his (or, presumably, her) field. Mascot for many baseball and football teams, and for at least one food company specializing in vegetables. Used of certain buildings And then all the adjectival connotations of absolute or relative largeness or importance: a giant step, a giant boat, a giant appetite, a giant boondoggle, giant redwood, giant panda. The largest of giants being the universe itself, or any of a certain class of dwarf stars within it.


Heart

This one is almost too rich. That which pumps blood. The quality of bravery or courage. Determination. The ability to feel deep empathy and compassion. Sticktoitiveness. One of the four card suits. The central point, the middle, the very the essence of something. Anagram of "earth." The locus of feelings (as distinguished from, or opposed to, or complementary with) the brain, the locus of thoughts. Lead-in to any number of phrasings: Heart attack. Heart to heart. Heart monitor. Heartwood. Heartache. Heartfelt apologies. Shot through the heart. The heart sutra. The heart of the matter. Deep in the heart of Texas.


Ideal


What's the best thing you can imagine? The moon sparkling on the water? Buying a new car? Riding horseback on the beach? Straight A's? Peace and quiet? A day without rain? Poker night with your best friends? Transformational sex? Season tickets for the Warriors? A novel that draws you into an invented world and keeps you there, enthralled? A home-made breakfast after a good night's sleep? Being able to walk without pain? Chris Stapleton on electric guitar? Sitting with someone who gives you their complete and total attention? That which can only be wished for but never attained? Unless, unless...


Jaunty

He strides in smiling, wearing a felt hat with a leather band, in which he has inserted a pheasant feather. He glances around the room and spies an empty armchair near the fireplace. On his way over, he plucks a glass of champagne from the bar, makes a show of taking a sip and closing his eyes and raising his head as if in the throes of an ecstatic revelation. Settling in the chair he doffs his hat, raises his glass in a toast to the assembled partygoers, takes a another sip, and smiles broadly at no one in particular.


Koala

What are you doing here? Were you invited, or did you just show up to see who would make a fuss over you? I get it; some people think you're cute. They point at you,  make soft cooing noises. Some of your more aggressively obnoxious fanboys and girls will likely pull leaves and stems out of the flower vases by the window and come over and try to entice you to nibble at them. If you were smart, which you're probably not, you wouldn't play along. Then they'd get bored and find some other way to call attention to themselves.


Lanai

In Hawaii, since the weather is almost always sunny and warn, most houses (and many condos) have at the side or in the back, which serves something of the function that a "porch" would serve in a house on the US mainland. Except that a lanai typically has no roof and extends longer and wider than a porch. It's a place to sit with friends and have a drink, or play a game of catch with your son or daughter, or just lie in the sun with a mai tai on the table at your side, soaking up the rays.


Mercy

As an exclamation, a word suggesting a) surprise at how poorly something is turning out, or b) pleasure at something so wonderful as to threaten becoming overwhelming. In the ethical sense, the act of forgiveness, often placed in contrast, as in Shakespeare's Othello, with "justice," often in the sense of earned punishment. The ethical ideal being justice tempered by mercy. An attitude more often aspirational than operational. There are Mercy Hospitals all over the country, which makes sense. I was taught in elementary school by nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy, and by and large they were anything but.


North

As in star. As in Pole. As in to Alaska. Straight up. An orientation during travel, as with a compass. Suggestive of winter. Snow and ice. Glaciers. Vikings with fair skin and blond hair carrying axes, pillaging the coastal villages of England. Historically and geographically embroiled, in the United States, with controversies associated with the civil war. From the point of view of the South, the metonym of all that is wrong about an American Federalism administered by Ivy League intellectuals, including multiculturalism, affirmative action, trade unions, and government handouts. Traditional rival of "South" in college and pro All-Star games.


Obese

Big. Round. Overlarge. But a loaded word these days. Those of a sensitive disposition emphasize the unfairness of fat shaming and to endorse "body positivity," which would preclude the need for a term like "obese." OTOH companies spend millions of dollars on television ads promoting diets and food plans and medications which are basically guaranteeing no-hassle weight loss, and those products are flying off the shelves. So there's a disconnect between the messaging from the politically correct and the messaging reaching the politically incorrect, as when Hillary Clinton lost the election after calling a significant percentage of the population "deplorables."


Pupil

The very center of the eye, the portal between the world and the brain. Circular window. Also, an attendee at school, not necessarily synonymous with "student, "which would connote at least some small degree of active engagement. You can be a pupil without being a student. Trust me, I know. But you can also be a student without being a pupil, if you are moved to study on your own. Wherever you are, you can be paying attention, letting the light fall upon the inner lens of your eye and make its mysterious way into your brain and reflective consciousness.


Query

Hints of academia. The sense of someone on a search for a hidden truth. Can I ask you something? What is your problem? (How come I get to be the one with the problem if you are the one asking all the intrusive questions? Did you ever stop to think that maybe it's your problem? It's always stupid this and fucking that and "I don't want to do this anymore.") You're right. I'll try to do better. (You have been saying that for years. But it never seems to stick, does it?) (Okay. Tomorrow then. One day at a time.)


River

Water on the move from the mountains to the ocean. Conveyance, highway for boats, attraction for nature lovers and skinnydippers. Home to fish and fishermen and fish fries.  Often a property marker. Natural symbol of anything in flux, not to mention various elements of oxymoronical folk wisdom, e.g. You can't step in the same river twice (which is simultaneously true and untrue). Thus mystery. Thus legend: the Danube, the Mississippi, the Rhine, the Amazon, the Orinoco. Last card dealt in Hold 'Em. Favorite subject of songwriters and artists. Picture it youself: the sun glinting off the water, sailboats skimming along.


Stand

As in taking one. As in tall. As in together. As in alone. As in easel. As in of trees. As in being upright, as in refusing to go along with what you know is not right. As in abide or put up with. What I cannot stand is this. And how about understand? Under from the German Unter meaning among. Standing among, suggesting community, and perhaps agreement or consensus. Yes, I understand. I stand among you, I stand with you, I will stand by your side. I will be a standup guy. We will stand together, you and I.


Train

A vehicle on rails. Cars carrying people, carrying goods, carrying gold. Freight train. Passenger train. Locomotive. Coal car. Tanker. Sleeper car. Caboose. Catnip for robbers, for hobos, for people eager to get out of town, for storytellers, mystery writers, movie directors. One also trains to become an athlete, a writer, a soldier, a doctor. What is left in one's wake, as the train of a wedding gown. Think of the ways in which train relates to river and stand. Movement and stasis. Being where you are, or being on the way somewhere, anywhere, else. Reaching the end of the line.


Under

The bus. The influence. The wire. The circumstances. The weather. Wear. Water. Write. Appreciated. Fire. Current. Pressure. Consideration. Perform. Pinning. Going. Standing. Investigation. Value. Going. Up from. Down. The emotional connotation of under-ness. Below. Beneath. Less than. The implication of failure, the disappointment of not rising to the standard. OTOH, what is under something is also the thing that supports it, the base, the basis, the rock upon which something rests, as in the famous and likely spurious saying about St. Peter. Who would merit a whole disquisition all on his own, historically and mythologically, were we to undertake it.


Value

Worth. Quality. Usefulness. Esteem. Appreciate. The question of metrics: how is value to be evaluated? Who is to say what is good and what is not good, whether and to what degree? What do you mean to me? What do I mean to you? Alternatively, what about the choices people make in the social sphere? Imposing houses? Good looks? Hot cars? Hot sex? The exercise of power? Competition as the driver of the economy? The accumulation and deployment of capital. Capitalism vs Socialism vs whatever the alternatives might be. Nirvana? Non-action? Total acceptance? What are you doing with your life?


Water

Original element, without which nothing, life having arisen out of the mineral-rich oceans of prehistory. Clouds. Rain. Snow. Lakes and rivers. Glaciers frozen tundra. Water in the stems of plants and in the veins of every living thing. For the grass, for the flowers, for the fish, for the whales. For cleaning out the digestive system, for washing the car, for showering and shaving and the baking of bread. Water on which to float, to sail, to cruise. To survive in the desert, look for an oasis. Water as a symbol of life, of clarity, of the richness of life.


X

The ex-ception. Marks the spot. Not commonly seen at the beginnings of words. Represents, among other things, the unknown. Something to solve for. Symbol for multiplication. Used to indicate the choice of a candidate on a ballot or a choice on a test. The means by which something written down may be crossed out. The generation following the baby boomers. Aurally, spoken—sometimes with regret, sometimes with relief, sometimes with real animus—of someone no longer a lover. Combined with the "Command" key on the keyboard, serves to delete whatever has been selected. Now you see it, now you don't.



Youth

Often said to be wasted on the young. Then again, youth is a relative concept, and even adults and oldsters have trouble inhabiting the present moment with attention and appreciation. I do like the sound of the word "youth," and I enjoy the pictures that come into my mind when I consider the concept of youth, or the actual young people who populate my memory and occasionally appear in front of my eyes. But I am in fact an old man, even though in my mind's eye I still think I'm the same person I used to be. As if.


Zen

Basic concepts: One, that your buddha nature, which is to say your enlightenment, lies within you, and that you are responsible for doing what you need to do to bring it forward, whether that be by work or meditation or art. It's not going to be provided to you by your family or friends or the deity of your choice. Two: that the world and all that we value in it and attend to in it is illusory. We want the world to make sense: we have to let go of that. It's not real, and it doesn't matter.