Strange words, now more than ever
Today, March 24th 2020, when I see a word more than eight or so letters long that begins with a ‘c’ I know immediately what it is without reading the rest of the letters. Until that word is Communism. Or cubanelle, conscientious, cabbalistic, cachinnate, or cutlassfish. And it always feels like such a great relief to find another word, a reminder that I am wrong, and that there is still delight left in surprises.
When you, like me, look out a window onto a strangely quiet city filled with empty arcs of freeway and darkened windows. When you see a television commercial filled with people and find yourself suddenly anxious at the proximity of everyone, just how close they all are to one another. When sidewalks are suddenly not big enough for anyone to navigate safely and every feature of our built environment, all gleaming plastic and glass and metal, seems suddenly impossibly deadly in how naive we all were. The new world is alien and filled with frightening features which we’ve only barely begun to understand. And yet, puzzlingly, it looks almost just like the old world. It has the same features: the same cherry tree blossoming on the corner, the same streetlight, the same hum of the refrigerator. It has all the things you remember it having, so much of the scent and texture, and yet at the same time it is a new and alien place. Am I the same me as I was before I just went to grocery store? Am I a danger or am I in danger? Are you a threat to me or do I threaten you? The answer is at once all. Yet my self is my old self to which I am accustomed and you are the old you to which you are accustomed. We may seem to be what we are or we may be entirely fictions to one another. And that is why now, more than ever, is the time for you to read Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String:
This book of ‘stories’, published in 1995, is a catalog of a world half-described with fully-familiar words but no need for character nor narrator nor dramatic arc. Instead, the world is rendered in descriptions and definitions that feel at once familiar and bewildering. There are passages that tell entire stories in the loosest of shorthand but also knit with delicate detail
A further American truth is that of John, a house/garment correlationist who developed the first shirt shelters and land scarves that were sufficiently large enough to supply a family with shelter while still outfitting them with rashproof garments that did not crush under.
There are dictionary definitions which slip between simplicity and palimpsest allusion, sketching worlds that may be like ours in a phrase and abandoning them just as abruptly
SNORING, language disturbance caused by accidental sleeping, in which a person speaks in compressed syllables and bulleted syntax, often stacking several words over one another in a distemporal deliverance of a sentence.
Or
PALMER. System or city which is shiftable. A Palmer can be erected anywhere between the coasts.
It’s touching and deeply familiar and all the more so because of how utterly alien and surprising the lives and beings and worlds in these passages are. Things startle with pathos and elegant precise abstraction:
MOTHER, THE The softest location in the house. It smells of foods that are fine and sweet. Often it moves through rooms on its own, cooing the name of the person. When it is tired, it sits, and members vie for position in its arms.
Each passage of narrative includes a glossary after it, defining terms like “eating”, “rain”, “John” but also terms like “jamping”, “frusc”, “The Sky Films of Ohio”. The more things are defined, the less familiar and comprehensible they seem, the further and more obscured they become. Like hearing someone speak a foreign language made of English words to describe a people and a place you’ve never known and cannot imagine. Much like I hear the word “distancing” and see everyone and everything through it though I couldn’t say I know entirely what it means. Like I see “Seattle” and I cannot imagine what this is.
You may think that you want facts right now, that you need more data, more actionable content, more outrage, more concern, more bandwidth. To be more yourself and make the world more your world. To find more meaning in it. And you may. But it’s equally as likely that you need none of those things. That you need to take a moment to appreciate the handrail in front of my building. What it was two months ago. What it is today. What it will be two months from today. The word handrail stays the same and its signification has changed radically. In January you’d have laughed if I said “that handrail will mean something entirely different in March”. The you who laughed then is both the same and different as the you who nods seriously now. The elevator buttons in my building, the handle of a shopping cart, a strangers cough, my own habit of pulling at my lip when anxious. Today we know the word and know the thing but know the meaning of neither. That estrangement is why we travel to far away places and seek new and challenging experiences, it feels exhilarating and invigorating. But now suddenly much of the world is new and exotic and old and familiar all at once. Suddenly you barely have to leave your bed to find that you no longer understand any of the things around you. It’s terrifying. It’s nonsense. And in that perhaps is the power of breaking sense for a moment. The Dadaists knew a thing or two about how non-sense can help you make sense, how building the faculty for it builds resilience, resistance, rebellion, strength, and kindness. How it strengthens us against catastrophe and brutality. In the midst of the First World War, as nonsensical an exercise as the human race has ever undertaken, they wondered why everyone was pretending to sensibility. Not absurdity, but nonsense. Not the positivism of noting that the rules have been violated but rather a celebration of what’s beyond the rules, the sense, the past, the meaning. That’s a parallel but the Age of Wire and String is more than Dadaist exercise. It’s imbued with something much more tender and touching. It feels much like the handrail in front of my building and the mountains to which I am no longer allowed to go: familiar and soothing, alien and disorienting, comforting and dangerous.
Other forms of sleeping also calm the sky. Wealthy landowners hire professional sleepers to practice their fits on key area of the grounds. The best sleepers stuff their pockets with grass and sleep standing up. Many amateur sleepers never wake up, or never fall asleep. If a professional wakes and discovers a protector still sleeping, or unable to sleep and making an attempt of it — in the shed, for example, downwind of the house — he is permitted to practice smashes upon this body. Freelancers take their dream seizures near the door and storm are said to be held in abeyance.
There’s most everything that I think a picture of our world would probably require: weather, people, place, logic, capitalism, endeavor, experience, and yet I know nothing of that world. I can’t imagine what happened before that passage to make this world what it was and I can’t imagine what will happen after. I know all the words and I might know most of the meanings but I don’t know any of what it all signifies. Even if I can see what’s described in that passage, I can’t explain it, and it shows no desire to explain itself to me, but its beauty and mystery are close and undeniable. It’s just like looking out my window right now and in that it’s most comforting thing I have.
You can buy The Age of Wire And String at:
