For the want, all for the want of...
Dreamt I was back at home, in the family garage.
Messy, pack-rat heaven, loads of forgotten things. Man-mades going back to nature. Very organic; full of dust, must and rust.
Somehow, the subject got around to horseshoes, and horseshoe nails.
Fer, I thought, is French for iron; therefore, a ferrier is one who, through working with iron, keeps horses shod.
In the morning, I thought, well, fer, ferrier... that only implies ironwork, there's nothing to imply horses... um... though, on the other hand... in English, a farrier is one who shoes horses... *
I don't think I would have made the horseshoe/horseshoe nail/iron/fer/ferrier/farrier connection awake; but why did I make it asleep? Is this important? Or is this just my brain goofing around while I'm asleep? (I'm half-expecting to see Cathy Jones as Babe Bennett closing every dream with I'm just goofin' around, that's all!)
This niggling sense of meaning... it's almost like a childish prank; as if the Subconscious likes to ring the mental doorbell of the Conscious, and then run away. I can't get any sleep because my Id is playing Nocturnal Nicky Ninedoors.
I can only imagine it got inspired by a bottle of acetone.
There's a bottle of acetone I own which was made in Switzerland, with the words "nail polish remover" on it in English and five other languages.**
The other day, I noticed the word for nail was Nagel (or Nagella) and the fleeting thought, oh, I know someone with the last name of Nagle, wonder if that meant at one point their ancestor made nails for a living... but how can you make a living making only nails? crossed my mind, shrank away into the distance as it continued to the horizon of my consciousness, then fell off the edge of my mind map where one finds only the words Here Be Dragons.
I guess thoughts aren't gone just because you've forgotten about thinking them.
~ ~ ~
* Ferrari... related, possibly, to the (Latin) ferrare: to shoe a horse. Which makes sense, considering the tradmark horse. Interesting to look at that beside the myth of St. Dunstan, the smith who put horseshoes on the devil (good old St. Nick)...
** The four official languages are French, Italian, German and Romansh. I figure the fifth one is either Latin, which they sometimes use so as not to play favourites, or, more likely, Serbo Croatian, since more people speak Serbo Croatian in Switzerland than Romansh.
Posted by edgar at October 24, 2005 10:49 AM