Words in my head when I awoke this morning:
Saturday, this word appeared out of nowhere, in the middle of the day:
Gymnosperm {aka Pine Cone}
It seems those soft & quiet P's are opening their mouths again...
...and they're not waiting for morning anymore.
A review of last week's words.
These words alit upon me just after after dusk:
Laphroaig .
It's the name of a lovely little distillery and its lovely little whiskey.
Laphroaig has somewhat of a reputation for tasting of peat and iodine.
Described as "a peat monster", it should not be confused with The Peat Monster.
Perlmutter
It's a family name, & I haven't been able to find out what it means.
{So, just for the heck of it, I used it in this wedding invitation here}.
There's an interesting Perlmutter at Berkley, who is known for his research in dark energy and its relation to our accelerating universe ; if I understand correctly, which inevitably I don't, his work involves using the red-shift of a particular kind of supernovae as a yardstick by which to measure this acceleration.
Bet even Shania would be hard~pressed not to be impressed by that one.
From Perl to Parry. This word waited for the usual dreamy~wakey morning~door. I watched it being written out in very old~fashioned hand~writing: parry.
If I collect enough of these words, will this all make sense someday?
More words that have occurred to me in the mornings:
Chaparral; popinjay; Passendale.
~ ~ ~
Also dreamt this: I was crossing over the border from the States into Canada. Customs was a check~out counter at a supermarket, and the cashier was the border guard.
For some reason, I had lied and described myself as the wife of an Israeli citizen; can't remember why, except that I felt that I had to... maybe I thought it would get me through Customs more quickly, or that it was more respectable for me to be a wife rejoining her husband than a woman travelling alone.
And the cashier/guard subtly questioned me, under the guise of making small~talk, on the places I was planning on visiting after returning to Canada, like maybe, hmmmmmNew York, maybe?
And I laughed nervously, and said, New York? That's more dangerous than Israel nowadays! I wouldn't even dream of going there, and tried desperately to think of what would be the New York equivalent of the West Bank & the Gaza Strip, so I could say something incisively poignant yet disarmingly witty...*
I was worried that they would be able to access my personal information and ascertain that I wasn't in fact married to anybody; but I decided that I was probably safe for the moment, and that despite all efforts we hadn't quite reached that Orwellian state of perfection yet if only thanks to everpresent human fallibility. {And besides, it's only a supermarket, right? How efficient could they be?}
The whole process was taking longer than I expected. The guard/clerk finally told me there was one last, small, fee to pay before I finally could go through {y'know, like one of those unexpected hidden fees you have to pay at the airport}. I gave her the {worn, blue, Canadian} five dollar bill & waited for my change.
Bu instead of giving me my change, she just held onto the bill; and she looked a bit abashed, as if she was trying to casually segue into another conversation but she couldn't think of anything to say. I looked around and saw that they had turned the lights off in the rest of the supermarket, and I was the only customer left.
I realized she was suspicious of me, but had nothing she actually could pin down; so she was using every delaying tactic in the book, hoping I might let drop something incriminating. She didn't want to be the one who let me get away.
I think I may have accused her of stonewalling me, but I can't remember; I think the dream may have ended there. I don't recall making it past Customs.
~ ~ ~
* This comparison of NY to the Holy Land was probably prompted by a clip {seen on Jon Stewart's Daily Show} of Madonna on her recent pilgrimage, giving a speech wherein she desribes Israel as being no more dangerous than New York.
What does my consciousness rest upon? It's words, all the way down...
A few days ago, the word was Terrapin. You know, Terrapin. Like the submarine. Or the war. Or The Great A'Tuin.
I didn't even know that I knew the word Terrapin before I woke up that morning...
Reminds me of Thomas King's collection of essays, The Truth About Stories. Each section begins with the retelling of the same story ~ the details are always different, but the punchline remains the same. It's the story about whether or not the world sits on the back of the turtle. The question comes up, but what is that turtle standing on? And the answer is, another turtle.
And that turtle?
Another turtle.
The story usually ends with something like, look, I know where you're trying to go with this ~ but it's turtles all the way down.
Sometimes, it's elephants instead of turtles, but the idea is the same.
As in, "you contumacious mammothrept".
~~ said by erudite misopede Samuel Marchbanks {aka Robertson Davies}
The P's, yes, the P's are back, and making up for lost time.
This morning, in my sleepy~wakey state, I dreamt I was skimming down through P~words on a dictionary page. My eyes came to rest on the word Putte, and that's when I awoke.
I was afraid it might turn out to be something very rude, and then I'd've felt obliged to censor myself & not blog about it; fortunately, it wasn't... strictly speaking... a rude word... it was only a peculiar one... which... sounds a lot like... um, a few other words that are rude...
{... oh, fine; okay, alright, I admit it: lately I've been feeling like I'm a poxy old doxy...}
And then I fell back to sleep & dreamt I read the phrase, Pasc{h}al sleeping blunder.
{Don't know what that has to do with being a poxy old doxy, unless it's referring to doxy in another sense.}
Y'know, I keep expecting these dreams to make some poetic sort of sense... after all, they seem so utterly dense with sense... but the penny hasn't dropped yet...
Non~figment~o~graphic.
I have no freakin' clue what it means. But at least I'm out of the P's.
This morning, it was "pig midden".
Not pack~rat midden, as one might have expected, but pig midden.
Maybe deep down inside I really want to be a Morris Dancer...
I envy people who have the ability to pluck the right word when they need it and place it neatly in a sentence where they need it, just so.
For me, it's like the language center of my brain is actually this little man with whom I have to play charades... okay, there's a word I want... it sounds like... first letter is... how many syllables? ... rhymes with... okay, it's got a certain letter in it... or, it ends with... it means something to the effect of...
And yet... when I wake up in the morning, there's quite often a ghost of a word on my lips... as if my subconscious has a Word~Of~The~Day feature.
Evidently my muse works best in the mornings.
The night before last, I woke up in the middle of the night unable to sleep; there was a word in my head, and the word was palimpsest. So there I was, looking up the word palimpsest in the dictionary at 3AM. Yup. Palimpsest.
This morning, the word was peripatetic. Looking it up nearly made me late for work.
If that wasn't peculiar enough, the even funnier thing is that I seem to be working my way through the P's, in no particular order.
When I first posted about this, the word was plimsoll. And pulegone. Since then I've had passerine, pissenlit, and the Peaceable Kingdom. And Noilly Prat. A week or so ago, I think the word may have been passe partout, or maybe even pousse~pierre, but I didn't make a note of it, and now I can't remember for sure.
Perhaps my subconscious is trying to tell me I'm really P~celtic, rather than Q~celtic...
Isn't it odd, the flotsam & jetson of the unconscious...
...right now I've "{Keep Away From} Runaround Sue" in my head. And I have no idea why. I don't even know all the lyrics, just a fraction of the refrain.
The other day, the word "Blodeuwedd" popped into my head; I had no idea what the word meant {turns out it's a beer}.
I think my Muse is broken. I ought to be getting plots & storylines, not just these dribs & drabs of words & song fragments from the sediment of my memory...
Dagnabit... where'd I leave that warranty?
Dreamt last night I was in Bride class.
It was a dress rehearsal for the final project, wherein five of us would actually go through the process of getting married. I was one of the five, chosen by lot.
Since we only had enough class time to marry five students, the rest of the women were to function as Bridesmaids. Thus, each Bridal Party comprised one Study Group.
As everybody in the class was, in theory, a Bride, everyone was in their own special wedding dress.
Looking at all the Wedding~Dress~clad Bridesmaids attending to their Wedding~Dress~clad Brides, I felt something was off...
It suddenly occured me that bridesmaids normally don't wear white; even wedding guests avoid wearing white, so as not to draw attention away from the real bride.
So I made some flippant remark to the Bride in the study group next to mine; I don't remember exactly what, but it was an observation that, technically, it was inappropriate for all of us to be wearing white. It may have even been a joke about how we're all essentially wearing the same dress.*
The emotional temperature in the room dropped. The other Bride to whom I'd spoken barely acknowledged the remark with a tight~lipped little glare, and then ignored me. The other study groups went about their preparations a little more quietly.
We had all entered into this mutual fiction of being Brides, and I had transgressed the suspension of disbelief; it was inexcusably bad~mannered of me, to have pointed out the truth.
~ ~ ~
* I may have paraphrased this quote from Rita Rudner:
In the morning twilight, during that slow transition from sleeping dream-state to waking conscious-state, submerged bubbles of words still trapped in the Lethe of my subconcious rise and pop to the surface of my fore-mind (like nitrogen from the blood of a diver, too quickly and I get the bends). Words that I didn't know that I knew. Words like fiat. Or inchoate. Or plimsoll. Or The Peaceable Kingdom. This morning the word was pulegone. Yup. I said Pulegone. Say it again: Pulegone.