My Personal Thesaurus

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Initially I saw it as a color wheel for words. No doubt versions of it exist both online and on paper. Standard stuff, I imagine, in creative writing courses. Specific guides for writers and poets. A quick glance at Google reveals reams of candidates divided by age, discipline, audience and intent. But there is this problem. When you look at a classic color wheel for example, they all look the same: red across from green, yellow across from purple, blue across from orange. The whole Roy G Biv dominated world that tells us what colors “should” maintain “proper” relationships with other colors. Now go look at a sunset. Hmm. Seems nobody told the sunset about the color wheel. Every color on the wheel, and seemingly many that aren’t quite there, are slap bang up against each other and somehow it just comes out awesome.

I suspect that we would find the same phenomenon at work in the world of writing. The truly creepy world of AI that mimics literary greats or discerns an author from a few pithy snippets notwithstanding, I cling to the belief that the miracle of words on a page mystically link author and reader; that subtext, the heartbeat felt between the lines equals, and sometimes exceeds, exchanges born in the here and now.

To step sideways for a moment, I am currently composing what will be my last syllabus for a communication course at NC State University, where I have taught since 1981. The course is an online course, and in the syllabus I break several rules that have slipped into being for the online environment. Primary among them is the notion that videos should be brief and should not substitute for lectures. Not only are my online videos long - often over an hour - but they blatantly are the lectures. Even more egregious, they are sometimes lectures pulled from previous semesters - a few from years ago. Which brings us back to the motivation for My Personal Thesaurus.

Doing a live lecture to a large class is clearly live theater. Being an undergraduate theater major myself that never bothered me, except for the fact that you carried all those “live theater” anxieties with you when you went off stage. “Damn. I have done that bit on the influence of the Western on early film better.” “Did I make the distinction between Edison and Tesla clear enough?” One of the real benefits of online teaching is that I can, and shamelessly do, go back and pull what I hope were the days I hit a lecture just right, and paste that lecture into the current syllabus. And yes, I do warn the students that they will be seeing a number of “golden oldies,” during the course and that guy with varying haircuts etc., is really just different versions of me.

Back to the Personal Thesaurus; I have been doing what passed, for me, as creative writing for more than 60 years. The earliest publication, as I have mentioned here on the Wall before, was a poem in the school newspaper when I was in either 5th or 6th grade in The American International School in Vienna, Austria circa 1960 or '61. Thing is, I hope I have gotten better since then. But nowadays often when I finish a piece, prose or poetry, and think about sharing it with you here on the Wall I am often beset by those “live theater” anxieties: "I think I said that better before!" "What was that word?"

Ah, yes. "What was that word?” And hence my personal thesaurus. It is not as if I want to go back and steal a “better line” from a previous post - but a better word? Sure! Why not? So, I start this personal thesaurus. The current organizational structure is random. And that is a good thing. Something more structured may evolve, but I think I will resist it. After all I’m not really after a color wheel here - rather, more a sunset.

Harmony

Whippoorwill 

Dappled

Serenity 

Moonlight

Tranquility 

Enlightenment 

Intimacy 

Transcendence 

Gentility

Gentle

Silky

Silken

Enfolded

Thunder

Transfixed

Starlight

Shaded

Soft

Animation

Animated

Drowsy

Dozing

Dream

Dreaming

Dreamy

Smooth
Suspended 

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Weaving a Narrative in Our Personal Spacetime

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Back in the late 1980s communication scholar Walter Fisher gracefully wove together his own and other’s observations into the assertion that “we are the people of the story.” It is a theory that has stood the test of time well in the swirling, competitive arena of communication scholarship where the newest, shiniest perspective tends to garner the “buzz.” For those of you who want to explore the “narrative paradigm” in more detail, look up either Fisher or his intellectual forerunner Kenneth Burke in Google or Google Scholar. Fascinating reading but admittedly sprouting in some pretty tall cotton. After all, they did need to get published.  But in this post, while admitting that some of my rambling can be traced to the works of those to illuminaries, I am going to try to stick close to the third tenet of Distilled Harmony: Distill Complexity.

So here we go.  As we move from infancy to aged, we live one intricate story. Many times it seems that it is a story whose evolving plots and interweaving characters could put Game of Thrones to shame.  But, no, it is really just us.  Occasionally, from some high point or major crossroads in that story, we glance back over our shoulder and see the countless tributaries of our narrative Mississippi twisting and turning through the forests, wheatfields and bayous of our lives until, lo' and behold, there it is, running between our feet. We weave the fabric of that story from our beliefs and behaviors. Our choices. We often explain those choices to ourselves and others through a variety of symbolic narratives - these days often through the Internet, Facebook, emojis, etc., that whole constantly shifting panorama of the digital delta. The dominant foregrounded narrative is what we consider our “real” life.

However that “most obvious” narrative - the Mississippi between our feet - isn’t the “whole story.” Elsewhere here on the Wall I have toyed with the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics. That view of reality asserts that every time we chose a path down the Mississippi, other versions of ourselves floated off up the Ohio, the Arkansas, or somehow even found their way over to the Nile and the Danube. 

Today I am particularly focused on the choices we make when we create narratives that  are admittedly fictional. The often playful narratives that spring from our imaginations - fanciful depictions of other “unlived” stories in our narrative. The would-have-beens, might-have-beens, could-of-beens, should-have-beens, of our narrative river. These imagined narratives are our art. We imagine a whole universe of stories that might have unfolded from the roads not taken. In these artistic imaginings we become the puppet master, deciding the script, motivation, and actions of all the players. We can even create the players themselves, from “whole cloth” as it were.

Of course, there is no “reality” against which those imaginings are measured, so they become their own reality. And as we give them life in any of a variety of forms they become literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, etc. Accepting that multifaceted notion of our personal narrative requires no great intellectual or creative stretch. Two-sides of a coin, mask of tragedy, mask of comedy, bass clef, treble clef - we do that all the time. Real world, world of the imagination; no big deal unless we start to conflate the two allowing our imagined narratives to infringe upon the harder edges of the real world inhabited by others. Wander too far down those paths and the guys with the butterfly nets show up.

But perhaps we should not be quite so hasty. The many worlds version of quantum mechanics would seem to allow for just such a conflation of the “real” and the “imagined.” According to my, no doubt incomplete, understanding of this aspect of quantum mechanics, our choices in the “real” world do determine the immediate course of our existential Mississippi, but they not simultaneously render the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Nile, etc., fictitious. Those “rivers not taken” continue to flow along carrying alternative versions of ourselves into alternative futures nestled within our personal spacetime.

Hence it occurs to me that our personal "quantum narrative" is a tapestry woven from all the lived, and the imagined narratives that reside in our spacetime, including those narratives that are the ‘unchosen siblings’ of those other lived and imagined narratives.

All of which brings me to this assertion, which may well form the opening of another, even stranger Wall post:

Spacetime can be envisioned as a onion of infinite narrative layers each part of which is contiguous with every other part. And, it would seem to follow that that which we define generally as “enlightenment" is the ability to sense, and/or make sense of, those contiguous points.   

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Prayerful Profanity

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We have always had a complicated relationship with profanity. Consider early cartoons. A character would drop an anvil on his or her foot, and a text bubble appears overhead: “#**!!&#!” The message is clear, the character is swearing, but you, gentle reader, must be protected from the actual words. “Oh, my gosh and golly!” or even “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”  

This semantic pussyfooting stems from the fact that not all profanity is the same. In fact, I would assert that it is a rather large genre of human expression. Unfortunately, we have all been exposed to what I think of as “casual profanity” f* this and f*in'  that, or that SOB and those SOBs did this or that. Long ago a dear friend suggested that “casual profanity” stemmed either from linguistic laziness when one lacked the intellectual drive to consider a more specific bon mote, or worse, was an indication that one’s vocabulary was itself insufficient to the task of expressing elegant negativity. I have come to agree.  

Additionally, there is “affiliative profanity.” This type of profanity draws upon the same lexicon, but employs it to express affiliation, belonging to an admired group. It is most common among young adolescents and their older brothers and sisters attempting to demonstrate the current version of what was once defined as “cool” or “in” or, to reach back even further, “hip.” It is also quite common among performing artists attempting to market their own version of “cool-in-hip” to a market increasing dominated by the aforementioned youngsters.  And it spirals from performer to audience and back again. Sort of a linguistic carousel. 

But, I would like to propose a third major category of profanity, and this one strays a bit beyond the more common varieties: “prayerful profanity.” Just play along with me for a minute. Say you are approaching a sharp bend in a rural two-lane highway and as you round the bend - whoa! there is a huge truck passing another car and coming straight at you! It swerves back into its own lane seconds before hitting you head on! Or perhaps you are crossing a busy intersection, and your friend grabs your arm, jerking you back just in time to keep you from being pancaked by a city bus. The exhortations that escape you in those situations, moments when you truly believe you just cheated death, may indeed be those drawn from the vocabulary of both casual and affiliative profanity. However they may also include phrases from what I call “prayerful profanity,” or what others might call “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” 

Consider this; in those life-or-death situations we are doing anything but “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” We have never been more intensely prayerful, never more truly hopeful that we are not taking the Lord’s name in vain, but rather are seriously seeking some kind of immediate divine intervention. I’m not really sure where I am going with this, maybe just re-emphasizing the old saw that there are no atheists in foxholes. But maybe it goes a bit further, maybe I am suggesting that those “spontaneous spiritual exhortations” are not really profane, but instead possibly sacred. I read Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and The Profane when a young undergraduate and while my recollections have no doubt faded over the years, I don’t think he would object to my asserting that there is far more than just a seeming oxymoron in the notion of “prayerful profanity.” Perhaps such prayerful profanity is actually a window to spirituality, a moment of insight that can be further explored as an avenue to the sacred. To steal a concept from theoretical physics, maybe prayerful profanity is a kind of “wormhole” between the sacred and the profane. Something we might want to consider after our roadside near death experience - once our heart rate returns to something approaching normal. 

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