Stumbling, mumbling, numbling, crumbling, crummy thoughts

Stumbling, mumbling, numbing, crumbling, crummy thoughts

So he wants to talk about the mystery of women. Ah, what does he know about women? (Just kidding, my friend. I took a liberty here. I hope I was granted a liberty.) Oh, I forgot. He once made a grand pronouncement that he was a champion in the love department. I didn’t know if the pronouncement was made in zest or jest. I suspected that it was made in earnest. Anyway, it was a gesture of self-confidence. Congratulations to him! I must confess that I don’t know anything about women except that they are mysterious and hard to figure out. The more I know about them, the lonelier I feel. That’s why I write poetry to alleviate my sense of existential loneliness. I would like to ask him question: What part(s) of the male anatomy the women find most sexually attractive and why? He must answer the question on his own without consultation with his wife and/or his numerous female friends. Come to think of it, the question should be extended to those males who are interested in this rather practical matter.

As regards the line from TCS, I find it beautiful and romantic and erotic since I interpret it as the girl’s wish for rain so her blouse would get wet and reveal her female form more transparently as she was heading home. I suspected what she hoped for was not a mere drizzle, but a downpour, so she would look like a Venus in the rain and all men in the vicinity would pant with unstoppable excitement.

Now, allow me to share with you in the paragraphs below, the words of Raymond Tallis, an emeritus professor of geriatric medicine and a poet and novelist and philosopher, from a book with a lofty title The Kingdom of Infinite Space. I sometimes would jump in and offer my own sophomoric comments

“Man”, Hazlitt said (citing Aristotle) ‘is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.” This quote resonates deeply with me because so many times I find myself both weeping and laughing at the same time over what women have done to me. I weep for my stupidity and naivety and I laugh over the absurdity of the thing called love. In the name of love, I have done so many stupid and irrational things. And I am sure the women, and there are so many of them, are laughing at me now, at my stupidity.

They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian and a writer. Well, I became a comedian and a writer of sorts. They are not laughing now. But I am laughing, hence this compendium of stumbling, mumbling, numbing, crummy, crumbling thoughts.

We laugh sometimes so that we shall not cry. And sometimes we laugh until we cry tears of laughter.

Speech is conscious of itself. When I speak, I know that of which I speak, why I speak, to whom I am speaking, what I hope to achieve through speaking, and that I am speaking.

Speech, which uses abstraction, says how things are, denies how they are, says how they might or ought to be and, most fundamentally, say that they are. It accompanies us from morning to night, from the end of infancy to the end of dotage. And when we are not speaking out loud, we are speaking to ourselves in the windless speech of thought. We even speak in dreams and dream that we are speaking.

We are explicit animals. The propensity to transform expired air into sounds that are used to refer to other things, to possibilities that may or may not be realized, presupposes an explicit sense of oneself, of the material world, and of other humans.

Speech is a compendious, elaborate, folded, oceanic expression of what is there. In saying what is there, we are saying something about ourselves: we say what we are; we exhibit ourselves, we put into circulation and image of ourselves. Speaking involves a mixture of air and history, breath and memory, beyond our consciousness. We make the language we have on loan our own possession, the most immediate and intimate expression of ourselves. The choice of words, the structure of our sentences, the games we play with accents and sounds, and so on—all mark the common language as our private property. Beyond the distinctive pattern of kindness or cruelty, helpfulness or obstructiveness, ignorance and knowledge, gloom and joy, there is a special inflection of the semantic breeze, an idiosyncratic mix of imitations and echoes that mark it out as ours.

Yet much of what others say bores us. Speech descends to wittering; and conversation is merely a “vocal competition in which the one who is catching his breath is called the listener.”

Now, I have to catch my breath. It’s your turn to speak. Please speak with sense and sensibility and beauty and music.

Now, you know why I am interested in language and languages. I am a talker, a maker of speech, not a speech-maker. I put words together and fall in love with their magic. Through talking and thinking aloud in words, I discovered my humanity and what a humanity it is!

I typed this “speech” today with confidence, without any sudorific anguish or anxiety. I came close to the line, but I didn’t cross it.

Wissai
June 8, 2009