I recently purchased The Red Book. As you probably know it is the reproduction of Carl Jung’s most personal work on what he calls the collective unconscious. The book is astoundingly beautiful. It is full of illuminations and calligraphic text.  I know this despite the fact that I have yet to open the cover.

I may have reservations about Jung’s theories and the concept of humanity that results but I nevertheless feel a sense of reverence for The Red Book.  Partly it is the sheer beauty of the drawings. When its publication was announced and I went surfing looking for material on it, deciding whether I would buy a copy, I stumbled across a few example illustrations. From the first I knew I was going to drop the (then) $200.

So I did. The day it came I was home ill. During one of my breaks between waves of pain, I went up to the front yard with the dog and found that UPS had been. I found the package (huge) propped up in the open laundry room. When the dog was done we all went inside.

I sat down with the box and just held it for a while. I knew what it was and I was kind of awed at its heft. Bodes well for the interior heft I am currently seeking, I thought.

I got the scissors and opened the outer box only to find a slightly smaller inner box that was free of markings. An indiscript brown package.

Jung’s work, as is true of many of today’s magicians and alchemists, roots in and through the mythic imagination. There’s usually no question when you’ve found yourself connected to the master narratives: hackles, goosebumps, shivers and other bodily signposts shudder into awareness.

What I felt holding the blank brown box were the trembling fingers of the great silence, the inhuman void that I have always known as the wyrd. When I feel that prickle, I take it as bodily recognition of something potentially and powerfully connective. I got a quick sense of a new aspen sucker wiggling above ground and beginning the transformation of what had been fundamentally barren ground.

Anyway after a while I opened the inner box and lifted out The Red Book. I just sat and paid attention to what I was feeling. It was immediately clear that I was not going to open the cover. I just stroked it. Reminded myself of Hagrid and his book of monsters, but that is what it felt like.  I had just met a new friend, one that I knew I would be able to communicate with and that would, in its turn, communicate with me.  I knew that I had met something fundamentally non-human and I was glad to get the chance to share space.

The power to be momentarily deeply, viscerally aware of sharing space, that’s the sacred thing, the magic that powers transformation. Even though this is a book of a man’s exploration of his inner narratives, symbols, and images, there is a network of dense mythic and narrative root-stuff under what shows and, like the aspen root network, it is longer lasting than the things that grow up into the air from its earthly source. How this works seems of some import, yet the question has not been answered in any satisfactory way. I don’t think archetypes float in some plane any more than I can get behind Potinus’ emanations — but the evolutionary biomechanics of it? Waaaaay to soon to say. Still, mythic magic works on us and if we create a bunch of new narratives to explain it, what of it? Isn’t the creative process what makes being human so much fun?

All these days later I have yet to open the book. I am waiting for my hands to feel like meeting the first page. But despite the physical stillness of the material book, it is already moving around in my cavernous interior. I have, for example, been thinking about what makes this reverence of mine for Jung’s book any different from my recent JW visitor’s reverence for the Bible.

I don’t think there is any real difference, except that I know the red book is a mythic representation of self and she, I’m afraid, thinks the black book is representative of something other than human reality. But all the bodily awareness, the perceptual reactions, the consequent sense of connection, all this is identical.

But wait a minute!  I just said that I felt that what lies underneath the red book and provides it’s power to provoke sensory reaction is fundamentally inhuman and yet I am aware that what Jung represents is the human universe (not the larger material one out of which we sprout).  The only way I can reconcile the two things (both of which I feel as fundamentally true), is to understand that there are parts of what shape human existence that are essentially non-human.

At the biological level this is easy to see. There are, for example, these fascinating little buggers called mitochondria. They are part of us, we cannot exist without them and neither can much of the rest of life (human or otherwise) on the planet. Yet they are not human. I mean even my finger nail isn’t really human despite the fact that it is part of me, but mitochondria are really not human. (Go read about how they work and their history if you don’t believe me.) So imagine getting a quick peak at the world from the point of view of the mitochondria. What it means to be human doesn’t have any meaning at that level. What it means to be human can only exist at a state of complexity far distinct from that of the lovely mitochondria. The two realms are invisible to each other with respect to meaning. Not that we can’t understand how they work but that is not the same thing at all as describing what it means to be mitochondria. In fact, that last bit is really a nonsensical phrase.

There are these limits beyond which what it means to be human just has no purchase. Meaning itself begins to dissolve at these margins. Sacred objects, poems, mythic narratives are those that allow us to approach the limits of intelligibility and experience for ourselves where in us the wyrd pushes. That’s what The Red Book is to me, a pathway to the thin outer reaches of the wyrd. It is a bridge to that realm where I experience the fundamental meaningless of the world that supports me and paradoxically, it is by that very experience, that the potency of my power to generate meaning for myself is made evident. At the edge of death, life is the most precious.

So both human and inhuman — when, through the gifts of the evolved brain and body we reach into that dynamo that Jung called the collective unconscious we get zapped by the inhumanity of our origins. Whether through Jung’s “active imagination” or any of the other myriad perceptual techniques, we seem to connect to aspects of ourselves that have  a longer evolutionary history than has this current set of properties and skills that we define as “what it means to be human.” The contact of realms is always electric and if one is the studious type, sometimes transformative.

Contemporary alchemy. The transformation of awareness. That’s what Jung offers and make no mistake, this capacity humans have to make meaning out of drawings and words is our most sacred magic. The bodily shiver that comes with the contact with the other, even if the other is actually as aspect of self, that’s the instinct for the sacred. And one day, soon probably, I’ll get to open the cover and step across the threshold to the meeting ground.

Cool.

This video is called Small Pleasures. It’s lovely. The narrator’s voice alone is like a warm bath.

via Wimp

If you remember, the idea is that phenomenology is using the language in ways that confuse some (most?) readers and, hence, contribute to the accusations of meaninglessness. I want to see if, by approaching words individually, I can come to understand what Gadamer and his compatriots experience when reading poetry.

Here again is the sentence from part 1 of this post:

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

One important word in the sentence is “thing.”

Dictionary.com defines “thing.”

thing

–noun

1.

a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimateobject.

2.

some entity, object, or creature that is not or cannot bespecifically designated or precisely described: The stick had abrass thing on it.

3.

anything that is or may become an object of thought: thingsof the spirit.

4.

things, matters; affairs: Things are going well now.

5.

a fact, circumstance, or state of affairs: It is a curious thing.

6.

an action, deed, event, or performance: to do great things;His death was a horrible thing.

7.

a particular, respect, or detail: perfect in all things.

8.

aim; objective: The thing is to reach this line with the ball.

10.

things,

a.

implements, utensils, or other articles for service: I’llwash the breakfast things.

b.

personal possessions or belongings: Pack your things andgo!

12.

a living being or creature: His baby’s a cute little thing.

I’ve cut some aspects of the definition out but this is enough to see two basic attributes of the word “thing.” The first is that it is a complicated word with many shades of meaning. The second is that even when “thing” refers to a life-form (item 12), it nevertheless refers to an object, in this case the baby. “Thing” in English refers very much to the objective world. Definitions 1 through 3 are the most common ways in which we understand something referred to as a “thing.”

The intensity of “thing”‘s meaning baggage is evident when we discuss animals we love. Technically a beloved pet is a thing. To be correct in English I would say “It ate its dinner already.” I don’t of course. I say “She already ate.” Calling someone an “it” is dehumanizing and quite insulting. That’s one reason I usually refer to the divine mythological “father” as “it” and not as “he.” “Are you telling me it killed all life on earth ’cause it was upset at the morals it gave us? Radical, dude.” Insulting, even without the obvious sarcasm. Using “it” for a life form impels disdain into the sentence. It implies an existence as an object as opposed to an existence as a subject.

Yet when Bruns speaks about “thing” in his introduction to Gadamer on Celan this isn’t what he means at all.

The following are from pages 20, 23 and 24 of Gadamer on Celan.

Something is thing-like if it is outside the alternatives of subject and object.

A thing is “set apart, elsewhere, outside not what we have made our own but that which is self-standing and alone…”

Things are strange when they are no longer “subject to our concepts and categories, when they escape us.”

The conceptual device that is subject/object gives meaning to “thing” in its normal use, and it is what Bruns and other phenomenologists are trying to get out from behind. “Things” are radically not-human in the sense that they are outside the  limits our language/concepts place on the world. That is, there is an apple that is the concept of “apple” pointing to the world object that tastes lovely with a bit of cheese and then there is the world thing which fundamentally is not captured by the word “apple.” This world-thing is what is outside the world as seen through the lens of the subject/object conceptual framework. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?

The best I can do at the moment is provide what I think is an example of such “outsideness” in action. Most people have had the experience of staring at a word they have used for most of their lives and then suddenly the word is alien, strange. Watermelon, for example. Normally it is only a signifier of that heavy, sweet, green skinned fruit synonymous with summer. The word is transparent or instrumental to what it signifies. The word in itself disappears into the world of what it points to. But sometimes there is that odd thing that happens and suddenly, the word fractures. W A T E R M – E L O Π bursts apart and the letters, the shapes, the history if its existence comes to the forefront and what it signifies has to share the stage with its carrier. Odd feelings are triggered when this happens. Meaning surfaces, but not linguistic meaning. That is, older, pre-linguistic sources of meaning close in on awareness. This kind of “meaning” moves in us like whales just below the surface of the ocean’s skin.

Poetry makes a habit of trying to make this feeling happen. It tries to make language visible again, tries to trigger these bodily, non-conceptual sources of meaning. So one of the things I am being asked to do when reading Gadamer, Celan or Bruns is to feel for the world-object, but further, I am being asked to see words as “things” themselves. Personally I find the first request much simpler than the second. The implication of the words as “things” in Bruns’ sense is that they have an existence in the world apart from humanity. Perhaps as memes exist? Not sure yet.

Here is a sentence:

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

This is from a book called Gadamer and Celan “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays. Page 20 if you want to look it up.

Does it make sense?

It’s no good that howl of incomprehension. It bears little weight especially if the ‘plaint is something that comes from the singular,”it means nothing to me therefore it has no meaning.”

More sturdy is the hundred-voice howl. L’élégance du hérisson: what? The mulitudes complaining about  the incomprehensibility of this sequence of letters bears some scrutiny. But if the examination shows that the complainers are all non French speakers then a different kind of examination is required. It’s not that “l’élégance du hérisson” is meaningless, it’s that it is meaningless in this situation. What needs to be studied is not the letter combination and its claim to meaning but, amongst other things, the limitations of the assessors’ assumptions about the nature of meaning.

Still, the fact that most howlers against phenomenology appear to be kin to our non-French judges does not mean phenomenology is in fact sensible in any way other than the one in which Rorschach blots are sensible.

So does the sentence I started with mean anything? Of course it must since the author who wrote it is no dummy, and if nothing else, it means something to M. Bruns. Yet, so what. If it doesn’t mean anything to you (and it didn’t to me either) then what to do about it? Here’s the thing: it might be more profitable to assume that Bruns is speaking a language you only think you recognize. The only other option is to close the book, but then communication cannot occur and I prefer understanding, even if it comes at the cost of learning a new “language” – something at which I do not excel.

I think the key to understanding Phenomenology in some way that goes beyond the individual psychology and cultural orientation of its practitioners is learning to re-encode the words we think we understand. For example, what does “thing” actually mean to Brun? That sort of re-engagement is what I propose to attempt on my own behalf.

The question about whether Phenomenology has a “language” of its own is something I want to answer because the poet in me is attracted to sentences like “Imagine things freeing themselves.” Yet I am sceptical. I mean, really, things “freeing” themselves? How can one understand that in a way that doesn’t provide “mind” to “things” and thereby cast the universe in the image-shadow of all that is human?

So, more on this in these pages as time goes by. I am on a quest.

A short while ago I had a dream that prophesied some potential problems to come. And what’s true is that one of those “whales” from the dream smacked me nearly senseless as it went by only a few days after I had the dream. I won’t bore you with the details, but what may be of interest is how I cope with such things as “prophecy” given my atheism.

I know enough to realize that while dream images may be random firings of the brain, so, essentially is much else we experience.  The point is what the brain does with those electrical and chemical impulses not just how they originate. There are many theories about how we achieve meaning and while many are interesting, I lean toward embodied cognition. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines embodied cognition this way:

The general theory contends that cognitive processes develop when a tightly coupled system emerges from real-time, goal-directed interactions between organisms and their environment; the nature of these interactions influences the formation and further specifies the nature of the developing cognitive capacities.

In other words, as Wittgenstein said, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”

(I would add another phrase to make it: “The human body (as it comes to be through trying to accomplish things in the world) is the best picture of the human soul. Not as catchy of course, but more accurate.)

This idea is where I begin thinking about how dreams accomplish meaning. Because language and concepts are so blazingly important in our recent development, they drown out much of our older forms of communication. Things like “my skin is crawling” or “my gut tells me no” are messages now largely consigned to the realm of spirit and intuition. They have become all but inaudible in the time it has taken to move from Erectus to Sapiens. We have developed technologies to listen for those “messages” – meditation and the like – and now, given our conceptual dependence, we create stories to explain their origins. Since those zaps of insight often feel as if they are not like us (i.e. rational and conceptual), those “communications” are often thought to originate in the outside-us — in the spiritual world. I understand the impulse to consign the conceptually unknown to outside-us but I think it unnecessary to posit another world when our own will do as an explanation.

Our bodies, living and developing in the world provides enough of an explanatory net.  Where do dreams come from? The bodily (non-conceptual) systems as they co-develop with the larger set of (non-conceptual) environmental systems.

The body is the model (think of it as a biological non-conceptual framework) which guides the activity of organizing those random impulses into meaningful episodes.  Impulses fired because of events in the body in interaction with its environment, are organized into packets based on past experiences. Like rain flowing down a dry stream bed, where a particular rain drop falls may be random, but the pattern the water creates as it moves across the earth is not. Because those body/brain firings originate and are released into a fairly tightly organized set of pathways, many of which result in (and have been caused by) meaning construction of the waking mind, it seems silly to assume that dreams would not have just as much meaning potential as other waking mental events.

The last two days in the archives have furnished me with several treasures. One of them is a book published in 1930 called Red Heroines of the Northwest by Byron Defenbach. The second of three parts is dedicated to “The Dorion Woman.” Otherwise known as Marie Dorion, she was a 25 year old woman that traveled with 2 children from Oklahoma  to Missouri to northern Wyoming all the way to the Pacific. Along the way she had another child – he died 2 days into his life. Madame Dorion ended up near Salem Oregon where she died in 1850 at the age of about 67.

If you read about this woman on the net and in the texts produced about her, what you get is often the bones of the Astoria trek to the mouth of the Columbia, and a lot about her apparently abusive husband, and the stuff about her bearing her third son on the trail, but mostly what you get is the author’s view of what all this means. “Marie” makes a perfect canvas for our views about women and the qualities we assign them because so little is known about who she, in fact, was. I mean we don’t even know her actual name. She is called Dorion Woman because her husband’s paternal name was “Dorion” and she was his woman.

We know this, at least in part, because of Washington Irving and his “Tragical Story Told by the Squaw of Pierre Dorion.” Much emphasis is given in Irving’s account to her “presence of mind and force of character” and certainly her survival seems, from the story, due in part to her attention to her household duties. This is why, for example, she had all the supplies that she would need in the near future if she and her children were to survive the winter. The story she tells, and that Irving would relay, about the fate of the Astoria party is what made her memorable to the public but no one, it seems, thought to ask her name.

Time tells much about women’s interpretors. Irving published his story in 1836. Defenbach published his in 1929 0r 30.  Both accounts pay attention to Pierre Dorion, Irving calling him the “hybrid interpretor” as a way of describing his bi-racial heritage. Irving doesn’t mention the drunkenness as far as I know. There is a section when he is describing the French boatmen and how they lift their flagging spirits – by song, nary a drop of spirit is mentioned. But at that time alcohol might have been seen as a problem with respect to trading with Indians (their abode being the destination of the boatmen, trade goods being the cargo) and granted as a necessity to those water-haulers whose spirits needed lifting, but no one had come up with the idea of denying it to civilized white folk yet.

But by Defenbach’s time prohibition and its ideas had taken its toll on the interpretive mind of writers. In his story much attention is paid to Pierre Dorion’s use of alcohol.  However, there is still a touch of admiration: “When sober,” Defenbach says “the stalwart young half-breed was a fellow of recognized ability as a trapper and trader. He had worked for Choteau and other Americans who were beginning to resist the monopoly of the fur trade by the Hudson’s Bay and other British concerns.”  A drunk, yes, but he could hunt, trap, shoot and, on top of that, was on the right side politically. But when it comes to Marie…

(Pierre’s) proved himself faithful and serviceable. His occupation called for almost constant travel up and down the Big River, and in these journeyings he usually dragged the squaw with him. Nor was this his only encumbrance. The couple’s first son, the sturdy Baptiste, was born in 1806, and two or thee years later another lad arrived at the tepee. This latter was a frailer type of boy, with snake-like eyes and a mouth that extended from ear to ear; they named him “Paul.”

To these two children the Woman clung with the savage devotion of a mother-wolf, bringing them up after the Indian fashion. There was no discipline, the few instructions given having to do only with the children’s physical requirements. The only virtues inculcated were those of fortitude and courage, and even these traits were warped into ferocity and thirst for blood. Such ideals as those of morality, gratitude, truthfulness, unselfishness and honesty were not sought to be conveyed by the Woman to her children, primarily because she had no such ideals herself or any conception of them. The first precepts she instilled into those young hearts were those of cruelty, murder, and rapine.

Jeez.

Shortly after this little exploration of the Woman’s character and moral rectitude (compare Irving’s and Defenbach’s ideas about the ideal woman), he talks about Pierre’s accidnetal fall into the trip to the Pacific, which he would not survive but his wife and children would. This fall, the story leads us to believe, came because of alcohol.

The processes of evolution have never produced anything more averse to solitude than is whiskey, even a quart of it…Pierre found himself surrounded by, or perhaps one might better say surrounding, a whole flock of quarts. He passed through alternating stages of hilarity, amiability, deep melancholy, and extreme irritability. Several days and nights passed in the enjoyment or suffering of these various emotions.

(Aside: the use of the word “evolution” adds a nice little sparkle from the conceptual bounty that is Social Darwinism – also something alive and well during Defenbach’s time. I wonder if he was a eugenicist?)

What follows is a rendition of what Defenbach thinks happened when a drunk, angry and now without the salary due him by the Spaniard, Manuel Lisa, and includes an almost jovial boxing match between husband and wife. The outcome is that Pierre Dorion finds himself working for Lisa and having to cart his wife and two sons along for the ride.

Ultimately, Defenbach (nor Irving for that matter) doesn’t say much about Marie Dorion but what he inadvertently says about how he sees the world is enormous. Apart from the idea of what women are, there is the purchase place for blame. It’s not surprising that in the late 1920s when Defenbach was probably writing this text, that alcohol got much of it. Poor old Pierre, a noble sort with his rustic trade, but reduced to dragging his baggage around, getting hobbled by a treacherous Spaniard, a snake-eyed son and by that morally bankrupt Woman. Think what he could have made of himself if wasn’t for that demon rum!

meh

Would that there was someone who would haunt Oregon’s historical archives for a more accurate view of the woman. I haven’t had time for that yet, so perhaps it already exists. I’ll have to check into it.

When I cook eggs for breakfast generally I prefer them coddled. That is, cooked without their shell in water just below boiling point. Where I live most people call this type of egg “poached.” Although I am sure both words can (and are) used interchangeably, I think they really carry different instructions. When I poach fish, for example, the water actually reaches a very slow boil or what this woman calls a slow simmer.

When I coddle eggs I don’t use a pipkin or a coddler, I just gently pour out the egg onto a shallow saucer and then when the water is the right temperature slide the egg into the hot water where the water meets the side of the pan. This way the egg stays together and doesn’t shred into the water making it all cloudy and the egg inedible.

I prefer the word “coddle” to “poach.” It has something to do with the sound itself, but also the words are resonant with meaning.  They go off in my head in ways that create different sensations.  ”Coddle” is something that evokes warm-bliss-raisin-toast-and-butter feelings.  ”Poached” is a too-long-at-the-beach-tight-face sort of word for me. I mean, really, how do you think the salmon feels?

So with my toast and tea I am having coddled eggs. It makes me feel better, even if while writing this I have forgotten to check the water and my egg is just a touch ragged.

You may (or may not) be aware of the discovery of many new planets outside our solar system but it has become something of a hot topic.  Universe (that cool blog that recently moved over to ScienceBlogs) had an interesting take on the idea of scale which included the discovery, and  Samuel Arbesman posted an interesting article on what he calls mesofacts that also included the discovery.  He’s right that some things change at a rate that means we just don’t notice them, even things that are important to our continued survival. I blame evolution. We are primed to notice sudden changes —  like the panther that seems suddenly really, really interested in our presence in her and her kits’ personal space. Those kinds of changes make or break our chances for immediate survival and so have taken the lead in our bodies ranking system for what is going to cause a sudden behavioural modifcation (you know like the fight or flight thingy). Often the slow changes (like in climate) do not trigger the hormonal stimulants which jump start behavioural change. After all, a bad harvest or two? We are omnivores, the barley is low? Go eat millet, or the goat, or last year’s walnuts, they last for a long time, even if bitter, and then there’s dandelion greens, it would take a pretty major cataclysm to wipe those suckers out. It is hunger, another kind of hormonal trigger, that causes us to seek out alternate food sources. What it doesn’t do is make us stop acting like giant earth-predators and unbalancing the larger biosphere. That is reason’s role, but it is a newby and apparently not up to the job yet.

As Claire Evans (the writer behind Universe) said, it really is about scale.  She thinks that we are about to experience that wrench that comes with the realization that we are not, in fact, the scale against which the universe developed. And of course what the universe’s non-human scale means is that the things that are most critical to us, the things we think matter the most, almost certainly have no corollary in the vast reaches of all-that-is.

Things like language, mind, awareness, these are human things in that they are the consequence of the evolution of our bodies and the ensuing social change the evolution of our bodies and brains has stimulated (and of course of any other group of creatures that might evolve toward the same evolutionary “goal” of a proactive intelligence capable of rapid learning as a member of a deeply social species). There are so many philosophers that have talked of our capacity for awareness as if it is an attribute worthy of universal acclaim, as if, at bottom, awareness must be a fundamental principle of the universe like mass or the speed of light. This is the power of the meso-world on us. Call it middle earth or midgaard, it is a fantasy universe where things are in fact human-sized and human oriented. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the universe, we do not actually live in middle earth.

Now’s a good time to go watch a short video called The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds.

And that’s just starting with the formation of the earth.  We barely register. In fact the only reason we do is because the creator of the video is human and probably thinks our existence matters. But to be fair I suppose we have made an impact as far as the earth is concerned. Well at least for this particular set of life forms that may well suffer extinction earlier than would have happened without our presence. But extinctions are a regular part of earth history so even this is nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Can you imagine a video “The Evolution of the Solar System in 60 Seconds“? Or “The Evolution of the Universe…”? We wouldn’t be a blip. I mean even the formation of the earth would barely register in the second imagined film.

I sometimes wonder what philosophy would be if we could get outside our middle-earth mindset. And teleology without a human orientation?  That would be fun.  Maybe the universe has been evolving all along toward the mechanisms that make a three toed sloth capable of enormous body temperature variation. Or maybe it is all about bioluminescence. Or the cephlapod ink sac. Or maybe life was just an accident on the way to limestone and the karst lands and their elemental denizens.

Wouldn’t that be fun? — to find out we do inhabit middle earth but that it was created in the image of a set of caves carved by the relationship between water, CaCO₃ and CaMg(CO₃)_2.

Personally I’d rather find out there is no meaning than find out I was an extra in someone else’s drama. That way I can make my own meaning, decide for myself what it all means, and then change my mind depending on how I feel that day. Much more fun, and in keeping with my middle-earth mind.

I mean, really, meaning?  Another of those human qualities that say nothing about the universe, whether big or small. But what else can guide us if not our quest for meaning?

Facts you say? Posh. Tish.

(Thanks Shannon for the pic.)

This seems to have come from engrish and if you have a peek over there you will find some howlers. Many of them have a sexual component almost certainly not intended by the product’s or service’s advertiser.  It makes me wonder what those fortune cookies really say. But really, isn’t that the real power of language and its relationship to meaning construction. All of a sudden what is visible are some of the deep webs which bind words together with the fine thread of categorical relationships and it makes you look around for other previously invisible things. If you think about the words “poisonous” and “rubbish” you can see how they really do fit together and if you work at it even a little you can stagger backwards into meaning-folds of the original language and take a guess at how “poisonous” is used more generally.  In other words, it gives us a glimpse of the connotations of “poisonous” in another’s context and by doing that, it makes temporarily visible our own contexts. It’s the difference, the dissonance, between the two that makes this funny.

Now that I find interesting.

To be honest it has been one long party since the opening ceremonies. I’m never downtown later than 11 so I don’t get the experience those who’ve been drinking so much that by midnight they turn into pickled pumpkins with fists but the Vancouver Police Department get to. So they tried to slow up the flow of the variously flavoured magic potions by closing liquor stores downtown at 7pm.

Here’s their second press release to announce a second night of early closures.  Bottom line:

The 7:00 p.m. closing time on Saturday night aided police efforts to curb flagrant liquor consumption and public intoxication seen in the Granville Entertainment District Friday night.

News 1130 is a local source for this kind of information, for those who don’t want to keep up with the media releases on the VPD site. However, it seems as if their editorial staff is either a little busy or someone is having a poetry moment. Here’s how News 1130 reported the above line:

They say the 7 p.m. closure on Saturday helped curb ‘fragrant liquor consumption and public intoxication’ as seen in the Granville Entertainment District, Friday night.

Please attend. In the first block quote the word is “flagrant.” In the second it is “fragant.”

Curb fragrant liquor consumption.

See what I mean. Definitely something going on there with the editor. Maybe cutting back on the booze and having a hard time of it?

(Thanks ittel for spotting this delightful lexemic confusion.)