THE ONE IN WHICH I LOOK AT EVERYTHING THE WRONG WAY
(And to not think of you... is impossible...)
Come over here. Let us make a bruiseless dinner party together & invite none of our friends. I think everyone has just one secret they would like to share tonight. For mine, we have to go back to the start.
We (me, you, harry) came to know the world not by things (nouns) but how things tasted on the tongue of yesterday (adjectives) (it is only when this taste lingers we feel propelled to tell others about it the following day... hence... poetry... )
Long before there were lies
there were adjectives.
1) And that, of course, was the beginning of beautiful, hopeless, wet & dangerous Sunday mornings with my lover. Sunday mornings as pleasant as corn. 2) And that, of course, was the beginning of Sunday mornings with my lover.
Can you see the factual sinew beneath my metaphor? Does it taste to you like liquour (1) ? But, my friend, where is the fun in mere recollection (2) ?
Who says the world began in nouns? That from the first day of life, rocks and trees had no feelings? Who’s to say they didn’t care about growing tall? & felt anger at how the fish began to walk and they did not ? & you mean to tell me they had no colour, no shape, no texture? & that only verbs came after, uninvited to the dinner party; the rocks began falling & trees dripping but nothing else? That is, until...
Adjectives turn up to my dinner party on the sleazy arm of a poet...
Because, what if I wanted us to meet under an unheated willow tree. The adjective is how you know I mean that single one in the shade — over there — behind the lilac bush. There’s this line in an unpublished poem of mine about a strong man. Strong is how I know which one he is. It’s the only way I know I’m talking about the one that is mine. Otherwise I would get awfully confused.
The night smells like snow as I walk to the grocery store to prepare for my dinner party. And I almost believe I could start over again. But first. Let me tell you about adjectives a little…. please. A slanted begging. The angle before a noun becomes this rotten noun.
LATIN: adiectivum — that which is thrown toward.
A sideways offering. A word leaning on another like a child leans into the hips of a woman & they are both watching unburnt sheep. They thought of an adjective as grammar’s barnacle. No soul of its own. Leeching off a rock. They were wrong. I tell them to take the stupid suit off and leave my dinner party.
GREEK: ἐπίθετον (epítheton) — the thing placed upon.
A wreath. A smear of copper. They called Helen ἐπιθετικὴ — meaning, perhaps, not beautiful, but beautiful-as-described. Placed upon. Like cold chicken on a dish. Unheated-as-desired. They were also wrong, but less wrong, so they can stay an hour but as soon as I bring my expensive bottle of red out, they must leave.
OLD ENGLISH: to ædicgan — to speak forth, to add on.
“Add” is too tidy for me. Too mathematical. What they meant was: to disturb.
Colour bleeds. The shape of the horizon hesitates. A red horse isn’t just a horse; it’s running away from the chalk, who will write his myth on stone. Cold stone. Dead stone. I don’t like this one, either, but they may have a little wine.
5:49AM – Up all night thinking of sleeping with you, in the shade of baby birds, and the noise they make which is hunger, or loneliness, or perhaps these are the same thing. Art is abortive. A man begins the night with passion and the woman with play, and by the end of the night, these have swapped. Art loves in colours too specific for the paintbox. I want to have my hands full of you. And to stop hiding under my shirt.
What was that?
I said what are you doing under there?
I SAID I JUST need a little privacy… To think…
What else is new before I continue with grammar dinner party. Sunny Sam has been playing basketball with sore knees. Neat Nick keeps adding words to his novel only to take them away. I drank a long black with Forty-Years-Old Frank Lord who said “self publish using money from benefits & leave yr books around the city” & crippling cigarettes have become a fifth finger to me (not counting the thumb).
Consider the field of lilies from the point of view of two people making love. Impossible without colour. Eat the colour. Vomit. Show it to me. let me
Taste it… Adjectives taste like… raisin bread…
You told me in your last letter to be more clever. Yes. I know what you did there. You beast. You unhurried beast.
SUMERIAN: 𒀀𒂊𒁀 — (A), (E), (BA),
Now THIS one is interesting. Sumerians didn’t use adjectives the way we do—they carved meaningful glyphs next to things (like sheep) to say, in their own way. Words show that they were fat, holy, the kind that don’t cry when slaughtered.
The word itself is more sound-based than meaning-based: translates as : glyphs carved beside the sheep to indicate ‘quality’ OR IN OTHER WORDS… AN ADJECTIVE !!!! My God! They are right! How else should I describe an adjective than the words placed beside a grazing sheep? You may stay all night. You may sleep over. In my bed.
this one is worthy
this one is good
this one will not scream
I write a grocery list and put
Plump tomato
Sacred orange
Docile duck leg
And I fall in love with adjectives all over again, and the man at coles does not care when I begin speaking such vibrant words.
IN SANSKRIT: विशेषण (viśeṣaṇa) — distinguishing mark.
What separates this cow from that cow
What names YOUR beloved in the darkness, when there are thousands of beloved’s around. (My beloved calls me sweetpea and he smells like hot water bottles. That’s how I know he’s mine.) In some way, this is the only definition for me, because I like to know what is mine. The Hindu Priest take up lodgings in the spare room above the souvlaki shop, and sticks labels on everything around the house in the following weeks. Yellow candle. Robeless table. He can stay a very long time.
Sometimes I worry that adjectives are a kind of betrayal.
They imply that a noun is not enough by itself. I am beginning to fall out of love.
In Babylon,
they had 20 words for bright.
None for enough.
Gertrude stein… “Adjectives are not really an exciting thing. They don’t do anything.”
Shut up. The woman uses adjectives as a refusal. It unsettles my mind. Instead of using adjectives to define or help out with meaning, she strips them away to let words exist in their own presence… unmediated. I hate how unsentimental she is. & all coming from the woman who says things like TENDER BUTTONS…. And goes on to say THE ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE. You roseless animal.
The red red is not red red it is red red and if it is red red it is red red because the noun refuses to be alone. She was lovely and lovely and lovelier when the saying was just… saying… lovely…. but I have to verbalise it three times to hammer the matter home. The Greeks never left the dinner party. I can hear them all, and it’s difficult to concentrate on writing this.
They say the last Ice Age ended 11,700 years ago, but the glaciers are still talking about it. Heatless glaciers. And every so often,
we remember—
that we are not writers of poetry. Adjectives are the writers of poetry. Oh dear reader… I would go as far as to say adjectives are the poetry. I am so terribly distressed lately.
I saw the best adjectives of my generation drowning in dictionaries, crushed by Marianne Moore’s hat in New York, dragged by syntax beasts through Hampstead Heath! I saw the adjectives swimming and they were utterly unblemished!
And the grammarians of Alexandria—pharaohs of footnotes!— declaring the adjective a satellite, an epithet! But I say it is the SMOKE that proves there is a house fire (not the fire itself, because what if I am looking at a very good painting of a house fire?). Therefore, my sweet pharoahs, we simply MUST describe the cold coming off the satellite, or the grey, or what the satellite was feeling.
Hopkins says dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon. Have we taken it too far? Baudelaire's adjectives imbue ordinary objects with delicate significance. In "Le Cygne", he describes a swan as "magnifique mais sans espoir" (magnificent but without hope)…
I say: adjectives are NOT embellishment !
And then to Kafka….We’re in Prague, under gey light… he uses adjectives like a syringe of distrust… a door more closed than merely closed— a silent room with an incomprehensible window … I simply cannot go on anymore… it is so hot under this shirt… but quickly…. Mayakovsky—oh yes—he wrapped himself in sleepy, heavy adjectives & leapt off the bridge into the Neva & came out screaming poetry before turning adjectives into bullets (preferably silver).
I miss him, sometimes. In Petrograd, I saw a man writing светлый (bright) on a wall while weeping, because the word meant both light-filled and hopeful…
I HAVE TO END THIS RIGHT NOW BECAUSE I HATE ADJECTIVES SO MUCH BECAUSE THEY ARE SO BEAUTIFUL AND THEY ARE MY ONLY FRIENDS. (next week I will write more about adjectives and poets. i haven’t even touched lorca yet. why won’t lorca let me touch him?)
Here are some conclusions we can draw from today’s dinner party:
To name an adjective is to limit.
To describe an adjective is to lie.
To negate an adjective is to hunt for meaning.
To touch an adjective is to turn the adjective on & to sleep with an adjective requires so much effort on my part, and I really don’t have the energy right now, and the dinner party is in full swing, so I must take this shirt off my head and be a good host.
That is all.
*Drawing by SAM DENSEM (my love)