Language

Any time we take a token of language and apply it across situations — calling two different things “cat” — or two different actions “promises” — we are lucky if it works. It sometimes works a little. Often enough. But much of the time it doesn’t work. Or it doesn’t work too well. Sometimes it works that what we are looking at — a human? — well the word “human” works but also it doesn’t work. “It is a human” and “It is not a human”. They both work. It’s a shimmering thing, a tricky thing — more like a little stream than an ocean.

The Young

I never explain the old world to the young unless they ask me.

What do you mean you went to a gym to lift weights? How could you afford to burn the kilocalories? And I said — there were so many kilocalories that the seek-calorie program actually caused ill-health. And they look at me like I am reciting a magic spell or telling the story of “hickory dickory doc — the mouse ran up the clock” — a bewitching rhyme but not something with a literal meaning.

Yet I experienced it. Gyms were real. Calorie surplus and the attending maladies were real. As real as I am.

Which of course raises a question. A question perhaps heavier than the one hundred and eighty pounds I could bench in my prime.

I tell the young I lived in a castle built my grandfather. And they hear “castle” and because of semantic shift imagine I mean a system of deliberately confusing memes. But I don’t. I mean a house made out of stone.

My grandfather fought in World War I. He called his enemies “The Boche”. He had alopecia areata and was entirely lacking in hair. No head hair meaning not even the fringe that most bald men have that serves to separate neck from scalp. No eyebrows either.

The young wish they had fathers who cared about them. Most of them did not. It’s sad. I care about them and I try supply some of the emotional nutrients that were missing in their upbringing. To cure them of spiritual and emotional pellagras.

There is a beauty to their hopelessness or perhaps, better, their hopelessness has taught them how not to live on bread alone. Or not having bread, they hope for beauty. Still I wish they had bread.

Their cell phones are a pestilence.

I can’t shake the feeling that there is something I ought to tell the young about what they have lost but I can’t put it into words. It is something about life or less grandly how people can talk to each other and how they can be on their own, and walk down a street, or buy a book in a store, that was so obvious to me that I never had to put it into words. And now I try to. I try to see and feel what it is like now for the young, and see if I can taste the taste that is absent from their diets, and put it into words.

Ach, I am just realizing now that this is what my bald grandfather was trying to do as he sat in his basement, stirring me a Grenadine Au Siphon at his bar, decorated with cut-out racy cartoons from Esquire.

Write your Bible while you still can!