virgules

\ \ all pronunciation information is printed between reversed virgules

egregious \i-ʹgrē-jəs\
ʹ Modifier Letter Prime
ə Latin small letter Schwa
ē Latin Small Letter E with Macron

(Often times we find ourselves on the wrong side of meaning. This may sound metaphorical. I am talking about the darn dictionary.

How so?

Think about driving. It is dark. You go to drop someone at their house. You have never been in this area before. You think you can trace your steps back. It doesn’t work so easily. You keep guessing and guessing and you are going round and round until you finally admit to yourself that you are lost.

Where is this going?

Language is like that.)

One can get lost.
Even the most traveled can.

So much snow so much light
At night the light creeps in
Through the shuttered blinds
If not the silence, the absence
Of the birds singing
One can be fooled into thinking
That it was dawn.
Only daybreak was more than five hours away.
What does it feel like to be in the north pole?
It must be lit 24/7.

It was a happy discovery to stumble upon these two poems:

The Snow Light
(May Sarton 1912 – 1995)

In the snow light,
In the swan light,
In the white-on-white light
Of a winter storm,
My delight and your delight
Kept each other warm.

The next afternoon—
And love gone so soon!—
I met myself alone
In a windless calm,
Silenced at the bone
After the white storm.

What more was to come?
Out from the cocoon,
In the silent room,
Pouring out white light,
Amaryllis bloom
Opened in the night.

The cool petals shone
Like some winter moon
Or shadow of a swan,
Echoing the light
After you were gone
Of our white-on-white.

February Days
(May Sarton 1912 – 1995)

Who could tire of the long shadows,
The long shadows of the trees on snow?
Sometimes I stand at the kitchen window
For a timeless time in a long daze
Before these reflected perpendiculars,
Noting how the light has changed,
How tender it is now in February
When the shadows are blue not blck.

The crimson cyclamen has opened wide,
A bower of petals drunk on the light,
And in the snow-bright ordered house
I am drousy as a turtle in winter,
Living on light and shadow
And their changes.

And a few pages down in Volume 2 of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century –

Those Winter Sundays
(Robert Hayden 1913 – 1980)

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

At that time I was not thinking about death.

What do you mean?

I mean death was one thing that was the fartherst in my mind. Why would I think of death? I had no reason to. My mind was full of other stuff – empty, vacant, may be, but it was still stuff – possibilities. There was this movie actor I was crazy about. You can laugh all you want to but the world exploded for me and I landed on this fragment. A fragment that was up in the sky and everything seemed imaginable. There seemed to be no limit. It was as if I was being put in a hot air baloon and sent to the moon. Anything and everything seemed within grasp.

Now, what has this got to do with the dictionary, for heaven’s sake?

Everything! It never once crossed my mind while I was in the sky that someone on the other side would just call it quits, simply take leave, exit the world. That wasn’t all of it. The whole place exploded. The alphabet was changed. To think that someone would walk in and my mother would hand her jewelry to them, it’s just unimaginable to me. It would never have happened in my time. I know, you think blood diamonds and everyone in the third world is under one threat or another living in fear – it wasn’t like that.

The smell of death reached me with the morning coffee. The coffee was hot and piping and in my hand while the death was continents and oceans away. How does one react to such a death. Here I was being transported and transformed staring at a clean jar of sugar under a bright light and wondering why no ant was in sight. Forgive me, I know what you are thinking. I had said I will not be going back. Life is too short to make any lasting promises.

So, there it was – death. No one likes to think of death, dwell upon it, unless one is sure that it was the least likely thing to happen. Then we sit and dream of each and everyone’s funeral, including one’s own.

fathom outstretched arms, length of the outstretched arms; …………..
A unit of length equal to six feet. 2. Comprehension.

After having satisfied every mirror in the house she left with a heavy heart.

So that is how I missed the biggest party that my family ever threw.

Don’t be silly.

I am being silly, aren’t I? Only, it was no small person that died. We were each given a taste of the uncommon at a very early age. For me, I may have been three or four. I remember walking behind him taking the same measured steps as the family picked itself up from the dining area listening to every word said and repositioned in the living room. The idea of a method, a path was planted in my head.

Is that good or bad?

I don’t know.

One day she was dead. She did not wake up. They found her dead in the morning. They did not talk about obsessive compulsiveness when she was alive when all she did was pick up the piece of needlepoint whenever she was distracted. They loved her to death. When she was dead there was grief. Grief for the loss, the empty space she had left in their lives. They found new purposefulness in this loss. Can grief be a distraction?

That was a digression about Mrs. R. In a way her death, the deliverance of it was more brutal than the news I received that morning. That is because I am not the same person. I have learnt to be melodramatic and convoluted.

The shelling continued for five days. Sometimes sporadically, sometimes not. Often it started when my mother was taking a bath, which was at night. My father cannot go without a day of bathing. His was a bird bath taken in the early hours of the morning, a splash of water poured down the middle of the head and spine with a cup. If needed, he can be over with it in less than a minute. His habits and temperament were suited for the times we were facing. Fortunately for my mother my father had installed a shower of sorts, a rubber hose running along the wall and taken up over a lever, in the bunker. My mother enjoyed long baths. In normal times it can take well over a half hour. In the bunker my mother did not feel comfortable undressing completely even though there was a tattered plastic hanging around the tiny corner spot where the hose had been placed. It was claustrophobic after being cooped up for five days but she was not thinking about us. She did not want to be stark naked when the bomb fell. That night I don’t know what else went through her mind, but she let the water drip over her while still draped in her sari. Once over, she wrapped herself in the one other clean sari that she had at hand, then squeezed the water out of the wet sari and left it behind the curtain. My father must have woken up very early the next morning. It had been quiet this one night. I must have fallen asleep while my mother was still in the shower.

Concept of the rebel
Someone who had been wronged
Not by one individual – a disagreement between two people does not make a rebel
Requirement – wronged by a group
Rebel gets noticed
Becomes popular
Organization is called for
If rebel wants to maintain stature
No longer one person
A group
An army
When does a rebellion disqualify from “rebel” stature and attain “group” stature?
All organizations breed corruption
There is something circular about all of this
How many hairs does not a bald make?
The game is rigged to keep the game going
May be
May be not

There was noise all around. Pounding noise, shattering noise, from above, all around me. My mother was shaking me, telling me to wake up. She was sobbing hysterically, pointing outside with her hands. My sister was screaming from her corner in the bunker. She was nursing her infant. “What do you want him to do? Do you want to kill him also?” she screamed at my mother. “I did not know, I did not know!” my mother wailed. “Oh, God! Why do you keep me alive?”, she continued to sob and cry. I turned to my sister to say “Can you calm down?” and then I turned to my mother to calm her. My mother was clutching her chest and was sliding down. I said “Mother, Are you alright?” I bent down to hold her so she wouldn’t hit her head on the ground. She went limp in my hands.

It’s all very difficult to describe the actual sequence of events that took place in the wee hours of that morning. If I have had a camera, like the surveillance one that I have now hooked on the wall by the corner above me, that shows me every person that walks in through the door on my monitor, it would have captured every second of what happened. No such footage exists. Here I am holding the same job that my father has held all his life. They say that one of the reasons that the war came to an abrupt end was my father’s death. He was a trained engineer. I have no such credentials. Yet the government appointed me as director of regional development soon after it declared victory over the rebels.

bunker (1839) 1. a bin or compartment for storage; esp : one on shipboard for the ship’s fuel 2 a : a protective embankment or dugout; esp : a fortified chamber mostly below ground often built of reinforced concrete and provided with embrasures b : a sand trap or embankment constituting a hazard on a golf course – bunkered adj

bunker vb bunkered; bunkering (1891) : to fill a ship’s bunker with coal or oil 1 : to place or store in a bunker 2 : to hit (a golf ball or shot) into a bunker

bunker mentality n (1976) : a state of mind esp. among members of a group that is characterized by chauvinistic defensiveness and self-righteous intolerance of criticism