recall odor

J. R. R. Tolkien once said that "cellar door" is a beautiful phrase when separated from its spelling and meaning. He's right: there's something about the way the syllables roll off the tongue that is extremely satisfying. I've discovered lots of words and names and phrases like that: mellifluous; Pleistocene; Melora (as in Creager, as in Rasputina); parthenogenesis; fleur-de-lis; ruse of metacarpi...

Why am I thinking about this, you ask. A better question is, why do I think about anything? If you know anything at all about me it should be that I have a strange mind. But this morning, I woke up with Mars Volta lyrics in my brain. You should have seen / The curse that flew right by you / Page of concrete / Stained walks crutch in hobbled sway / Auto de fe / A capillary hint of red / Only this manupod / crescent in shape has escaped. They came to me unbidden and in perfect clarity, words that wide awake I can't recall. I had to look them up so I could include them here. Cedric Bixler-Zavala's lyrics are usually described as incomprehensible and cryptic, which suggests that they should mean something. Maybe they're not supposed to. You hear a melody and you don't ask yourself, "What are those notes trying to communicate???" You feel the melody and either love it or hate it; it requires no thought. Maybe Bixler's trying to do the same thing. Maybe his word salads are designed to communicate with us in a far more basic way, to touch our subconscious minds and emotions rather than to stimulate our intellect. Maybe the lyrics are more about how they sound (cellar door) than what they say. Like Archibald MacLeish says in one of my favorite poems, "A poem should not mean, but be."

Speaking of word salad...what was that nonsense I just wrote? That's what passes as deep though in my environs.

Less than 12 hours, and it's NaNoWriMo! I am totally stoked. That probably won't last for long. I imagine this time next week, I'll be regretting getting myself into this mess again, but it's not like I have anything better to do. The high point of the month of October was driving all the way up to Varina last night to look at tacky Halloween lights at my cousin's neighbor's house. Writing this novel is going to be like taking a European vacation for me. What a sad life I live.

Anyway, inventory awaits, and that latte I had for lunch is ready to make a swift exit. (Yeah, I bought another one...venti this time...$4.24!!!)

LxL