I, Gelaftimus

 

A jumble of words.  A spasm, a syndrome.  The spraying of a passing fancy, designation.

You don’t know where I got these words, nor do I, or only rarely.  A voided origin, a lifetime suffering verbs and the masks of nouns.

Experience: feels like something moving forward, somethings breaking and tumbling about it.  “Feels like.”

A kind of perceptual first instance, shaped by everything before, altered by everything after.

At the limit then, boundary-lip, threshold.  Moving, and that ceaselessly.  Colliding.

A poet, after committing suicide in his youth, now festering under the ground, is found to have remarked that “a tree grows upward…the path of least resistance.”  So most of us.

Whatever “us” might mean, a jumble of words, perhaps a spasm, unconscious and involuntary instinct, so carefully and meticulously learned: to say.

Gelaftimus is what I feel today, this moment, my wife sitting and stewing on her couch, me (whatever “me” might mean) crabbing over my desk, this white paper, with a ball-point pen, scribbling – “a jumble of words, a spasm.  A syndrome.”  Perhaps.  But it is gelaftimus, I tell you that.

Early on I was assigned this particular label: “Nathan,” only later coming to find that “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context.  In fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.”  (V.N. Volosinov, et. al.)  “Feels like” experience.

Needless to say, “I” have struggled with defining the cluster of words “I,” “Nathan,” “man,” “boy,” “me,” “son,” “husband,” “father” and so on in their perpetually altered contexts, circumstances and situations, ever re-de-term-in-ing their possible meanings.

A jumble of words.  A spasm and syndrome.  Instinct and accomplishment (accomplice-ment?)

My wife, last night on the swing, beside me, in the dark, on the porch, spoke of “not being allowed to say” as a child – so very many experiences “not to talk about” –  frozen (perhaps) in their places or processed without knowledge dementedly deep underground (out of sight, out of mind, and so forth).

Contextually, she was addressing the decades-old infancy of “figuring out the world around me and my relation in and to it.”

“Reality works in overt mystery”

–Macedonio Fernandez–

which I found (what she said) to feel like truth (as in actuality) – the jumble of words, the spasms and syndromes of “making words fit.”  The odd difficulty we sometimes name “maturity,” i.e. beginning and growth.

I would confuse myself in this (were I to find me).

Alas it floats on the crest of the wave, breaks and spreads on the shore, regathers in a reflective pool, drifts away and starts again in fragments and particles.

Poised on a threshold, hardly poised.  Rather in the breeze, a metaphor passing hands.

This jumble of words.  Syndromes and spasms.  Accumulated masterfully and haphazardly over ages and accidents.  Feels like, experience.

Gelaftimus, today.

 

“A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; [or making it fit with prefabricated words? –N.F.] and in writing [that babble at the crest of the wave –N.F.] one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) [?! –N.F.] and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, [ever creating more waves – N.F.] it makes words to fit it [or fits it to words which recognize? – N.F.]”

–Virginia Woolf–