Word-Wednesday for September 29, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, September 29, 2021, the 39th Wednesday of the year, the second Wednesday of fall, and the 272nd day of the year, with 93 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for September 29, 2021
Fall colors splash across the forest floor.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for September 29, 2021
Sunrise: 7:21am; Sunset: 7:07pm; 3 minutes, 33 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: --; Moonset: 4:12pm, waning crescent, 44% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for September 29, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             60                     82                     88
Low              38                     20                     58


September 29 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Coffee Day
• VFW Day
• National Women’s Health & Fitness Day

September 29 Word Riddle
How do you make a tissue dance?*


September 29 Word Pun
New specialty wine for seniors with an anti-diuretic hybrid grape: Piño More


September 29 Etymology Word of the Week
genius: /ˈjēn-yəs/ n., exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability, from Latin genius "guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth; spirit, incarnation; wit, talent;" also "prophetic skill; the male spirit of a gens," originally "generative power" (or "inborn nature"), from PIE *gen(e)-yo-, from root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups. Sense of "characteristic disposition" of a person is from 1580s. Meaning "person of natural intelligence or talent" and that of "exalted natural mental ability" are first recorded 1640s.


September 29 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1955 Arthur Miller's View From The Bridge premieres.
• 1976 Boy George expelled from school.
• 1987 Star Trek Next Generation premieres.
  

September 29 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1547 Miguel de Cervantes.
• 1571 Caravaggio [Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio], Italian painter.
• 1794 William Michael Rooke, Irish composer and violinist.
• 1810 Elizabeth Gaskell, English novelist.
• 1849 Ladislao Joseph Philip Paul Zavrtal, Czech-English composer.
• 1864 Miguel de Unamuno, Spanish writer.
• 1903 Karl August Andersen, Norwegian cellist and composer.
• 1907 Gene Autry.
• 1920 Václav Neummann, Czech conductor and musician.
• 1943 Lech Wałęsa, Polish Solidarity movement leader.

September 29, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 48 of 52
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.


Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:

• anagnorisis: /ˌa-naɡ-ˈnôr-ə-səs/ n., the point in a play, novel, etc., in which a principal character recognizes or discovers another character’s true identity or the true nature of their own circumstances.
• codicil: /ˈkäd-əˌ-səl/ n., an addition or supplement that explains, modifies, or revokes a will or part of one, e.g., “Sven has remembered him in a codicil to this will.”
• eirenic: /ahy-REN-ik/ adj. tending to promote peace or reconciliation; peaceful or conciliatory.
• flether: /ˈfle-t͟hər/ v., to fawn and flatter.
• olid: /ˈô-lid/ adj., smelling extremely unpleasant.
• penstock: /ˈpen-stäk/ n., a sluice or floodgate for regulating the flow of a body of water; a channel for conveying water to a waterwheel or turbine.
• sitzfleisch: /ˈsits-flīSH/ n., a person’s buttocks; the power to endure or persevere in an activity; staying power.
• tripe: /trīp/ n., the first or second stomach of a cow or other ruminant used as food.
• vellichor: /VEL-ih-kore/ n., the wistfulness of a second-hand bookshop.
• xanthippe: /zan-TIP-ee/ n., a nagging, ill-tempered, shrewish wife.

September 29, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
muse
/myo͞oz/ n., 1. (in Greek and Roman mythology) each of nine goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who preside over the arts and sciences; 2. a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist. The traditional names and specialties of the nine Muses are: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry, lyric art), Euterpe (music, especially flute), Melpomene (tragedy), Polymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), Urania (astronomy).

Our muses might be the most transcendent capacity of  human consciousness, where in the world of the mind we can construct models of the real world built upon flights of intricate internal consistency; where those flights of fancy may have zero external validity when tested against reality; and where we rarely have an opportunity - much less the wish —  to test them. Psychologists call this tendency delusion; writers call it art — the novel, the story, the poem. Just ask James Joyce or JPS or WannaskaWriter or Tolstoy or Mr. Hot Coco [=sinMHC/cosMHC] or Lillian Lieber.

So happy you asked! Lillian Lieber was among the first generation of women mathematicians to hold academic positions, who wrote seventeen books in her one hundred years of living from 1886-1986. One of those books is Infinity: Beyond the Beyond the Beyond, which features her peculiar style resembling poetry. Lieber insisted it was not free verse but, rather, a deliberate way of breaking lines in order to speed up reading and intensify comprehension. In her first chapter, “Our Good Friend, Sam”, Lieber outlines her perspective on muses:

For those who have not met SAM before,
I wish to summarize
VERY BRIEFLY
what his old acquaintances
may already know,
and then to tell to all of you
MORE about him.
In the first place,
the name “SAM”
was first derived from
Science, Art, Mathematics;
but I now find
the following interpretation
much more helpful:
the “S” stands for
OUR CONTACT WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD;
please note that
I do NOT say
that “S” represents “facts” or “reality”,
for
the only knowledge we can have of
the outside world
is through our own senses or
“extended” senses —
like microscopes and telescopes et al
which help us to see better,
or radios, etc., which
help us to hear sounds
which we would otherwise
not be aware of at all,
and so on and so on.
But of course
there may be
many, many more things
in the world
which we do not yet perceive
either directly through our senses
or with the aid of
our wonderful inventions.
And so it would be
Quite arrogant
to speak as if we knew
what the outside world “really” is.
That is why I wish to give to “S”
the more modest interpretation
and emphasize that
it represents merely
that PART of the OUTSIDE world
which we are able to contact, —
and therefore even “S” has
a “human” element in it.
Next:
the “A” in SAM represents
our INTUITION,
our emotions, —
loves, hates, fears, etc. —
and of course is also
a “human” element.
And the “M” represents
our ability to draw inferences,
and hence includes
mathematics, logic, “common sense”,
and other ways in which
we mentally derive the “consequences”
before they hit us.
So the “M” too is
a “human” element.
Thus SAM is entirely human
though not an individual human being.
Furthermore,
a Scientist utilizes the SAM within him,
for he must make
“observations” (“S”),
he must use his “intuition” (“A”)
to help him formulate
a good set of basic postUlates,
from which his “reasoning powers” (“M”)
will then help him to
derive conclusions
which in turn must again be
“tested” (“S” again!) to see
if they are “correct”.
Perhaps you are thinking that
SAM and the Scientist
are really one and the same,
and that all I am doing is
to recommend that we all become
Scientists!
But you will soon see that
this is not the case at all.
For,
in the first place,
it too often happens, —
alas and alack! —
that when a Scientist is
not actually engaged in doing
his scientific work,
he may “slip” and not use
his “S”, his “A”, and his “M”,
so carefully,
will bear watching,
like the rest of us.

Interestingly, some persons have a sAM, or a SaM, or a SAm, or a SAm,  or a saM, or a sAm, or a Sam for a muse. In a nod to Kim Hruba’s Writers Retreat, Word-Wednesday also points readers and writers to Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel. A Czech-French author, Kundera calls his muse, “the wisdom of uncertainty”, and he speaks about the storytellers’ ability to surprise themselves as the story crosses back and forth from imagination to the page under its own muse-inspired, seemingly self-generated momentum:

When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

In her 1996 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wisława Szymborska talked about it this way:

It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself. It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself.

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

And then there’s Tom Waits, who notoriously maintains an ongoing, active dialogue with his muse. When trapped in L.A. traffic, Waits began to hear a tiny trace of a new melody. Panicked, he spoke to his muse this way: “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist, come back and see me in the studio. I spend six hours a day there, you know where to find me, at my piano. Otherwise, go bother somebody else. Go bother Leonard Cohen.” Sometimes he pleads, sometimes he berates, sometimes he debates. Waits also said, “Every single song has its own individual character and you can’t treat each song the same way, because it wants to be treated differently and there are songs that are like scared birds that you have to sneak up on over the course of months in the woods.”

For more on muse management, sign up for Kim’s writers' workshop next year.


From A Year with Rilke, September 29 Entry
Where Does a Smile Go, from The Book of Hours II, 15

Those who are beautiful—
who can keep them as they are?
Unceasingly in their faces
the life in them arises and goes forth.
Like dew from morning grass,
like steam from a plate of food,
what is ours goes out from us.

Where does a smile go, or the upward glance,
the sudden warm movement of the heart?
Yet that is what we are. Does the universe
we dissolve into
taste of us a little?



Be better than yesterday,
learn more about your muse today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.



*Put a little boogie in it.