The Sacred Door, The Sacred Threshold

Beginnings imply endings. And endings imply beginnings. So it goes for the the month of January.

The month is named after one of my favorite gods, a god most humanly and metaphysically figured: Janus, whom the Romans worshipped as the "god of door and gate," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The origin of his name attests directly to his divine sovereignty. Janus derives from the Latin ianua, meaning "door," "doorway," or "entrance," and is closely related to ianūs, "covered passage" or "arcade." There is speculation that these two words, in turn, come from *ei-, a most basic of Proto-Indo-European bases signifying "to go." This base also explains the Latin verb "to go," īre.

The usually bearded deity was believed to have twin heads, one facing forward and the other backward, and thus, like a door, looks both ways. (In some depictions, however, the god bears four heads, each facing in the four cardinal directions.) According to myth, Saturn endowed the god with the ability to see both past and present to reward his hospitality. Thusly, Janus was patron of beginnings, cosmic and terrestrial, as well as of human life, new eras, and new enterprises, which could account for his frequent mintage on coins. He was lord over all ranges of portals: first and foremost entrances to domiciles, bridges, arches, and covered passageways. Most famously, Janus watched over the Gates of War in the enclosed and gated archway in the Roman Forum, whose doors were only closed during the rare times of peace.

A clean-shaven Janus as featured on a Roman coin. Image thanks to vroma.org.

While there are gods in other cultures that resemble Janus, such as we see in certain Grecian depictions of Hermes and in Assyrian depictions of the man-fish-headed Oannes, historians assert that Janus has no immediate equivalent in other mythological systems, and thus was an old Italic deity, likely the Etruscan god known as Ani. (I should note, however, that Sir William Betham posited that Janus takes his name from a Mesopotamian name, Uanna, which, in turn, is a variant of the name of Biblical prophet Jonah, or Yonah, meaning "dove.") His ancientness may also explain Janus' high rank in the Roman pantheon, for his surname, divom deus, means "god of gods," which suggests a Jupiterian, or Jovanian, status.

Beginnings, then, are occasions of sanctity. And therefore so are endings. But perhaps also sacred is the ambiguity therein: as inception must in ways be defined by cessation, and as cessation must in ways be defined by inception, we must respect life's liminality, its thresholds. To be human is to be aware of past and future, and, perhaps more important, to know that our present is a constantly moving threshold between the two.

January, in light of such liminality, reminds me of a more epistemological poem I penned over two years ago, called "Winter Gardener," which anticipates, to boot, my upcoming and long overdue "Eclogue 7." Happy New Year, or, Happy Ending of Last Year.

Winter Gardener

No song from the birds.

The starling's course

across the field

carries the whiteness

and the stillness

of the snow.

Dusk. Or dawn.

The winter gardener knows.

John K., 12/10/07

Two Etymologies: Poetry & Art

I have a number of pots on the stovetop. "Bed: The Essay, Part II" and "On Direct & Indirect Experience: The Work of Art in The Age of Digital Reproduction" I have placed on the back burner. These are still climbing to their boiling points. I have started "Meta-Crisis: Some Thoughts & Concerns about Art," but must let it simmer for now, as to synthesize better the ingredients. Then there is Bed: The Sequence, poems about the bed. This sequence, I am thinking, may organize itself around the 7 Valences I discussed in "Bed: The Essay, Part I." The number 7 is irresistible, but I don't want to script a recipe for it. And we also have my ongoing Eclogues and Elegies, which have no recipe, as I am striving to embody the precepts and principles of seriality. Plus, I feel a new poem emerging out of a conversation I had with a friend this weekend. I am not sure whether it will become an "Eclogue" or an "Elegy" or neither. But I'd hate for it to be a Spicerean "one-night stand" poem.

In the meantime, let's get back to the basics with a couple of etymologies. In this edition, I want to look at two cornerstone words in our creative lexicon: poetry and art.

Poetry

Poetry (along with its archaic cousin poesy and the suffix -poiesis, among other incarnations) first derive from, you guessed it, Latin, by way of French forms that are nearly identical to their English cognates. The Latin roots have three permutations. Poēsis is the "art of poetry"; poēma is a "poem" or "poetry" in the collective; poēta is a "poet," "playwright," a "person of great skill," or an "artist." Each has a Greek ancestral equivalent that ultimately originate from the Greek verb, poieo (ποιέω). The verb is flexible and polysemous, meaning "make," "do," "produce," "be the author or cause of," "prepare," "acquire," along with a slew of other variations. This word, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European *k^u̯ei-, which means to "stow," "gather," or "pile up." The root is embodied in a handful of Indic languages, and means the same as the root, with a few delightfully rich variations: the Sanskrit, kāya, "body," and citrakāya, "tiger" (literally, "speckled-body," giving us the word cheetah.)

The etymology of poetry is wonderfully tangible and apropos to what I think poetry, in fact, is. Poetry is very much a made thing, a pile of sounds and images gathered and arranged, a heap of stowed meaning. The etymology reminds me of Frost's "The Wood-Pile," of Stevens' "Man on the Dump," of Lorine Niedecker's "condensery" in her "Poet's Work," of Duncan's "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow." The etymology of poetry, I am sure, was not lost on Duncan.

Art

Art (with its kin artifice, article, and co.) derives from the Latin ars, artis—a feminine noun primarily meaning "skill," "craft," and "trade" used frequently to refer to the work of craftsmen, tradesmen, and, well, artisans. While the word does secondarily mean "a work of art," it also signifies such things as "invention," "trick," and "stratagem." But the meanings don't stop there, as ars diversely denotes "military tactic," "manner," "method," "means," "science," "theory," "profession," "occupation," and so on.

Artifice is a combination of ars and facere, "do" or "make," thus forming the sense of "a making by skill."

The Proto-Indo-European source is the simple *ar-, meaning to "fit," "suit," and to "join." The cognates in Indo-European are far too abundant to list, but here are few of the very many English ones:

adorn

arm (body part; weapons)

army

alarm

arithmetic

order

ratio

read

rhyme

rite

Math, science, reading, religion, war—all arts, all telling the story of man.

The etymology of art reminds us of art's physicality: of colors, sounds, shapes, rhythms, notes, motions, lines orderly ordered, suitably suited, fittingly fitted. But, more importantly, of colors, sounds, motions, etc. joined in novel, challenging, and unexpected ways. Art is not first of the intellect, but of the hands, of the body, of things, of the world.

Details are thanks to my Amsco Latin Dictionary (2nd ed.), www.etymonline.com, The University of Texas at Austin's Indo-European Lexicon available at http://bit.ly/2HDcgC.

Bed: The Etymology

Bed is an ostensibly innocuous word. For me, the monosyllable initially evokes sensations of rest, sleep, and comfort. Yet, as soon as I peel back the first layer of connotation, a torrent of complex symbols breaks through. But before I discuss these symbols, I will let the etymology—my first entry not wholly Latinate—speak for itself.

Bed has remained unchanged in form and meaning through English's history: the word is identical in Middle English while the variants bed and bedd exist in Old English. A bed for sleeping and a garden bed are present in all three major periods of the English language. The form of the word, moreover, has stayed essentially intact from its Proto-Indo-European base: *bhedh-. The meaning of this base, however, reveals bed has indeed travelled—though not as far as we may suspect at first blush. *Bhedh-, classified in the semantic field of agriculture and vegetation, denotes "to dig, pierce, or stab." One of the original senses of the word, we can see, is the sense of a ditch, pit, or hole dug in the earth.

Perhaps the cognates can reveal bed's curious itinerary to its present signification, or at least its various interrelated meanings:

• In the Celtic family, we have the Gaulish bedo-, meaning "canal" or "ditch" and the Welsh bedd, meaning "grave."
  
• In the Germanic family, we have the West Germanic betti, denoting "bed" in the sleeping sense, the North Germanic Boðvarr, which serves as the proper masculine noun "Bothvar" but also signifies "battle." In this secondary meaning, we may witness a preservation of the Proto-Indo-Eurpoean sense of "to stab." Proto-Germanic has the root baðja-, which, from my research, signifies "bed" in the agricultural sense. I have also come across the Proto-Germanic baðjam, which apparently signifies "a sleeping place dug in the ground." If this signification could be confirmed, then we might have a clearer understanding of the historical and anthropological development of the bed, which meaning could most effectively unite both the somnial and agricultural senses of the word.
  
• In the Italic family, we have the Latin verb fodio, fodere, fodi, fossus, meaning primarily "to dig, to dig (up or out)" and secondarily "to stab, pierce," just like the Proto-Indo-European base. From the verb is derived the noun fossa, meaning a "ditch, canal, moat, trench," as well as other nouns and adjectives related to digging. From these words we get the English fossa, fosse, fossil, fossorial, and perhaps fossick.
• In the Greek family, I can verify no cognates. Etymonline.com reports bothyros, meaning "pit," but I cannot locate the word in Greek dictionaries. I did find barathon, meaning "pit," and famously the pit behind the Acropolis in Athens into which convicted criminals were thrown to death. Rome had its equivalent, the Tarpeian Rock.
• The Baltic family's Lithuanian has bedù and bèsti, signifying "to dig" and "to bury"; badau and badýti, denoting "to pierce" and "to gore"; and, very interestingly, bãdas, a noun meaning "starvation."
• Old Church Slavonic in the Slavic family has bodo and bosti, "to stick" and "to prick."
• Lastly, the Anatolian family has the Hittite pád-da-i and píd-da-i, which means "to dig."

We can thusly see in the etymology of bed four major classes of meaning: 1) a hole dug in the ground for agricultural purposes; 2) the more violent act of stabbing or piercing; 3) graves and burial; and 4) a place for sleeping. My next entry on the topic of bed will assay these meanings, as well as unpack the complex symbolism of bed in the broader sense.

For specific cognates, thanks to etymonline.com, the University of Texas at Austin's Indo-European lexicon, my AMSCO Latin dictionary (2nd ed.), and S.C. Woodhouse's 1910 Greek dictionary via The University of Chicago Library's online format of it.

Bed: An Introduction

My latest idée fixe is one of the earliest yet most primal words we learn, one of the simplest yet most taken-for-granted routines we perform, one of the most comforting yet complex symbols we possess: bed. In my next posts, I will be offering the etymology of this seemingly straightforward but startlingly sinister syllable, a poetic sequence (if it will so permit me) on this most basic of phenomena, and some essays on what the bed signifies in our existence. The topics will be manifold. Childhood, entropy, sex, and, among others, death, will be my fodder. In the meantime, as I tuck in my sheets and prop my pillows, good night.

Passion

Maybe it is just me, but today the word passion lacks the potency and gravity that it etymologically deserves.

I often encounter the word, in its adjectival form, bedecking classifieds for jobs: "...seeking passionate employee...." The word subsequently peppers the applicant's cover letter and résumé. Guiltily, I have done so myself. But to my ears, neither usage of passionate reveals anything substantial about the desired employee or the aspiring applicant. The word also commonly modifies the amatory, as in "passionate lover" or "passionate sex." Love better approximates the etymological passion, to be sure, but our usage seems to emphasize its carnal aspects. Then there is the empty question: "What are your passions?" This question usually implies activities, perhaps even hobbies, one enjoys outside of his or her professional identity. Call me curmudgeonly, but I think passion has greater depth. 

There is one usage, however, that does retain the original sense of the word, and this usage has become sedimented in a few related terms: "The Passion of Christ," "Christ's Passion," "The Passion Narratives," or simply, "The Passion." The Passion, in Christian tradition, refers to the episodes culminating in Jesus Christ's crucifixion, from his betrayal to his trial to his actual suffering on the cross. It is the suffering throughout these events that needs the greatest stress. And it is the word suffer itself that needs most etymological emphasis.

Passion derives from the Latin verb patior, pati, passus sum, meaning "to suffer, endure, undergo, experience, allow, put up with, and (sexually) to submit." (I could find no intermediating Classical Latin noun, which is perhaps an entry for another day. Passio as a noun emerges in Late Latin.) The verb is akin to the Greek paskhein, "to suffer, endure," which itself is akin to pathos, "suffering, feeling, emotion," and more literally, "what befalls one." The Proto-Indo-European root of pati is *pei- /*pi-, "to hurt, shame, scold." (The English word fiend also comes from this root.) The Proto-Indo-European root of paskhein is *kwenth-, "to suffer, endure." I suspect there is an interesting history of cross-linguistic renderings here, but I will leave that to the professional linguists. 

Let's spend a little time with pati. 

First, we recognize two important cognates, patient and patience, which come from the present participle of pati—patiens, which has the sense of "one who is suffering." A "patient" at a doctor's office and the capacity for "patience" are thusly illuminated. 

Second, the form of pati warrants notice. This kind of verb is known as a "deponent" or "middle voice" verb. These oddball verbs, found in Latin and Greek, among other languages, are passive in inflection but active in meaning. 

I enter into the murky territory of speculation here, but I detect a certain pattern in this class of verbs. Very many of these verbs are stative, experiential, intransitive, existential. A few examples: nascor, "to be born"; dominor, "to be master"; ancillor, "to be a servant"; aquor, "to water," in the sense of "it is watered"; assellor, "to void," in the sense of "I am voided"; aborior, "to pass away"; irascor, "to be angry," in the sense of "I am enraged." The list continues. 

Two related phenomena intrigue me about these verbs. The first phenomenon: many of them appear to be formed from root nouns, as if a kind of back formation. For instance, irascor is formed from its root noun, ira, "anger"; aquor from its root noun aqua, "water." 

The second phenomenon is the fascinating interplay inherent in their active meaning and passive construction. Since these active verbs have passive construction, they grammatically can have no passive meaning. And, for many of these verbs, that makes perfect sense. What would the passive meaning of the active "to be born" possibly be? And that brings me to my main point. These verbal hybrids possess a strong sense of passivity precisely in their activity. They exhibit a simultaneous agency and receptivity, a "doer" who has been "done to," a "moved mover." I think this plays out compellingly in the case of pati, especially since we know its Greek companion pathos denotes "what befalls one." To suffer, to endure, to undergo, the very activity of the agent is a kind of willed passivity, receptivity, a kind of taking on, in, or into—of hardship, of harm, of pain, of opposition.

And here we have it: the very word passive comes from—you guessed it—the Latin pati. 

Now, let's go back to passion. Passion could so powerfully signify something in which we so believe and which we so love that we actually suffer, endure, undergo, even permit our "being wronged," "being blamed or scorned," to use a sort of middle-voice. (We can understand why the word was used to refer to Jesus Christ's death.) This signification speaks to me of a way of life, of moral purpose, of ethical conviction, of spiritual essence, born out of rigorous reflection, woven into the sinews of the heart. And this signification, to me, surpasses any sense of "uncontrollable emotion" or "strong enthusiasm." Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Galileo, Socrates, Sojourner Truth, to name only a few—passion.  

For love, we do suffer. For our professions, especially when they are driven by a larger telos, we do endure. As for art, music, literature, and their multifarious kin, we put up with a lot of hell. As the descriptivist that I am, of course I believe language is an ever-evolving edifice, always adding on new rooms, renovating old rooms, revealing rooms that appear different each time we enter them. That is its beauty. But another part of the beauty of language is its ability to be at once flexible and precise. A word with the etymological richness of passion has that potential for an exquisite precision. What is it that you so believe in that you suffer for it? That's passion.             

For some of the details, thanks to my second edition Amsco Latin dictionary, etymonline.com, and the University of Texas' Linguistics Research Center's Indo-European Lexicon, which I exhort you to explore at: http://bit.ly/2HDcgC.  

Peculiar

Our next etymology takes us to the politics of ownership. The word peculiar bears, well,—and please do pardon my obvious pun—a rather peculiar origin.

The core of peculiar is the Latin pecū, an old noun meaning "flock" or "herd" in its seldom used singular. In its in most often used plural, pecua, it signifies "farm animals," "sheep," "pastures," and, most importantly, "cattle." The emphasis is clearly on the plurality, the collective, the "more-than-one-ness." 

Pecū originates from the Proto-Indo-European *peku-, a mere orthographic skip away and meaning the same.

As any basic lesson in history will reveal, cattle, and more broadly, livestock, became at certain point in (geographic regions suited to grazing) civilization private property. And therefore became, part and parcel, a measure, means, and material of wealth. This, too, must have existed in the ancient Roman's worldview, as we see a family of derivatives birthed from the root. Pecūnia is "money," "property"; pecūniārius is the adjective, from which we get pecuniary. Then there is the rather obscure verb, in my opinion, pecūliāre, or "to supply with private property." Pecūlator is a fun form meaning "embezzler." Finally, among other variations, we have the adjective pecūliāris, denoting "one's own," "as one's own private property," and, secondarily, "exceptional" and "singular."  

Before a few brief meditations, I'd like to note that the nouns cattle, flock, et alia assume two other forms in Latin, differentiated only by their inflections, their endings. The first is pecus, a later, more regularized third declension noun (neuter) meaning essentially the same as pecū. (The difference, in case you do not know, is all in the stress of the u.) The second is pecudis, another third declension noun (feminine), signifying a "single head of cattle," "sheep," or any kind of beast, in contrast to the fauna of sky or sea. Here, I will highlight that we don't see variations on pecudis, as in pecudiārius, in Latin. In fact, we don't see any (that I have found) adjectives modifying a cow in the singular at all. This further emphasizes to me that the consciousness and conception of this bovine in Latin, and even in English, is entirely about the collective, the plural, the herd. 

But I find this notion of the collective ironic in that the derivatives of pecū relate very much to the individual. It is no big leap from a sense of "one's own" to "singular." Yet even here the connotation of singular as "unusual" and peculiar as "strange" or "odd" doesn't come until a few centuries after the Middle Ages. (I'd like to know exactly when and how, but that is outside the scope of this current entry.) Whatever the case, there underlies the evolution of the word the connection between that which one owns and that which distinguishes oneself. This idea, of course, is far from foreign in the modern capitalistic imagination. Our status is largely marked by our property. And our individuality is marked by our personality, or what is peculiar to us. Interestingly, only the "peculiar to" construction retains the sense of "one's own," while the construction "x is peculiar" holds the more qualitative connotation. 

A few questions arise. Are there differences that emerge in the use and form of *peku- between nomadic and agrarian Indo-European peoples? And if so, what are the different ideas of property therein? 

And more specifically, what was the context and politics of the first use of peculiar after the Middle Ages? Was there any kind of challenge to the hegemony of the day? 

These questions, of course, are largely unanswerable, but even their contemplation can open up fascinating thoughts about man, his world, and his ideas all through the seemingly innocuous word peculiar. 

Thanks to my handy-dandy Amsco Latin Dictionary (Second Edition) and the ever accessible and fabulous etymonline.com for some help in the specifics.

Eleven & Twelve

There are countless collections of the origins of curious words and phrases gathering dust on bookshelves until some vulnerable reader, much like myself, falls prey to their novelty. But, in The Space Between Three Violins, I am less interested in the immediately recondite and esoteric than I am in the quotidian, which hoards a trove of exotic treasures beneath its membrane. Our first etymologies, therefore, are nearly as plain as they come: eleven and twelve.

Eleven derives from—and I am taking some typographic license for the ease of transliteration—the Germanic ainlif, meaning, quite literally, "one left." Twelve exhibits the same, deriving from the Germanic twalif, or "two left." Note that we can easily supply eleven's sense of "one left over from ten," as well as twelve's "two left over from ten," to understand the forms of these number words.  And, in case you wanted to know, ain we can trace comfortably to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) oinos; two from the PIE duwo. Lif, moreover, emerges from the PIE leiwk. 

But it is not that parts that concern me here. It's the rarity of the construction. I have only encountered one other language that demonstrates such construction—Lithuanian, a peculiarly wonderful member of Baltic phylum of the Indo-European languages. From eleven to nineteen in Lithuanian, witness a PIE cognate + lika (as in "left"), whose origin, note, comes from the aforementioned leiwk. A few examples: vieunolika (eleven), dvylika (twelve), trylika (thirteen), and so on.

So, what strikes me as so unusual about the construction? For starters, outside of the Lithuanian counterpart, eleven and twelve are the only number words that contain a "pure" number word with a verb—in this case a past participle. Please correct me if I am mistaken, but every other language that I have researched and can think of handles numbers above 10 with a combination of number word + number word. For example, eleven as a "ten-one" construction. 

How did the "one left" and "two left" configurations enter into German and thus English as such? Why just these two? Why were the rest of the "teen's" exempt from this formation? What kind of contact between Baltic and Germanic peoples potentially occurred for, I hypothesize, a cross-pollination?

To me, there is something so different about uttering "one left over (from ten)" than "ten-one." What is it? I am not quite sure. Perhaps it exposes the primacy of the number 10 in the human mind. What in our evolution—physically, psychologically, linguistically—privileged this number so nearly universally? Why is it groups of 10 that we think in, figure in, navigate time and space in?  

There is also something so beautifully tactile about ainlif and twalif. Their etymologies provide a rich image of man before objects (sticks, stones, shells, fruit), counting them, separating them, putting them into neat, comprehensible piles. Man's primal urge to categorize, organize, to make sense of the world, the cosmos, through groups of stuff, things, food, tools, building materials near man's opposable-thumb reach. 

And that's why eleven and twelve, obscure in their origins as they may be, are so alive, concrete, historical, tangible.