[Newspoetry] [Peace] URGENT: Go on Record Supporting Urbana Anti-War ResolutionNow!! (fwd)

[Donald L Emerick]

Dear Anne,

In the last of your proposed resolutions, you my have slipped up its typing.
Rumsfeld is Secretary of Defense, while Powell is Secretary of State -- so
I suspect your fingers did what mine do, sometimes, which is to leap from
the start of one phrase to a similar point, in another phrase,
inadvertently,
in the meanwhile omitting all of the intervening words (end of phrase one,
start of phrase two).

Interestingly, I might note, I do not hear this same mistake in listening to
speakers speaking, but I do see it happens to writer's writing.  A similar
kind of mistake made by speakers, though, would be those so-called
slips of the tongue (ornately, lapsus linguae or lapsi linguae?).  A similar
mistake by play-back devices (variously, electro-mechanical) would be
a skip between (adjacent) tracks (grooves) that often happens when a
device is (physically) jarred?  (It would be hard to imagine a device as
mentally jarred, in the same sense of jarring (for otherwise, the device is,
like, in a bottle, in a glass display jar or behind glass, in a display
case,
on which it says: DO NOT OPEN EXCEPT IN CASE OF FIRE).)

However, slips of the finger (lapsus fingae?  lapsi digiti?) would appear
to have no name, at least not one that I have been taught, despite the
rather high frequency of the event (this kind of mistake).  So, I hereby
propose a name, as if I am the first to discover, to cognition, this effect,
and thereby, as discoverer, entitled to propose a name for a naming,
which name others shall respect, by using it when it is appropriate,
to speak of the effect (phenomenon) when they think to mention it.

The name of this effect?  That is problematic.  I am disposed,
by my schooling (or lack of it, one is never sure whether to praise
or to condemn some historical elements of a developmental path)
to favor Latin, even pig-Latin, over all other languages.  (I thought
only hog-farmers and hog-butchers to the world spoke pig-Latin,
as related elsewhere, in the related tales of the Three Little Pigs
and of a Pig crying Oui-Oui-Oui all the way home from market,
whose French, I am sure, was a Romance language, aLa tin.)

I try to exhibit, in displaying mental associations, how mnemory
is laid down, rather like a heap, as an unplanned collection of
trivia, there being little reason for thinking, abstractly, that all
recollection comes from successfully realized intentions to collect
experience, as it happens, into a mnemory.  Order that happens,
most often, far more often than other ways, is an order of recall,
not an order of experience -- and it is that discipline, of course,
that tricksters like mnemonicists, rhymers and reasoners exploit,
to make mnemory seem to have an order by the fact that it fakes
an order for some display, afterwards.  (Science is the business
of discovering fakes, leaving the peace of truth undisturbed as
happens in its consequent identity for the truth of peace.)

And writers, too, show this tricksterism works, by planning
how words shall fall, in a certain order, to achieve some effects,
although different kinds of structural levels are always possible,
as one becomes skillfully advanced in one's abilities to form,
reform, inform, conform, deform, x-form.  The plain and clear
language of expression of the literal business world is, thus,
a zero-level, normatively: when a literal (physical) expression
is one-to-one with some parallel and unique mnental construct,
such as its (originally-intended) mneaning.  (This would be
called the charlantry ESP if we did not call its medium language.)

Obviously, now, having faced the task at least more than once,
and having fled more than once, as well, I do not wish to name
this phenomenon.  I leave it to your imaginations, as unspoiled
as they might naturally be, to fix a place, find a name, for this
alleged experience.  Perhaps, if I were not such a lazy man,
in service to a cowardly soul, (or do I have that backwards?),
I would dare defy myself, my own mnemory, and make it up,
make up my mnind, make up a word, and put it on for you.

Thus, I have overwritten the pretextual occasion of this note,
having no time that is not as free as I wish it to be, i-dle-dust.
Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick