[Newspoetry] NewsPoetry Reprint

[Donald L Emerick]

Lost Souls at a Loss for Words

Yeah, that was a good one, John.  At least they kept the attribution.  I assume you found it by searching around on the Web, to see how your name might be appearing on line.  With a name like Gavroche you are pretty well guaranteed some easier searches than names like, say, Wilson or Smith.

Emerick is all too common, as a last name, for my preferences.  Moreover, the combination of Don(ald) (L) Emerick seems to pick up a lot of trash in the search engine garbage collection routines -- leaving me the tedious task of sorting through, click by click, the garbage.  Of course, some of this task is powered by the demon of personal vanity -- so it will be done if my will is to be done (or done-merick).

The first time I encountered a book reference to any Emerick happened when I was reading texts on the political history of political geography -- a fascinating field of readings, in my view.  It covers such topics, for instance, as the homeland, the heartland, the promised land, the treaty lands, and so on.  As God is my witness, I'll always have the land (the year of the Jubilee (jew billies are like hill billies, except they grow up in the hills of palestine-israel)) says Scarlett O'Hara -- "I'll never go hungry again."

That is what the promise of land is: a defense against all adversities -- a thing, therefore, to be defended -- like a man's home is his castle -- or his tent.  But, the land on which he dwells is the critical thing.  The land must have a name and that name is an owner's title.  This is the land of the Goshen, the Dixie Land, where old times are not forgotten, but re-enacted in new guises daily.

The Terry Schiavo case is a reverse Dred Scott case:  here the Republican Party is espousing the idea of residual, reversionary ownership rights in a person.  A slave, you see, would never be freed nor emancipated -- but always belong to somebody.  They are willing to trample over every state's rights, to reach this result -- to trample over the rule of law, itself, in the name of some non-constitutional idea of catering to the inflamed (and highly inflammable (and even more insane (insannable?))) majority.

The land is there.  It's the ground upon which we stand.  Look closely at the dirt beneath your feet, the dust between your toes.  Philosopher's have been wanting to ground truth for centuries -- as though they never saw neither dust nor mud -- nor wind and water erosion.

You own a piece of ground to the center of the Earth, but not to the farthest star over head, because the world turns in its space, it turns over and over, it rolls its own rock around the Sissyphussy Sun.

I have been thinking of totally renaming myself, just to make searching for me easy on the internet, on the world wide web.  But, it is a daunting task, to find a name that you can wholly possess, excluding all others from its scope.  As I thought of this problem, I saw what the rabbis meant when they told me that there was no possible way to pronounce the name of the being(s) that we nickname god.  The word god is just a class name, a concept -- but the name of any god is not something that our tongues could pronounce, or our voices stretch to reach as sound.

No, my name will not be one of those names of god -- for a name that is truly called commands the thing that is called to obedience, to follow your will.  This is the magic of words -- for we learned to name ourselves, and we learned to come when called and, when called, we came because such calls appeal to our sense of being together.

Somedays, I wish I had the erudition of Tolkien, for instance, in languages, to understand them better.  I should, on those days, wish to have been a linguist of some kind.  Nothing but words really matters, so far as talking about life goes -- and talking about it is as close to living it as many of us ever truly come.

Our favorite words are things like protest, claim, argue, consent and dissent, I said, you said, he she it says.  You can quote me on that.  Like a quantum security protocol, I'll know you used my words, my formulation, my incantation, my newspoetry -- I'll find calls to my name.

But, first, I think, I have to have a name that says all this, and whatever else it ought to say.  I'll be working on it, in the wordsmith labs, late at night -- alchemo-nomologically -- or is that the Alnomological Labs -- blowing up syllables and fusing letters, splitting and parsing and smashing, how many damned words can there be, to search, before I find me?