It Is The Nature Of The Truth That Like A Lie It Hides Itself (CE 2019)
It i is ii the iii nature iv of v the vi truth vii that viii like ix a x lie xi it xii hides xiii itself xiv
i A word taken from outside; the noise a nail makes rapping on a windowpane or vase, thinking of what to do with it.
ii Short and quick like a pistol. A killing word. So killer they couldn’t invent a verb to oppose it. In English we just put our hands up and add ‘not’, pathetically.
iii Latin got the idea when it decided not to have too many articles. Took for granted that thingness was nominally full of imprecision. Imperium sine fine dedi. The Dominion? A Dominion without end? Just Dominion without end? If it’s without end, is there a difference?
iv Nature would have us know that all things tend toward the ground, toward a center, that the water when it hits the basin of the fountain always funnels to the drain, that all things live in a measured, but unmeasurable free-fall toward the final altitude of death—but also that within this universal gesture is contained another force, which forces the fall to occur in a whirling motion, which is why the water doesn’t just bee-line for the pipes, but spins around the orifice a while, as if examining, cradling the thing that causes it to fall. If this is true for water, of which we anyway are mostly made of, it is true for us.
v Out of which I would add: is also true for (of? Gen.? (Dat.?)) truth.
vi The most arrogant word in English. Something I maybe should’ve started this fucking thing with, if only word order were as free as in Latin, for instance but then no articles? Half of this gone?
vii No comment.
viii Either a more precise version of ‘the’ or a subordinating agent such that it might be said subordinate clauses are not subordinate elements of sentence per se but the thing that emphatically makes the character of the sentence (c.f. Autobiography of Red on Stesichorus on adjectives).
ix The difference between liking something and being like something.
x Utter freedom, like the fountains in the Eaton Center seemed to me when I was a kid, my mother rolling me around on trains and buses, she going about her business. She taught me to throw pennies in the water for a wish. I think she wanted to drown money.
xi As I was washing my face one morning admiring my teeth, the warrior’s canines my ancestor Hungarians always seemed to have, it came to me: the truth about Hungary (I thought as I rinsed my mouth) is that it is the opposite of Canada. I thought of the Paul Lendvai book my mother has on her shelf. Chapter titles: The Heroic Age of the Hunyadis. The Catastrophe of Mohács. The Disaster of Ottoman Rule. Hungarians, my grandfather said, have both a superiority and inferiority complex, being both historically conquerors and conquered. Though Hungarian nationalism’s just as full of shit as any other, at least, I say to myself, it bares both wounds and picks at both in equal measure. Canada, in spite of not having an explicit fascism problem, just doesn’t know how many wounds it has. Yet it complains always of weakness, dizziness, incontinence, foul smells.
xii It is now time for whiskey, I have talked enough.
xiii Why the hell we keep 3rd p.s. inflection is beyond me, like, is he or she really more worth an extra s than you or me?
xiv Fourteen words to get to the last one folding the sentence back onto itself.