rambling

Words, they’re always hiding in other words, sneaking around. Maybe they are patiently (peacefully) waiting to be noticed. (I have an aversion to the word patience, we can talk about it later.)

I wanted to tell you about the piece I read yesterday that had me shaking my head and sucking my teeth and groaning in my apartment and sending emails. There weren’t words necessarily for how to tell you. This one was a real page turner. One word would be exhilarated.

This writer wields English like a sucker punch to the gut, makes a guy pay attention, makes him holler; he provoked exasperated sighs—so good it almost hurts. (I’m not the guy, but close enough. A sucker is always a guy, and a guy can be any gender, we can talk about it later).

The piece was The Silence of Thelonious Monk by John Edgar Wideman.1 I was shuffling through my papers and found my print out of the Black Backstage reader Harmony Holiday assembled for her thusly named exhibition. She would know about this piece because she’s that kind of writer too, and also a dancer, which I tell you because this kind of exhilarating writing (righting?) has so much to do with music. I call it a piece, it’s a composition, an essay, a story. It may as well be a song. It’s a myth, an epic, really. I’m down bad.

But back to the in-the-open ruse of these doggone words: exhilarated, fyi, from ex "out, out of; thoroughly" (see ex-) + hilarare "make cheerful”, that part also has ‘reconcile’ and ‘grace’ in the root of it.2

That’s the root of it, feeling graced and reconciled.

So my whole life hilarious has been neighbor to exhilarated and I never knew. Exhilarate, hilarious. Hilar, for short, in both cases, they knew each other all along, no surprise if I really think about it; small world but knowing these coordinates of this shared region makes it grow, actually, gives it energy (sails flapping, hard wind).

A sucker punch may as well be a strike, I didn’t see it coming. These kinds of sequences that take my breath away, a rhythm close enough to music to make me move.

So, like I said, I was moved.