The birds start by 0315 here, which is when I awoke this morning. They didn’t do it, make me wake-up, they’re not roosters after all, but it was odd, since in summer-coming season — the annual-but-always-unexpected late Spring overcast SoCal days with weather-people broadcasting [good weather word!] ‘plenty of heat on its way’, or the last random snow days in northern Colorado — it’s still two hours until sunrise.
We identify crowing with imminent, immediate, co-incident dawn: if the rooster’s screeching it’s happening now, when it wasn’t happening then and isn’t going to be later, and if the bird screws up, there’s gonna be a problem or already is and it will continue, tho perhaps the rooster himself won’t be doing so.
But birdsong is immanent not imminent — ‘remaining within, pervading, inherent’ … always there, always ready to be, but doesn’t have to be talking or noticed or noticeable or anything, really anything at all, necessarily, until it is, and then it is very necessary — we might say vital — indeed
Lotta pressure on the rooster, like all the time; none on the songbird … most of the time.
We cd say more gets done by that first and I wldn’t qubble just now, but also depends on what one wants to do.
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True fact: I knew of a girl once, last name of Birdsong, and it’s the best surname ever, easily. Dunno if it was hers by marriage or birth, but she was friendly while, interestingly enough, serving as EA to an eminent man, who also had quite a bit of money, by which I mean she’d certainly had her share of busy days, difficult duties, and insistent interloping irritants [such as me] almost wholly irrelevant to her or her [professionally speaking] man, yet here she was staying sweet, as the yearbooks used to say.
True fact: another girl of public-only acquaintance — one of a handful at the orthodontist — has the first name Clarissa, and that’s gotta be in the top-five of givens, given we reserve a special category for the Italian feminine: Chiara, and Michele one ‘l’, &c. And confessing to a preference here: you’ll concur this seems an option of an older generation yet I had a friend in middle school and a great-great-grand someone named Clarissa. It’s a loverly name and the teen girl of youth insisted on being called ‘Lisa’ and I hope she changed her mind.
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Also true and rather too-obvious to require explication is how … non-traditional … spellings of names nearly never work. Parents [I can see either pursuing it] think they’re putting a deep dark significant red stained oaken door on their home — Clarissa Birdsong, which I shall be using in a book someday — but they’re actually leaving the door as it is and painting the whole thing bright yellow. I see this in people who buy Aston-Martins as well: they get it in ‘electric lime green’ as if having James Bond’s car isn’t enough to get some attention.
Still, their hearts are in an OK place — the parents with malformed ideas about creativity I mean; not luxe car buyers, whose hearts are merely in an understandable place.
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An exception to the above tho not really since it’s a different thing, is when the odd spelling is there bec it’s actually a different name.
There’s a woman on Twitter named Racheal and you’d think it was a dad who cldn’t spell — maybe he was going for a variation on Raquel, bec. Welch, and he thought he was in that Italian feminine region [the Italians call it Tuscany], tho Ms. Welch was born in Chicago and is not Italian but Spanish, Jo Raquel Tejada — or a mom wanting some flair.
But it’s more intriguing — ‘arousing interest, fascinating’ — in the end, and thus, at least here, in the beginning, bec it’s a variation on Rachelle, on the spelling of the name pronounced so, which means, can’t see any way out of it, that her parents [she is 40] hadda work within the knowledge of people who name their kids funkily [perhaps, sigh, even ‘Funky’], risk being cast into that circle of Hell by on-hearers and irrelevantines who’d encounter their grown daughter, and not because not bothering to blunder beyond there to insight into an individual, miss the whole inquiry-worthy subject, let alone the girl herself.
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Knew a Rachelle, dad-named, fascinating and loverly, tho alas, not immanent.
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This is not what I want.
Now that I’ve written this far I see what I meant to say, or rather, didn’t yet mean to say until I had said it, was top-five writing, or mine anyway, seeks to be some form of immanent, loverly fascination.
If only in the nth bit, apparently irrelevant, such as even here, but which, if taken together properly can become, or be received as, what must be said now, couldn’t have been said before, and mustn’t delay — lest later be … leave us not consider.
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We may even achieve ubiety — ‘having a definite location at any given time; state of existing and being localized in space’ — the WWOD at Dictionary.com, when for certain elements of this attempt I was there a moment ago, and a quite different workout than the CrossFit folks know.
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It’s Right and Fine and … Loverly, another way of saying Good and True and Beautiful which, I hope, saying it thus, snuck up on us.
or
Write and Well and Weal, like the WWW, an archaic way of saying the Interweb, the capitalizing of which is also archaic, in internet terms anyway.
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It’s not about utility. Even the rooster, with activity full of use, launches and lurches himself from a place inside always there, a bit at least curious if not intrigue demanding inquiry, and perhaps even lovely, at least to hens if not to others and if not rising, to the loverly of the Italian feminine.
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And here we mention The Book of the Dun Cow, which involves a rooster and which you shd read and which I shd read again and then you again.
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Beauty, as has been said, is useless.
Goodness and Truth seem more functional tho sometimes out of favor but I wonder. In their pure and initial form they mustn’t be about utility either. If we are right and fine for some end only then are we useless of all men.
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And maybe the songbirds, to other songbirds, are just talking.
This is Twitter — not for nothing did they call it that — and what we do with executive assistants and their people, and in the pre-teeth tightening moments of a medical professional visit, and in every encounter with another human, no matter what their names, which we may not, if we are me anyway, even remember.
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This is what writing is when done well and weal.
No less a loquacient than Ray Bradbury suggests
One poem a night, one short story a night,
one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights.
When I read that I checked to see if he was married. He was, to one, for 56 years, and they had four daughters. Whole lotta talking going on there, and some nerve #AmIRight? to tell us to write one thousand days in a row.
Like a rooster, that guy.
Image:
Chauntecleer
Debra Hall