Every charismatic leader, or "priest-king" needs a business manager, or "war-king" at his side.– Kennith Rexroth
"But we should not look for only one or even two meanings of the syllable ur [the root of both 'urge' and 'organise']: the more numerous the poetic meanings that could be concentrated in a sacred name, the greater was its [magical] power" (Robert Graves).
Some words downright lie. Consider 'administration' (literally, 'toward or near a servitude'), which could be short for "Add-men mimic nature's bounteous ministry" at least or "Ad-men represent divinity" at worst. With the abandonment of a religious integument (sometimes called institution on analogy with constitution, in a chiasmatic confusion of skin and bones), the proper form should be "admenstruement" on analogy with encasement or entrapment or government, all situations where men construe or are construed to bleed on schedule, like construction-workers for pay, in both productive and reproductive activities.
Where -ment is short for "men (did i)t" (just think of the artificial mountain or a monumental moment), -(t)ion suggests a spontaneous ('natural') process, like "creation", referring to "flesh-becoming" (see creatin: 'flesh', 'muscle') from an indeterminable flux, source or womb. Where the manufacture of flesh has a certain ring of emasculation and fakery (man-factions fashion men), creation and evolution pose no such arrogance until they bring in an autocrat or other godly apparition. It may not rhyme, but a 'rhythm' of sense is there nevertheless, and that suggests a possibility: Can marianettes conspire to string up the puppeteer?
Io, the root of the suffix '-(t)ion' was in poetry, a river nymph pursued by Zeus and transformed into a heifer. In history, Ionian is both a party culture and dancing dialect of a soon-to-be Greek (uni)verse. Zeus as raper-transformer is here merely the scape-goat blamed (actually, poeticised) for a natural process of a native alliance between a riverine people (fishers) and cattle pastoralists, both confronted by an oppressive or meddlesome civilising encroachment (the Olympian gods). The result of the conflict is that cattle became men's property and women, through the institution of permanent marriage became chattel. The story, semantics or context is lost but the usage remains entangled in our language as a grammatical artifact of an insurrection in myth-time against patriarchal meddlement and its pursuit of progress and rural economic development (a labour force, its oaths and its tribute – the only thing "meant" to flow other than blood – and the origin of the means and ends argument and statistically calculated normality as the first laws of exclusion).
Consider Ocean, the big liquidity which many consider the mother of all life (and therefore, invention). Whether called Miss Oceania or Mr. Oceanus, it is still a chaotic cream of every trace nutrient a creature could crave, like a big mixing bowl or pepper mill nurturing not only fish and the things they eat, but land crawlers, slithering creepers and fliers when, in a blustery dance with the sun, it redistributes rain on parched ground and up spring flowers, come to drink it in, and all the pollinating urges of birds and bees only end up more piss in the seas under a flatulent sky. If the cycle of life is not a poetic organization, nothing is. As the orgasm must accompany organic reproduction, the orgy just as likely preceded ergometrics and work once took on an entirely different sense than it does today.
Despite all the anti-organisational rhetoric, some of which is rightfully disregarded, perhaps accompanied with a puzzled expression, many only see another argument over semantics in the pursuit of an improved insult like a better mouse-trap. What, after all, could be the beef with planning and coordinating, which is also to say, with thinking and communicating, whether concerning past or future events? The advice to tend to the present is no call for amnesia nor walking blindly into a brick wall of the future. And where is any harmony or cooperation to be found without some degree of coordination? The absurd argumets over semantics only expose manipulators as shit-stirers with self-agrandizement issues. What lurks beneath all political debate is the distinction between an acceptance of spontaneity and the imposition of force, if only the force of argument backed up with strong arms should one's logic be weak.
But who remembers that meaning is a provisional attachment to a fluctuating context? The par excellent definition of a word is only appropriate to contexts which seem not only to endure through time, but are re-iterated across space, or keep cropping up like dandelions in a monotone garden of grass? And when the context does change, the word persists as an old habit, and meaning soon becomes irrelevant, if it is considered at all. The debate on organisation is really one of preferred weeding tactic, as if we're talking about appropriate grammar and agreeable syntax encased in a good (rigid) educational environment. But left to its own devices (at least the poetic ones), there are no weeds in nature.
As both "sides" are committed to their position, the antagonism is not unlike that between the political and antipolitical or the social and individual, providing the sophistic ammunition to justify total war (or insult) among those who would be thought allies against a common oppression, whether in the form of an occupying army or a fascist, autochthonous regime whose vicious cycle becomes our criterion for assessing and judging nature. When with strangers (some would call barbarians), one needs an arsenal of words in an ever recursive discourse just to communicate. Or so it seems.
The debate in its smallest form should be recognisable as between organisers as manipulators and those who would let things grow, albeit with tending, nurturing, the occasional application of fertilizer and cross-insemination. We are talking of both poetry and gardening, neither of which would condemn the occasional destructive effort, but it also applies to meat-eaters. If hunters pay as much attention to maintaining the context in which their 'food' is found, there is little to distinguish them from herders, as neither would wish for the extermination of their care and, god forbid, settle down to toilsome farm labour which even a lilly or rose would instinctively refuse. Sometimes the leavings are set aflame just to encourage the growth of something new, and then sustained.
No comments:
Post a Comment