Monthly Archives: November 2018

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Thanksgiving and Other Arbitrariness

It is that time of the year to be thankful. At Christmas it is time to be merry. At Easter, a time to … well, that depends on your perspective. After all, these are arbitrary dates. Easter moves around every year, so its arbitrariness is self-evident. Actually, so does Thanksgiving.  But Christmas, well, that one’s nailed down at least.

But the fact that we attach a certain set of feelings to each one of these holidays, if we even celebrate them at all, well, that’s either nostalgia (e.g., my mother was, after all, always quite cheery at Christmas, or thankful on Thanksgiving, etc.) or it is merely the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Black Friday is the day I always, like a lemming rushing to the sea, go out shopping for no real reason than force of habit.

But let me get back to the arbitrariness of the dates and the concomitant emotions adhering to those dates, or rather holidays. If the dates are more or less fluid and not really fixed on the calendar—indeed, most historians would not attribute the historical date for the birth of Jesus to December 25—I would here like to introduce an alternative way of thinking, and maybe even an alternative way of living. First, with all due respect to nostalgia—and I think it should sans doubte be accorded some respect—what if we really did decide to keep Christmas cheer all year round and try to be merry every day? And, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, try to be thankful every day? And what about Easter? Well, that’s not so easy to define, but one adjective that comes to mind is hopeful—so hopeful it is. And what if we should try to be so every day? That would actually require us to master our emotions and marshal them, each and every day, to address the circumstances of that day. And, I admit, that would be hard. It would require of us generous forgiveness, lavish kindness, faithful optimism.  

But just imagine, for a moment, the possible outcome? We could be fun to be around (merry), gracious and generous (thankful) and optimistic (hopeful), the last of these at least within realistic parameters. That might just make us pleasant, affirming, even likeable. Now there’s an idea for Thanksgiving this year. I, for one, am going to give it a try.

Happy Thanksgiving, today and everyday…

 

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Exploding Wedding Dresses

Fiber optic Christmas trees have not quite become all the rage, but there is a kind of rich quality to their kitsch-ness that, if only by assonance with Christmas, seems to work.  “At any rate,” your save-the-planet neighbor will officiously muse, “At least they didn’t have to kill a tree for the holiday.”  Also, the advantage of buying a fiber optic tree, especially one that changes colors, is that you can truly astound your spouse.  I remember doing this a few years back. My wife was out of town for a conference in November.  When she returned, I had the tree all set up and decorated—not just any tree, but a brand new tacky fiber optic tree that I bought at Walmart. Her jaw dropped, and if only for that moment of something like surprise and horror combined, it was worth saving the life, as it were, of a living pine.  And virtually all of our friends and neighbors were both shocked, even mystified when during that festive season they came to our house, the house of a writer, to find the kind of tree that they felt did not befit such an “intellectual” household. The shock factor was definitely worth it.

But what could be more amazing than a fiber optic Christmas tree?  I suppose a fiber optic wedding dress could be.  Yes, they’re all the rage—or maybe they’re not, but at least as much “all the rage” as fiber optic Christmas trees are. Still, they have the advantage of 1) offending no one in these times when practically anything can offend anyone. A fiber optic wedding dress can’t really offend anyone, even if it doesn’t sit well with their taste. Certainly “offend” would be overstating merely transgressing anyone’s taste.  Even grandma will have to say, “Well, dear, that’s very twinkly,” or something to that effect.  And advantage number 2) the groom will have no trouble identifying the bride as she comes down the aisle. “Yep, that’s her,” he will think.  Thirdly, the pastor can modify his question from “Who gives this woman?” to “Who gives this radiant woman?” or the like.  And she will literally be radiant, or at least her raiment will. Fourthly, after the ceremony everyone will say, “She just glowed, didn’t she?” And they will never have to lie about that, as they will certainly mean it.

But, if she divorces and has a divorce party and decides to light her dress afire,  then she will have to be especially careful, for fiber optic dresses burn, I would wager, much more quickly than traditional chiffon or lace gowns do.  Which is a fifth reason to opt for fiber optic dresses: divorce rates could well go down, as no doubt fiber optic dresses will bear the warning label: “IN CASE OF DIVORCE, DO NO INCINERATE OR EXPLODE.” And some will even add the further admonition: “RECOMMENDED: DO NOT DIVORCE.”

So that’s the moral of this enlightening story: save a tree at Christmas and surprise your spouse (if you have one already) and, at the very least, shock your extended family and neighbors by buying a fiber optic tree. If unmarried, using that as a spring board, when you do get married, buy a fiber optic wedding dress; finally, avoid an exploding dress simply by not divorcing.  Lesson learned.

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: What a Dog’s Bark Means

Ferdinand de Saussure

Words are powerful things. There are lots of theories as to why: a brilliant Swiss linguistic theorist named Ferdinand de Saussure suggested that they are significance bearers, and he distinguished between the signifier and thing signified. In as much as he sees the connection between the two as arbitrary, he never really explains the shape of words, like say why the word “bark” is used to describe the way a dog barks (where “woof” is obviously the onomatopoeic equivalent). But he did correctly talk about their capacity to carry a “sign” that points to the thing they are signifying.

The only way a word can lose significance then, is to strip it of its meaning by endlessly adding meanings to it. When I was a much younger person, at the very inception of my career as a writer, I remember distinctly being at a conference at Rutgers University in New Jersey where I heard one of the speakers explain this phenomenon: he pointed to a chair in the room and said that it could be called a stool instead of a chair because it could be used as a stool. A chair, he said, could also be a ladder, if you’re changing a light bulb, or a night table, if you keep your water glass on it at night. A chair, he said, is not just a chair and, he added, it can be quite something other than a chair. The word chair, he said, therefore has no meaning. Words, he declared, simply have no meaning per se. They are arbitrary; they are so flexible that they have lost their elasticity.

But he wasn’t finished. He went further: nothing, he said, has any meaning. And, he added, as a result, there are no laws or rules that pertain to any individual. All rules, he boldly added, are, like words, artificial constructs devoid of meaning. Life, he concluded, has no meaning. Such a point of view may sound like a grand reductio ad absurdum, and in fact it is. I should, too, note carefully here that this speaker was not kidding around: he actually meant every word he said. To his credit, he had followed the path whither it in fact leads, into the great abyss of nihilism.

I wonder, though, if words did have real meaning, where the path would lead. Put another way, one can see that “bark” can mean both the skin of the tree and what my dog does when a burglar jiggles the lock on my door, or “love” can signify the passionate act that a young couple makes as easily as it can connote the compassionate act of hugging a disabled elderly woman whom you’ve only just met in a nursing home. Yet even though the words “love” and “bark” have remarkable range, that doesn’t mean they are devoid of meaning. The man burgling my house, unless he is hearing impaired, decides to rob another house; (I have a Great Dane with a very deep and ferocious-sounding bark). The young couple doesn’t need to be told what love is, nor does the person in the nursing home receiving the hug. They know. They know because words do in fact have meaning. They bear significance because the thing they signify has meaning. The life of the disabled person has meaning. The passionate love of the young couple has meaning. And any burglar can tell you that a Great Dane’s bark most certainly has meaning.

So, I’m sorry to have to report to the famous lecturer of many years ago, that he was simply wrong. A chair can be used as a nightstand or a ladder, but it is still a chair. Words have meaning because, in fact, life does, too. And that, in case you were wondering, is the real meaning of a barking dog.