Tag Archives: nouns

Golden grass covered in dew.

Possessive

Golden, dew covered grass
Photo by Johnny McClung

‘I’ve started talking to Proto-Indo-European.’

‘You mean you’ve started talking in…’

‘No. Talking to,’ Cassie insists. ‘I’ve personified the language. I call him Piedas.’

They meet every Friday at Lenny’s for happy hour to complain about their PhDs, how far behind they are, how mad they’re going.

‘Midas? Like the king with the golden touch?’

Cassie chews on a mojito-drenched mint leaf. She knows Beth will never understand her obsession with the noun-based languages that Proto-Indo-European generated. She never should have mentioned Piedas.

‘Like Midas, but everything he touches turns to nouns.’

It troubles Cassie that 40 percent of people, herself included, are doomed to see the world in terms of nouns. Things. Isolated, rigid, commodified. Bought, sold, stolen.

‘PIEdas. Proto. Indo. European. You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Beth says. ‘Happy hour’s almost over,’ she hints.

Cassie rises unsteadily and joins the clamouring mob at the bar. Foolishly she closes her eyes and allows the invading nouns— elbow, glass, noise, light, exhaustion, panic—to transform into verbs. Gush, swirl, flow.

She sinks, as into a river, like Midas, who dipped his tortured hands into the river Pactolus to be cleansed of his greed.

What hope is there for Piedas? Cassie wonders, moments before her head hits the sticky floor. A vision appears before her dark, unconscious eyelids.

‘Everything now you touch,’ says the river to Piedas, ‘turns to yours.’

‘Mine?’ wonders the weary king, casting his eyes over the verdant landscape that now belongs to him. Each detail now reveals itself in golden splendour—the waving limbs of his grassland, the jutting peaks of his mountains, the roiling herds of his antelope.

We can redetermine the value of the possessive, Cassie realises, as the crowd helps her to her feet.

‘You are thirsty,’ said Piedas to his wilting tulip, carrying water from his river in his palms.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 109 of Structured Visions, What makes you so special? You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

The dancing

Grey scale photo of a couple dancing
Photo by Serhii Kindrat

The heady talk of Freshman pretension swirls amidst the stench of pot smoke and beer in the crowded basement common room. Event horizons, postmodernism, chaos theory, minds blown. The only thing blowing Joel’s mind is the vortex of galactic tuition fees that admission to this selective, flaky college has thrust him into—a singularity of devouring debt. 

Even Freshman Writing offered no relief. What should have been a refuge of reassuring practicality on how to avoid a sentence splice and ensure tense consistency descended into a pseudo-philosophical discussion on the instability of metalanguage.

‘Any idiot can verb a noun,’ Joel had muttered in an unusual display of petulance, mortifyingly witnessed by the one classmate he would have preferred to impress, whose name (and everything else about her) remained a mystery. Chastened for his churlishness by a pitying glance from her dramatically lined eyes, he was smitten with a sudden certainty that she could see straight through his pathetic armor of contempt. 

‘Let me guess,’ he hears her say now, her breath a warm whisper on his defenseless neck. ‘You’re the kind of guy whose world is made of nouns.’

Whatever this means, it might once have been true. But now only the solidity of her palms on his shoulders keeps him on the ground, and her thumb on the base of his newly soft skull tethers him upward like a balloon in the moment before its release.

She does not say ‘Let’s dance,’ but ‘Let’s do the dancing,’ in honor of his former dependence on nouns. But now it’s the verb that brings him the stability he once yearned for. They dance, they’re dancing, they’ve never stopped dancing, nor will they ever, he hopes. May we dance forever is his silent prayer, or at least, he pleads, until the singular moment when the matter of his being is formed in the flux of their spiraling embrace.