I suspect my fascination with etymologies is rooted in the two semesters of Latin I took in high school. I don’t remember a lick of it, but I have remembered how to break words down and root out the bits that can (maybe) tell you something on their own, which might get you by if you find yourself in a jam (the jam, at the time, being standardized tests). I am by no means a linguist; I’ve no formal experience with the inheritances of words. They’re a playground, a rabbit hole. I admittedly enjoy how irresponsibly I follow their transformations, considering how the parts of a word have made up that word, and how they mislead, how easily a word’s present form can overwrite its past and still arrive at the same understanding for all the wrong reasons, and how then each root word leads you to suspect it is the root of another. Suffuse: suf-, alternate of sub-, meaning under, beneath, up to; but ‘fuse.’ I think: parallel to infusion, but, while infuse has pleasant connotations, suffuse casts a glance towards submission, willing or unwilling. It walks a fine line between terror and bliss, between a hot shower after a hard day and waterboarding. Of course, this is trumping things up quite a bit, akin to exploring the significance of two plus two equalling four by means of numerology. ‘Suffuse’ means, simply, ‘to pour liquid over a surface,’ though pour is misleading. One Established Dictionary says ‘overspread,’ instead of pour, even as it says the root Latin word is ‘to pour.’ (Unexpectedly, ‘fountain’ has nothing to do with fundere, the Latin root.) Or: one would expect ’sect’ to follow from the root ‘to cut.’ A sect, one could assume, is a small group separated from— by an incision, a de-cision— but still part of a larger group. But ’sect’ comes from ’secta’ for ‘following.’
‘Do your work, and I shall know you,’ [Emerson] says in ‘Self-Reliance’. ‘Work’ is a way to confront the essential facts of existence and to discover in doing so the power of human desire which turns facts into mythologies and mythologies into facts. – Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature, p. 94
Perhaps the most interesting aspect, the thing that keeps me going through Roubaud’s not always fun to read The Great Fire of London, is the dissonance of reading in the present tense. We often consider grammatical tense and the effect it has on what is being narrated. But rarely do we consider the tense of the activity of writing, except in such rare circumstances when it becomes so problematic, by the author’s intention or not, that we cannot help but notice it. There is a bifurcation between experiencing self and writing self. How an author handles such a dilemma, in an individual work or in their general method, I find to be one of the most interesting moves an author can make (can, because many do not). Read the rest of this entry »
