Off the Record

Translation. I was sitting with TR, at the bar in the pub, when the brain trust from the college came in. Drew asked me if I had a Latin dictionary, and I told him I had several; he wanted to make certain that a phrase was translated correctly. I told him that colloquialism would corrupt the phrase, that Cicero would have used it somewhere, and when he emailed me later it was with a quote from Cicero. It feels good to be correct. I'd never read the quote before, but I was sure that's where he would find it. Sequitur stellarum could mean 'follow the stars', it could mean 'watch where you're stepping', or any number of other things. I'm struck, translating Latin, or Old English, that I only know, generally, what's being said. One of my Chinese friends asked me what the hell I meant by 'sucking hind tit' and when I explained what I meant, in elementary terms, she knew exactly what I meant. They had a phrase for it. There is no way we could possibly be understood, and yet there are moments. When the transept meets the vault. The moment when architecture comes to bear. Loading becomes an issue. Describes an actual thing: two dancers dancing, the fleas desiccated in 24 pounds of salt. I'm sympathetic, to a certain degree, with any lost cause. It's so lovely, cool and clear just after dawn, that I take a mug of coffee and roll a smoke out on the back porch. It was almost completely still and quiet, just the occasional puff of air that stirs the leaves on a specific set of branches, and I fell into a kind of reverie, thinking about wind. In my mind's eye I can picture air, slightly warmer than the ground, flowing over mountains, the transfer of energy, and the amassed 'front' moving out when certain conditions have been met. Wind must involve the existence of atmosphere and temperature differential. I thought I had a book about wind, but if I do I couldn't find it; I did find a book on tides and another about dust, both of which I set aside. It was the puffs of wind that interested me. Wondering if they were generated separately or somehow split off from a larger mass. How long does a puff of wind exist? I've watched the effect of wind narrowing in a funnel, swirling paper in an alley and floating plastic bags to unbelievable heights, and there's an algorithm for that, I'm sure; but camping once, on the long grass prairie, I watched wind fragments that must have once been part of a larger whole asserting themselves. When grain crops are destroyed by wind they're called 'shattered'. I almost always get side-tracked by specific words. I was trying to identify a mushroom yesterday. I wasn't going to eat it, I just wanted to know what it was. It was an abortive Clitocybe. My identification of anything is suspect, I thought geese grew from barnacles until I reached middle-age. I have to go sleep.