Usual Silence

Utterly still. I got some flash paper and did some magic tricks on the back stoop. Off beat drumming. I like salmon, I like tuna, I like sardines four to the can. Crickets are 22% protein. Rain, and everything is saturated. I was just fixing to turn on Black Dell when the power went out. Then the quiet was virtually complete. Enough overcast light that I can back against a window and read. I make a cheese, salami, olives, and kimchi plate, eat with my fingers, using one hand to read; put on a bathrobe and a knit hat, start a fire. Just a little fire, to chase off the chill, enough heat to fry a small steak and two eggs, toast with jalapeno jam. Comparing variant spellings. Codifying language is no easy task. Idiota was originally someone who couldn't read Latin. All the text, hand-copied, on vellum or parchment, was in Latin. The information was all there, but in a language almost no one could read: how to raise wheat, how to build the Parthenon. It was all there. Greek, transcribed lovingly (Hesiod), into beautiful, fixed, Ciceronian Latin. With the addition of all that Roman engineering. AND, from the very beginning of recorded text, there's all this mysticism, fear, self-doubt, such a deep and strongly held desire to be told what to do. The Humanists are the thread, which was my point. Poggio Bracciolini had a great couple of years; 1416, 1417 he won thirty games, batted .442; found Vitruvius, in ten volumes, at St Gall, then Lucretius the next year. On a roll. The Vitruvius is fairly common, there are eighty copies (or so) of the original, when he found the Lucretius there was no other copy. There are two others, now, but this was a tenuous thread. It held, barely. A sidebar: Robert Johnson to Eric Clapton. I can't help it's that way. Twist and shout.