New Orts #112

March 8 MMXXVI

Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being. In the fairy tale we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift.

This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through. Of closure. It’s all nonsense.
Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.

— both, Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations

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EPEOLATRY: the worship of words. The word was coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-94), American physician, professor, author and poet, in his book, The Professor of the Breakfast Table, published in 1860. Holmes writes: “Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified.” The word is derived from Greek epos, “word”, and latreia, “worship”.

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words, perhaps about the Orts project:

This is my letter to the World . . .
— Emily Dickinson

I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it.
— John Cage, in Lecture on Nothing, 1949

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