Orthoprax

It is difficult to write about the Fob, current or incurrent, partly because the passing of time has shattered some of the sense of solidarity that this website provided (this is, perhaps, simply my perception in being away from the medium for so many months), and partly because I am completely at a loss to define, in tones of symbological cuteness, the new members of Fob. Microsoft Word, which is rapidly supplanting King James as the ruler by which rhetorical brilliance is measured, suggests that “symbological” should be “hymnological”—there is, of course, an argument there, but I suggest that Word content itself with the mash that exists on the Ugly Swan blog and be content. Hymns there aplenty, and see where it gets us.

Where was I?

Ah, yes. Nattering. I want to say that our two new members need their own monikers, but at the moment the process of assignation seems overwhelmingly exhausting. I say this because I suspect that the most easy way to define them is in relation to me—I make this descent into solipsism because (let’s face it) I’m pretty Big Cheese in Ottoro, and anyway I was the point of articulation for their entrance into Fob. (“Point of articulation,” said my theory professor last year, over and over again, shearing the words uncleanly with her concave teeth. You may note that there is a lot of articulation in the word articulation, and a sound of pointing in point. This is theoryspeak; what I’m saying is that I invited my friends to a writing group and that a phrase sounds like what it is. Brilliant in its simplicity, and the man behind the curtain—Foucault, perhaps—takes a bow. Pay no attention to him.) Still, make no mistake—if we insist on a history slapped on a nametag for this new-timed twoesome, as long as we’re willing to allow for an initial lassitude, write one I can.

Canapés. Cannabis. Canopies. Cantaloupes. Can-cans. Cans of soup. Can-do attitudes. Cancers.

Naming is virulent, metastastic. No one—I am being frank, severe, playful—will read this save Mr/Master Fob (and every point of articulation in his progress from this space to that), The Th. That is (is That The Th.? That is The Th.), and me. I am, tonight, simultaneously brilliant and aching—the ligaments in my shoulder crack when I write this, like camera flares, like cereal; calisthenics or percussion. Percussion, doubtlessly—“through the cussing”.

Damn.

Melyngoch is Cerulean, flames on the range (bluer for having heard—against all representations!—a discouraging word; bless her).

Jeph is only what he is not. Write him, then, as not. Lower-case his name; make him mere (not)ation.

Ryan is a stair-railing with no stair, well-sanded pine. It’s the grain that you care about in a bit of wood, the grain and the cut. Almost, he convinces me to be a Christian (but without these chains, these chains).

editorgirl (write small letters large) is always to me a square of fine pink silk, rippled like a patch of healing skin.

***

Ahem. What more could we have done for our vineyard?

1. Play. When it was late in the evening, we should have bartered for five more minutes, for three, for one. We had a shocking disregard for the Rules of Existential Economics; we pinched our pennies. For what? Poetics? No one has yet, says the insomniac sage, written an opus on an early bedtime.

2. Fought. History slots its Greats with fighters; Ivan was Terrible on the field, not the meadow. There is a law written that we may bless the soldier’s sword more than the surgeon’s saw, and the pike more than the plow. Gather ye rose-bloods while you may, and make foray while the sun shines.

3. Struck, and struck often, when the irony was hot.

This business of naming those who will never know they’ve been named. It seems precious somehow, a bit disingenuous. Melnygoch Named me. There is that. Master/ister FOB Named himself, gathered into his name this circle, these other names. Thmazing Theric Named, Named, and Named again—he is also not, but the not is in what you think, his (given) Christian name insufficient for the task, needing fricative to frame it.

He will read this and say I am obscure. And so I am. An oblong, misshapen cure of the cancer of Names.

Tolkien. Boy. Youth of Fantasy. Delusional ingénue.

procussive, adj. Toward the cussing.

Damn.