Where any-angled light would congregate

I like that Philip Larkin, who likened churchgoing to funereal tourism, can yet imagine a religion, can raise his glass to something infinite.

This is “Water.”

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

This is water

Some commencement speeches earn the status of legend. One of those belongs to David Foster Wallace. He spoke at Kenyon College in 2005 (read it here). 

He starts with a story about two young fish swimming. An older fish asks, as they swim by, “how's the water?” After a pause, one young fish turns to the other and says, “what the hell is water?” His speech, deliberately not “grandly inspirational,” but urgent and honest, begs the graduates not to forfeit consciousness as they grow into their prosperous, respectable lives. Bluntly and earnestly, he argues that the authentic life is about attention: how you attend to life, and to other people; how you school your thoughts into worship of “some infinite thing” that matters; how to keep telling yourself “this is water, this is water.” 

Three years after giving this astonishing speech, Wallace committed suicide.  I don't know how, nor would I speculate about why, yet I can't help but wonder if he drowned.  

Give birth again to the dream

My acronymitis has turned into a full-blown case of white collar blues, so reading a bunch of commencement speeches from American colleges has left me feeling both inspired and sad. They're mostly from thinkers, talkers, writers, artists who tell their own stories of youthful aspiration, post-graduate let-down, career cul-de-sac, and triumphal creative emergence, and end with a stirring carpe diem. I'm encouraged by a persistent narrative of figuring out who you are, how you might bring your “deep gladness” to meet “the world’s deep hunger” (Frederick Buechner), how far passion can take you on the road to an authentic life, but at the same time I don't think I'm very far into that narrative yet. I'm post-post-graduate; ill-fitted and ill-at-ease, grateful for the money, doubtful of the value, wanting something much, much more, not quite knowing what it is.  Perhaps Maya Angelou can help. If you can forget that the dawn she refers to is Bill Clinton's inauguration, her poem is another stirring call to knowing the who, and the what, and the why, and the how all at once.  

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.

What is it but a dream?

In the spirit of the acronym, today's peom shall be an acrostic: acros coming from Greek and meaning “end or outermost.” It's from Through the Looking Glass (1871) and is built on the full name of the real-life Alice: Alice Pleasance Liddell. You'll notice the similarity to a well-known nursery rhyme, which I discovered predates the poem by at least a couple of decades. The first printing of “Row, row, row your boat” was in 1852, so no doubt it was being sung by Victorian children for some years prior. What better, on a wintery Friday, to drift into the dreamy world of Lewis Carroll?

A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July -

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear -

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream -
Lingering in the golden gleam -
Life, what is it but a dream?

OMG! AATOTW!

I wouldn't presume to out-Watson Don Watson by saying any more about management language than he has already so ably said, but here's a word or two about acronyms. Now, technically, an acronym is a word made from initial letters (UNESCO, Radar, Qantas etc) not just a bunch of initials, but since there's no really satisfyingly technical word for a bunch of letters, and bunches of letters seem to be colonising the language at an alarming rate, I'll use 'acronym' here to refer to the wide substitutionary use of bunched capital letters in place of words. I think there are two main reasons people use acronyms. Firstly, they use them to save time. But whose time? By compressing the words, the speaker or writer saves time by transferring the burden of cognitive interpretation onto the hearer or reader. Like deciphering 'txt' language (which I find brain-curdling), unpacking acronyms is an added layer of process for the recipient of communication, which she usually has to do rapidly and imperceptibly, and without compromising her reception of the message as a whole. The user of acronyms is essentially saying: 'my time is more valuable than yours.' The second reason is related to the first. People use acronyms to demonstrate their gnostic initiation into a particular tribe, their insider status. Their time is more valuable precisely because they have been initiated, because they are on first-letter terms with all the important phrases.

Having said that, I regularly encounter acronyms that, when expanded, don't make much more sense than a random bunch of letters; indeed many of their component words could be reversed, replaced or interchanged without violence to the sense - such as it is.