to stick ; to adhere ; ( fat ) -- synaloepha ; relay ; delay {aleiphein:toannoint}

the trajectory of most song is : what did Arepo grow ?

English , with its double-wide blue , with its shame that does not protect us , is big enuf that all its frailties are our every category : catechism , flora , synapse , strake . ( the former pair are one thing ; the latter pair are one thing )

but scham is helpful to Teutons ,

the Japanese speak when they speak of love (ai) with Po-Chü-i's Han tongue , &

the aloha of Hawai'i is too Samoa's arofa -- we'd translate it love -- that calls louder for strangers than kith .

from a letter :

"mal suereg targan tavtaiyuu?" is a Mongolian greeting. it easily approximates our "how's things?", and means literally "I hope your animals have been fattening nicely." I like it for two reasons: firstly, I seem to have become utterly a yeoman of awkwardnesses, raising on my own plot a cabbage-n-taters of what-to-says, fractured domestic potteries, &c -- whole 9, you know the type -- smiles and nods, that what-do-you-say of it, ugh. so I think it might make a nice freshwater inquiry to sluice afield in one of my interminal processions of polite serenities and concerned others. "no really, how ARE you?" "fine, you know, cows fat as Olmec heads far as a Datsun'll sputter."

second, and what's more, it's actually beautiful, that connection; "goodbye" in English is literally "God be with you," in Amharic you ask how one's spent the last night, the Russian for hello & Latin for goodbye are both "be healthy." but these horizonless people live in such a way that anyone knows exactly what to inquire about in a friend's or stranger's life -- it's specific without being disingenuous, relevant but not needling or cute. it's a same kernel on which the Forbidden City is built, where the Helmsman once slept; the same one that started the Canterbury Tales; that gave us our talk. I suppose it's to be expected that a confident, sturdy thing shld be stone in the parturition of so much, but I'm floored by it, and that they still have a same word for "yurt" "house" and "home" -- even "place" -- so "yurt", which is our pronunciation of the Mongolian "ger", is the same word they'd use to describe where you or I live, and if we were headed home on the F train they'd say we were headed yurtward, and if we met up at the Carnegie Deli it wld be, in Mongolian, an eating-yurt. all of which is to say, it seems to me a pure way of approaching things, to envision the world as a pasture, to attend to its circus of relevances as pastoral, and manage, as the Mongols clearly have in history, not to be dampened out of reality by it.

interstet : recently some genetic demographers working with an exceptionally grand sample of men from across Asia -- Tashkent to Kamchatka , el nueve entiro -- discoverd a prodigious fleck of Y-chromosome , minim on the seminal Word , a single genetic peculiar to a full 16 million Asian men . since the Y is passt identical thru the seed , this meant : 16 million men with a single common ancestor . the branch-out was estimated as being 1,000 years ago ( sevral hundred as a margin of error ) , and was traced back to , all the way to , all the way to , all the way to , Mongolia . the only person this seems liable to have been , then , is Temujin -- sunspot in the sense meaning great justice -- whom we know best as Genghis Khan . science wld guess an average man wld have 800 direct descendants living today ; Temujin makes Raamses II look like Isaac Newton . a last piece of evidence sadly can't be got well -- our bastard uncle Djugashvilli deposed the last reigning grandson & had the Ikh Korg -- Temujin's burial spot -- razed from the minds , and Temujin's spirit banner -- watch-keeping remnant -- purloind from the land , of this man who is history's Great & Gentle light . two teams search now -- one for good Genghis , the other for Khublai , who founded the Yuan & first cast the prohibitions up which China ( still in Russian calld by the name of the Western tribes the Mongols conquered to get in , Kitaj ) trellised itself to firstness , that private firstness whose call it still attends . two other words in Russian that come from the Mongols : bogatyr , the heroic horsemen of the old Slavic epics , who ulaan is red so ulaan bataar is the city of the Red Hero , a name as beautiful as Addis Abeba , the new flower ; & dengi , the form ever plural , from the Mongol for gold , meaning money . by all accounts Temujin wept often & readily .

friend is an interesting word -- it, like most languages' words for friends, is from love, but, and what is less usual, all the words related to it have disappeared. Fried and Fred, when they're used as parts of names, mean friend, friendly, or peaceful. (So Frederick means king of peace, rick being the Germanic for king, cognate with the Latin rex and too with the English reign and regnal -- interestingly, Vladimir can also mean King of Peace, tho I think its mir is more aptly the world.) The Romans called Friday Veneris Dies, "Day of Venus". When the Germans came pithing thru, besides absorbing the wonders of spaghetti cookery and Catholic guilt, they became pretty keen on the days-with-names business as well, and so translated "Veneris Dies" as "Frigedag", which means Frigg's Day, "Frigg" being the Germanic goddess of love, her name from the same root. This is why Friday was originally Buy A Friend A Fish Day, before everyone realized fish deserved friends and friends don't deserve fish.

but what I'm really getting at may be Richard Feynman, the physicist who demonstrated that, at the sub-atomic level, the dynamic balance on which matter is perched -- an atom being best understood, after all, not as a system of discrete motions but rather as a cloud of conflicting probabilities of configuration -- exists between forces of torqued passage not only back and forth thru space, but back and forth thru time as well, with any particular subatomic particle accelerating into the near future and then braking hard into the recent past, unendingly, thru all time. this is obviously a strange phenomenon, but real, and, in addition to physicist and story-collector, Feynman was obsessed with Tuva, politically a republic of the Russian Federation but culturally Mongolian. to read his correspondence, he saw with a shocking, cudgel-like unity: he cld intuit the role of bizarre particle physics the way most of us intuit gravity, and his sense of Tuva -- horizonless, relevant but uncute -- was, somehow, crucial to his ability to trellis the vines of a reality made medusiform by uncommonly nuanced understandings into a cohesive, glyptic, manifold world. and that is certainly related to what beautiful is.

life is the thing that includes itself . we start as fish & make our own landfall ( landfall in the sense meaning loss of hysteria ) ; because of continuity it is literally the case that each of us was a reptile . we emerge into a language shaded by technology -- 4 ages , a fylfot , over us , like Temujin , a kind of safety , a terebinth -- and understand the magics around us accordingly . or : it's obvious once you've traveled that frommage ain't cheese . Jeremiah talks abt circumcizing the heart of Israel . all the cognates of our word black mean usually white , occasionally blazing -- belyj , bianca , blank , bella . that's why Uncle Izzy writes :

We set up mast & sail on that swart ship

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping

from the Nahuatl :

And so I the singer gathered

Blossoms to bedeck the nobles,

Cover them with beauteous garments,

Fill their noble hands with flowers.