Post 22: Intermission post

This blog post feels a bit like an interlude. Not really an interlude to my other blog posts, but mainly just an interlude to my started, attempted, not yet written posts. I actually began this blog with the intention that every post would be done in one motion--that there wouldn’t be able to be a post that was started without being finished--that each post would be completed as one fell swoop, as a not-too-thought-out impression of something. But, I seem to be drifting toward posts that want to be longer, or that have more time-consuming thought-projects. Anyway, this post takes on the status of an intermission in that it seems to be…more meaningless than not…a very short tale…not hugely questioning...a stand-up comedian in the midst of a regular old open mic night of sorts.

I’m writing about this tin of (presumably) cinnamon that I recently saw at a coffee shop. (Very recently, to be sure, as this is exactly the kind of material that would so quickly fade to black if not immediately pinned up by writing.) When I saw this labeled container, my immediate impression was that the word “cinnamon” was spelled incorrectly. My second impression was that the word was in fact spelled correctly, but that there was something to its appearance that made it look wrong, or at least “off.” I had a few theories (not quite “theories” but, you know…): 1. aside from the “i,” there was a strangeness to the top of every other letter looking the same, 2. the text happened to be an unusually unadorned presentation of this word (it’s a word often dressed up in serifs and swirly letters--at least this is the case in my mind’s eye), 3. it was just one of those words that looks a little different than how it sounds. In thinking of corresponding word/thing pairings, I sort of landed on this thought that an individual word, a “word in the world,” has a way of always being out of context, and therefore always a little “what are you doing here?”. Words not in their specialized settings of being surrounded by other words (in a book, an article, maybe even in a sentence) are always surrounded mostly by a lack of language. “cinnamon” literally sits on a language-less surface. Whereas the opposite seems true for things--they’re always in the context of other things, other objects. A word in the world is like a physical object replacing one word of a book (if it were to). Which is what likely gives uncontexted words their punchiness--they’re somehow eternally not at home. And something about a word naming a thing like "cinnamon" also gains funniness in straying even farther from its word-home, while at the same time establishing itself as a stranger from the object world. (Is funniness what this is?) (Do name-words often seem to be at a certain point on the word-->thing spectrum? When are these words closer to one end or the other? Do they ever seem like they’re trying to get home, or trying to run away?)