The Exilarch’s Solarium

Heaven is wherever you are, 
Scattered over places near and far, 
Sent by sylphian radar from the nearest star, 
A sirenian chimera the color of feldspar. 
From the solarium where your songs play, 
Chalices of smiles emanate hollow light 
Off the mantel where a fire melts away 
The iron traps of my stubborn might. 
You've eroded a mountain, a pillar of salt, 
A man of mirages destitute of convictions, 
Misplaced among the laburnums of Conwy. 
Look to the west, o patient one, 
'Cross Cathedrals of Hope that glitter 
O'er all the waves of the ocean spray, 
Drawn to the sky with every breath 
Inhaled from the barren face of the moon. 
Downtrodden the crystal angels play, 
Above quays where the castle displays 
Melancholy eyes of deep dismay, 
Shedding tears upon a Galilee bay. 
This state of mind, these material illusions, 
Eulogize sly whispers off the window sill, 
Searching those lost skies of seclusion 
For stray threads of the scent you left. 
Now Judea's seraphim of gypsies 
Sing your hollow songs of yesterday, 
As I sit here holding a sunken chalice 
By the blue light of the frozen mantel. 
Where are you my sweet, my little lorikeet? 
The virtue of patience has grown weary, 
Fried into nothing by the wyverns of time. 
If I'd known it would take this long; 
That these sylvan trails of yellow sawgrass 
Swaying under the sun lead to nowhere; 
That a solitary thistle withering in a silver vase 
Would be the only thing you left me, 
All this heartache could have been spared. 

The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, David George Haskell

Ecologist David Haskell picked a spot in a Tennessee forest that he'd visit almost daily for an entire year. His observations at this spot, which he called a mandala, would serve as the basis for each of the journal entries he decided to publish in The Forest Unseen. He comments on many different things that are bound by a common thread: the seemingly spiritual ability of nature to diversify itself as much as possible. With a poet's sense of perception, Haskell writes about things like the crystallography of snowflakes, hermaphroditic snails, the migratory patterns of birds (along with their unique anatomy), the communicative power of plants, the mutualism between many species of insects, and the strange reproduction of fungi. Those are just the things I remembered most from reading it. There are many other wonders of the natural world that he touches on, all brought on by events in the mandala throughout the year. Incidentally, he calls this spot a mandala because to him it represents a microcosm of the universe. 

The Forest Unseen's unique merging of poetic science reminded me of The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie. Anyone who enjoyed this book should consider giving Murchie a try. 

Accommodation Signifiers: How Languages Are Transformed into New Ones

 Accommodation Theory says that we tend to mimic the expressions, gestures, and vocal patterns of people we like, strengthening our bonds between them.  We accommodate their nuances of language into our own, either because we find them charming, clever, or amusing, etc.  I'd like to expand on this theory by proposing that it's responsible for the shifting of most, if not all, languages in the world.  How it happens is an originator "invents" a certain style of speaking, whether they are aware of it or not, and if it catches on it may spread through a region and literally contribute to the language everyone is speaking. 

Think about someone you met who had such an attractive speech pattern that it changed your own.  Maybe you only spoke that way around this person, which is often the case, but it's possible that you started speaking that way around others too.  And if so, maybe they found it attractive the same way you did.  If it kept spreading, then in theory this one style of speaking could affect the entire population of a community.  Similarly, new words become invented when the friends of the inventor latch onto them.  [Words like selfie and twerk had to come from somewhere, didn't they?]  They can use these words in their own vocabulary and spread them around to other social groups, which may continue to spread them, like a chain reaction, until they become a regional attraction.  By the same token, expressions, dialects, and accents will spread if enough people latch onto them. 

Each of these inventions of language are what I call Accommodation Signifiers.  Often there will be many different signifiers acting on a language at once.  Certainly, they don't always come from the same person; rather, they come from a great number of people in different social groups throughout the region in which a language is changing.  I believe the sum of all these signifiers is what modifies languages, causing them to change into new ones once a community becomes isolated from its previous nation of speakers, where the language they'd once spoken had been more universally distributed.  For example: after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin- its original language- got broken up into regional dialects like Spanish, French, and Italian.  Each of these regions had their own signifiers, which morphed Latin into all the languages we know that evolved from it.  This phenomenon can be likened to the way animals evolve once they are isolated from the rest of their species.  Culture takes its course in the same way nature does.