Three from “Etymologies”

The time came to build a permanence, for which was sought an architect, who formed all forms first in the mind. But which? To understand each form, another was needed: the lines of a blueprint, the marks of an alphabet, the modeling of a diorama. These, too, took explanation: schools of thought to interpret the lines, a grammar police to stay on script, a rhetoric and its dictator to rally model citizens—while others tried to make sense of these in books full of diagrams, jargon, theoretical models, one of which said: “Beware the architect. The ‘master builder’ of the ancients cannot help but construct form on top of form when searching for an ideal, each layer obscuring the plain connection of things: as when two people, with a mere touch, know they could never formulate what they mean to each other.”

To enter Babel, one must follow Hebrew Babhel on the way from Akkadian bab-ilu, the Gate of God—but only ruins remain of mankind’s attempt to converse one on One. A shorter journey ends at Merriam-Webster, the monument of an heretical sect that attempted to define all of His creation. The orthodoxy noted its curious feature: a word’s meaning is determined by how it is used in relation to other words, whose meanings are found likewise: the monument was built on no foundation. A search ensued for the loose word that, if pulled out, would cause indescribable destruction.

The mind that shapes the bumblebee’s name out of onomatopoeic bombeln is in turn shaped by the name of the bumblebee, which comes to evoke in the mind afternoons of anab-e-shahi and beards entangled, his scent now as distant as the summer it sowed, ripe years in which we could not tell the bee from the bumble, and to which the bumblebee, in its briefness, paid no mind.