| Let us please learn new words that mean as much as direction: wife. |
That single cryptic line is the complete text of a poem by Richard Brautigan that I first read almost forty years ago. I still don’t quite get it, but for some reason it’s always struck me as hauntingly beautiful. And, following a momentous weekend, it feels like the right thing to post today.
Edited to add: Apparently this post was as cryptic as the poem. One commenter writes:
You make it sound like you would like to get married but have not taken all necessary steps.
In fact, I took all the necessary steps this weekend. It was a lovely wedding.
Under the heading of “I’m No Poet, But…”
Perhaps “direction:wife” is to be taken as the first part of the standard SAT type analogy question: A:B::C:D. If we need to find new words to come up with the second half of this analogy, it suggests that “direction:wife” describes a heretofore indescribable association, a unique relationship.
i read the colon like a pause. direction: wife is like magnetic north.
So what was so momentous about your weekend?
You make it sound like you would like to get married but have not taken all necessary steps Taking a direction toward a wife sounds promising but incomplete. What else could “Let us please learn new words that mean as much as direction: wife” mean?
Or, perhaps you find solace in directing your wife, telling her what to do; or perhaps fishing directedly for her the way Brautigan fished for trout in America? Perhaps you want to wrap up your thoughts or work as memorably as Brautigan did, as in “I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word ‘mayonnaise?'”
Regardless, I wish you well.
I admit I don’t get it. I have a sneaky suspiction that the poet might have planned on this. i.e. the point might be to make the audience go “huh?”.
Try generating some random integers and ask your mathy friends to “find the next one in the sequence”. :-)
My guess is that the last word is a prescient misprint for WiFi.
Told you I wasn’t a poet…Congratulations!
Mazel Tov!
Hope you’re not updating this blog on your honeymoon.
“In fact, I took all the necessary steps this weekend. It was a lovely wedding.”
Wow! Congratulations and best wishes for much happiness, Steve.
Sincerely,
Neil
So that’s your excuse for your unforgivable sloth? A likely story!
But hey, it’s your blog, so I’ll be polite and play along: Mazel Tov!
Congratulations Steve, just gone back to this one. I think we can now answer the question posed a couple of days ago,“Which is a more important weekend event, a significant one or a rather significant one?”
BTW, Steve, did it turn out partly sunny or partly cloudy at your wedding?
Neil: Thanks for asking. The weather, along with everything else, was wholly beautiful.
What the heck are you doing blogging?
Have a great week and stop wasting time on us.