Braingasm (Part II)

So the other day I had one of those moments when you figure out a truncated word you've been using is part of a rich etymological history stretching back to that first gurgling (or burbling) metazoan lost on a coral reef somewhere. Basically, this was equivalent to when I learned "diss" was short for "disrespect". That was some mind-shaking shit, I tell you.

Yesterday's word: "dig". In the sense that beats and subsequent hepcats used it: "so I was walking down the street, digging the old neighbourhood, when I run into a guy digging a hole in the ground. I'm like, "What'cha digging?", and he's like "this hole", and I'm like "I dig"." But all that aside, I found a possible candidate: "to dig" is short for "to dignify". Bear with me. Why would you ever dig a moment? Nobody digs scenes of horror or tragedy. You may stand transfixed, or numbed and cant's look away, or possessed with some fiendish curiosity. But you don't dig it. Digging is something apart. Digging is what you do when you see a child teaching an old man how to ride a unicycle. Digging is what you do to graffitti that says "beauty is our only weapon". You dig the bum's rant if it's particularly evocative. You dig a natural lawn drizzled with warm, slow rain, thinking "this is right". (This happened to me that day.) You dig trees and squirrels as they go about their treeing and squirreling. You can even dig your own mind from time to time: you can daydream or invent stories about your retinal flares or floaters. (I have one long, malleable floater I have named Xerxes the Hunter. Why not? And another thin, put-together one I call Salah the Dandy. Again, why not? And I'm working on the dozens of transient floaters--the supporting cast, if you will.) You can dig the somplexity of paint peeling off a billobard. And so on and so forth. But it doesn't even have to be enthusiastic. It can be passionate and passive digging. This kind of digging can be unnoticed by everybody. I'm doing it right now to my hands, and still managing to accomplish something. In this way you can listen to absolutely anyone.

So why is this so important? I believe I've found a concept to give some tangibility to what I try to do as a writer. (As a semi-productive, unofficial, prolix, I'd-starve-if-this-was-my-livelihood writer, if you care to call that a writer.) I try to dignify moments. Mundane moments. I try to extract a Hero Cycle or dramatic arc from things like old Mrs. Sadat struggling to order her angina medication at the pharmacy. Because the modern world bulldozed our psyches, but we still have the resources to fight back. That's why art is important. It trains you to find the "poetry" in anything. Yes, anything. That's why I prefer "digging" over alternatives like "turning into art" or "beautifying" or other pronouncements in that vein. If you can find some way to dignify the essentially objective mindlessness, the almost-thing-in-itselfness of, say, an SN2 mechanism, then you are closer to finging God than millions of candle-lighters and well-wishers. Then your art has saved you, and has indirectly saved the world. You have achieved total mental Feng Shui.

Consider: "History is replete with examples of what happens when any group of authorities do not have to answer to empirical evidence but are free to define truth as they see fit. None of the examples has a happy ending. Why should it be otherwise with therapy?"