The Day Before the Day Before Christmas

December 23. Two days after the Winter Solstice so we'll have more sunlight today than we had yesterday, but less than we'll have tomorrow. I look between the slats of the blinds covering my window, and see green leaves and red berries of a holly bush. Sunlight clear and sharp. 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Beaufort Wind Scale 0. When I went outside a moment ago, I shivered; a Moscovite would have tossed off his overcoat, I'm sure, and gamboled and frolicked in such balmy weather.
When I say the word "winter," I mean something quite different than what a Russian means when he says "winter." At 34.035388 latitude and-84.665166 longitude (http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html), my winter doesn't have the frozen lakes the Russian's has, though we each mean the same tilt of the globe in relation to the solar plane. If I brought a Russian friend -- say Ivan Ivanovich -- into my home and pointed at a chair and said, "Chair," and he pointed to the chair and said, "Chair" in Russian (you'll have to use your imagination, Cyrillic being unavailable in this blog), then Ivan and I mean the same thing in an empirically verifiable way. However, if a Palestinian and a Jew were to point to the same plot of turf, and both say, "Homeland," they would mean vastly different things.
So, at what point does a language leave off being a language and become more than a language? Can words in and of themselves be extra-lingual? If pointing at a chair identifies the label "Chair," what does the label "Chair" point at? If the word "Homeland" means the same thing in two different languages, yet the speakers still come to blows over the meaning, what hope is there for mutual understanding? If a chemist says, "H2O," and a man crawling through the desert says, "Water," who has a better understanding of reality?

Excuses, excuses

Things I have been doing lately include working on the bulletin for our church (Mt. Olivet Baptist in Acworth, Georgia; if any of y'all are in town Sundays or Wednesday nights and want to stop by, please do); putzing around with my family history (trying to get out a compiled genealogy of my maternal grandfather's descendants for distribution as a Christmas present to my relatives); working on rebuttals to statements Jehovah Witnesses make about the Holy Spirit and the crucifixion. Not that I'm particularly rabid about debunking their myths; it's just that I have a tendency to hold on to the things I've been told all my life. After all, if I accept the theory that the Earth is round when it looks flat in every direction I see, why shouldn't I accept the postulation that two thousand years ago, God allowed Himself to be hung on a crux immissa (the Latin cross) rather than a crux simplex (a stake)? The fact that I'm skeptical about the story of creation as presented in the Hebrew canon doesn't mean that I can't have fun toying around with the Greco-Hebrew myths of the first century. (A.D. or B.C.E., take your pick.) Wikipedia has a good article on the various forms of the cross at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_or_stake_as_gibbet_on_which_Jesus_died . I never realized that the stake was actually used as a torture/execution instrument, so I appreciate the JW's teaching me something.

First Words

In an attempt to make my initial post memorable, the best I could come up with was starting the title with the word "First." I like the idea of first being first. Like the first word of the Bible being "Bereshiyth" (the transliterated Hebrew) or "In the beginning" (the traditional English translation.) First is first. Beginning is beginning. That kind of thing. It somehow casts the whole idea of progress in a circle rather than a straight line. Self-description describing self. A great place to start: at the first, in the beginning.

For example, my first novel, The Flaming O Motel, which begins a trilogy, uses that circle-motif: O. The title of my projected second novel has it, too: O2 (Circle Squared). [The '2' should be superscript, but I haven't figured out how to do that in bloggish yet. If I knew how to HTML, I could probably get it right, but since I don't, I'll leave it for later.] And in the third novel of the series -- kaleidOscope -- the circle will reappear. (FYI, the word 'kaleidoscope' comes from the Greek for 'beautiful-shape vision.')

By way of credentials for what I write, I graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson with an M.A. in American Indian Studies where my graduate committee was kind enough to allow me to do my thesis as a collection of short stories. Several of my close friends were from the Tohono O'odham tribe, so although I don't feel that I have the moral authority to report for Tribal Americans, my views of Tribal Americans do have some legitimacy.

As for my credentials for how I write, short stories of mine have appeared in literary magazines such as The Madison Review, Crosscurrents, and Negative Capability. I have attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, and Ploughshares' International Fiction Writing Seminar at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands. I received a Professional Development Grant from the state of Arizona, and won the first Copper Award presented by the Society of Southwest Authors.

Okay. I think that's enough for the first step.