On·o·mat·o·poe·ia/änəˌmadəˈpēə,ˌänəˌmädəˈpēə/
noun: the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named (e.g., cuckoo, sizzle ).
…
He looked at her adobe complexion, coffeedark eyes and opulent, hefty toss of clotted midnight hair cascading forward over her shoulders and all he could tell her was that she was vash, a curious word from his native tongue that she had never heard and did not really understand. As the young night began, it was a word she would taste over and over again with herself through the festivities. Feeling it. Tongueing it. Certain words were a nightline to intuition. “Onomato-something,” she thought. She assumed it meant more than “looking good” or that she was presentable for the gala, which was certainly passable but hardly the aim.
Vash meant many things, as words are drifters from their marks and can wear many true masks. But in the main vash would bespeak the thick, long, heavy, stainless, and simple darks we encounter in life. When Nyx strode her nighted gown across the dying eventides, it was certainly vash. When dark chocolate melted in meandering rivulets in the TV ads, it was all so intensely vash. Vash was the purring sh crouched within sexual that you had to lick behind your teeth to say. There was no bright vash, and only certain races could even be it. The chilly dark of oblivion it certainly was not. Not hardly. Rather, vash was smooth and charged with deep intent and vivid mood. The sultry word meant a warm kind of dark that enveloped things, evocative of subtle, darkling texture plunged in shaded depths; the smooth, runny tessellations in the lacquered skin of pythons; the faint and beckoning pattern of sumptuous indigo off-darks sidewound through blacker satin even still; or the strands of sparse light-catchers in inky, weighty tresses. And all of it was vash. Just like her, and like the limousine from which she emerged, sleek and mercurial in the popping flashbulbs. Just like the midnight metro skyline with its faint complexus of twinkles in the pitch, and all the pretty lights digesting through the long, mysterious snake of twilight.
Charmed opposites. Dark energies. Warm cinders. Steely jet. Satin shadow. Nocturnal-femme.
She was so exquisitely vash.
-Drake Dunaway
…
I was thinking of getting a ‘tiny home.’ I’m a severer minimalist than most other singles, I live alone, and I could pocket $400 more each month without noting a difference.
Whether I do it or not, things like this are what Americans should be doing; finding better ways of doing things, instead of the costly loyalty to ‘it’s always been done this way,’ with all its concomitant bank lobbying, regulations, FDR Era regulations to make you buy an obnoxious McMansion and indebt yourself like ‘a good American.’
Tiny, customizable homes never caused a financial meltdown. I don’t know a single person in my peer group that uses all of their home, but Heavens are they paying for every inch.
…
Most people were at one time magical thinkers. Then they grew up.
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- Who can be an oracle? A virgin, of course.
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- When is her sight lost? When she gives a man all her knowledge.
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- Where do I build my altar? On a mountain or hill. Where else?
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- What animal teaches us to know? The serpent. Who else?
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- What must I do to approach? Immerse in water. What else?
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- What cancels poison? More like poison. Everyone knows that.
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- What gives curse? A like object accursèd. Obviously.
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- What shape is the soul? The soul is avian. All men know this.
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- What is the local shaman by day? By day he’s a raven, O simple one.
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- What of the man who walks idly? This man shall die! You know that!
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- Where does heaven touch down? At the Earth Navel. This is so plain.
- We worship the Bright One; we worship against the Dark One.
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- Where does one find the Earth Navel? Search: it finds you.
One spends their childhood with Crayolas drawing smiley faces on a lemon-yellow sun and idly thinks like this. I think it’s the best context for understanding Leviticus. Bedouins in Sinai draw in crayon a house for G-d. They draw a cloud above it with a 
smiley face and play house with G-d, and G-d lets them. Everything is intuitive, felt, and mutually understood in this warm and cozy sandbox. Nothing is systematized or articulated. G-d speaks, and each ritual impulse is felt and done.
“The two sons of Aaron die.”
“Why?”
“They brought strange fire.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It is so very clear what that means.”
…
Blade Runner is one of those classics that is pretty self-contained as a stand-alone film and a balking venture to unseal. But one for which die-hard fans like myself have always yearned for more. Perhaps this very wistfulness unrequited is what makes a film of such astounding acclaim and bold vision truly enduring through decades of cult fandom; there’s so much promise and just enough is bound up forever in mysterium to avoid any trace of bathos. Religions know how to wield mystery in all the proper doses. So do cults. And so it is with some mixed and yet pollyanaish optimism that I anticipate the sequel, Blade Runner 2049. It certainly better be worth the restraining order I get slapped with for kidnapping one of my friends to see it with me. So far, it looks as visually scrumptious as the original, produced by a topflight dream-team of Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve who deliberately jagged for the R-rating and kept green screen CGI to an absolute minimum.
In the original masterpiece depicted a dark, despairing, and alchemical world of techno-mysticism backwashed with a weighty yet mesmerizing nihilism. It was always raining. People were packed like sardines. Everyone – including our protagonist – was world-weary and sick of life, pining in an unspeakable darkness. The deepest darkness there is. The darkness that fosters our most achingly poignant musings and beckon us to search for truer life than this. And this setting launches four star-crossed “sons of G-d” on a perilous fall from heaven and onto a Gilgamesh-like quest for answers to age-old dilemmas swirling around identity, memory, the precious ephemerality of life, and the meaning of death’s inevitability. These world-forsaking dreamers are pitted against a life-weary, plain-clothes Det. Deckard, the hard-boiled anti-hero who enforces the cruel world order and answers to the paymasters of his epoch. Seldom have such films concerning the Creator and Created flipped the probing questions onto the demiurge itself (the demiurge being we proud humans in becoming creator elohim ourselves) in quite the same way we as humans do to G-d and Providence.
I’ve resolved that by the Law of Attraction, I will make myself vulnerable enough to be let down outrageously, pining vainly that this sequel can stand up to its parent. Here’s to hoping it bombs in theaters and spawns four more decades of loyal cultists ready to drink the Kool-Aid, like yours truly. Here’s to hoping the film bores millions of suburbanites and their obese, ADHD children out of theaters.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;– Ode, By: Arthur O’Shaughnessy
Photos courtesy of http://altinyhomes.com/, All Walls: http://allswalls.com/ , Edward S. Curtis, Library of Congress
© Drake Dunaway, 2017
Sleepwalker's Row 