I cannot really go down anymore
to all the rooms where the doors are closed
I can enter them
but there is an eerie silence
even the dust hangs still in the air
I cannot go down there
because I closed the doors
because I am afraid to throw away the key
In the shadow I found my relief
a door that is closed
something to hold on to
They don’t mind the rain
from pouring in
as long as the other
stays out
Prompt: Where did the word dumb come from?
The English word dumb originally had nothing to do with intelligence. It meant unable to speak.
It comes from Old English dumb (pronounced roughly “doom”), meaning mute, silent, unable to speak. This in turn comes from the Proto-Germanic word dumbaz, which had the same meaning.
You can see related words in other Germanic languages:
Interestingly, English and Dutch took different paths:
This kind of semantic shift is common. Words describing physical conditions often develop figurative meanings. For example:
So the original sense of dumb was simply silent or unable to speak. The modern meaning of stupid is a much later development.
491 Another reason for solitude!– A: So you intend to return to your desert?- B: I am not quick moving, I have to wait for myself- it is always late before the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude- so as not to drink out ofeverybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul – and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.
I didn’t expect the mess
when you opened up
but I will take you apart
remove what is rotten in you
and straighten you out
not because I love you
but to make you
yourself again
love plays no role
in this world
I need your past
In part
your outer skin
in place
so I can replace
your spine
to fit
Tomorrow
we break it down
in order
to build it up
like yesterday
without the order
It is complicated
I know what I see
but do you see
what I see
so we can argue
It grew naturally
bending to the light
was cut off straight
and later painstakingly
bent in place
At one time Zarathustra too cast his delusion beyond man, like all the afterworldly. The work of a suffering and tortured god, the world then seemed to me. A dream the world then seemed to me, and the fiction of a god: colored smoke before the eyes of a dissatisfied deity. Good and evil and joy and pain and I and you-colored smoke this seemed to me before creative eyes. The creator wanted to look away from himself; so he created the world. Drunken joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to lose himself. Drunken joy and loss of self the world once seemed to me. This world, eternally imperfect, the image of an eternal contradiction, an imperfect image-a drunken joy for its imperfect creator: thus the world once appeared to me. Thus I too once cast my delusion beyond man, like all the afterworldly. Beyond man indeed? Alas, my brothers, this god whom I created was man-made and madness, like all gods! Man he was, and only a poor specimen of man and ego: out of my own ashes and fire this ghost came to me, and, verily, it did not come to me from beyond. What happened, my brothers? I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself. And behold, then this ghost fled from me. Now it would be suffering for me and agony for the recovered to believe in such ghosts: now it would be suffering for me and humiliation. Thus I speak to the afterworldly. It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds, this and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor, ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.
I don’t want to do it
but I will draw you
how you were
and how you now are
not that you will ever look at it
but
just for my own sanity
I ordered uneven sizes
of panels
for building walls
and what have you
I planned how to use them
but not how
Any thought system in me
has a function
but the truth is
you don’t need any of them
I was wondering
what keeps you together
because just the parts
and the sum of it
fall short
it should not work
but I understand now
you cling on to reasons