“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Because the mind (which may in the end be a full-body phenomenon) is the cup that lifts the world to our lips to be tasted — a taste we call reality — it is difficult to examine the cup itself, to observe the inner workings of the mind as it sips questions and turns them over with the tongue of thought to form ideas, to render a world. We can’t will it, because the will… read article

A pun is best delivered without announcing itself as a pun. Those ungifted at wordplay tend to underline, boldface and italicize their every attempt at a pun, most of which are already feeble. Thus, the pun’s bad reputation and the ensuing groans. In contrast I love a good, subtle, almost anonymous pun, which ought to detonate like a boobie-trap. The resulting intellectual burst of recognition is pure satisfaction. English is amenable to punning because our language is forever gravid, draws from so many sources and tends to be overrun with synonyms and homonyms. The OED defines pun precisely and without a nod to the comic:  “The use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words.”   But of a specific kind. Charles Lamb tended to take a shotgun approach to punning, assuming at least one of the pellets will hit its target. Take this passage he wrote in a letter replying to one from his friend John Bates Dibdin on June 30, 1826:   “Am I to answer all this? why ’tis as long as those to the Ephesians and Galatians put together—I have counted the words for curiosity. But then Paul has nothing like the fun which is ebullient all over yours. I don’t remember a good thing (good like yours) from the 1st Romans to the last of the Hebrews. I remember but one Pun in all the Evangely, and that was made by his and our master: Thou art Peter (that is Doctor Rock) and upon this rock will I build &c.; which sanctifies Punning with me against all gainsayers. I never knew an enemy to puns, who was not an ill-natured man.”   Lamb’s bilingual pun is based on Matthew 16:18: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” It was a favorite of another master-pungent, James Joyce.

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From global targets to backyard projects

Good hearts try to talk us out of phobias. After all, people are naïve about the powers of rationalism: “Explain it, and it goes away.” As a kid I fell for that, almost literally, when I tried to muscle my way with sheer will power past the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland, formerly the second-tallest building in North America. It was the only time in my life when I fainted -- only briefly, but a friend caught me and pushed me into a doorway. With age I’ve added to tall buildings a cluster of new but related irrational fears – large open spaces (indoors or out), being a passenger in a speeding vehicle, escalators. All have in common a spatial component, the feeling of a free-form fall into space. I have a recurrent dream of being suspended upside-down by a rope hanging from a horizontal flagpole at the top of a skyscraper. Jonathan Swift had similar terrors and scholars have retrospectively diagnosed him with Meniere's disease.  No doubt talk therapy and/or pharmaceuticals could ease the distress, but it’s a little late for that. Besides, I’ve crafted a lifetime of avoiding certain situations and venues. I just don’t go there anymore and the loss is minimal. Perhaps this is why I feel safe and confident with words – no danger of dropping into the abyss, metaphysical or otherwise.   A.E. Stallings has a poem, “Fear of Happiness” (This Afterlife: Selected Poems, 2022), that nicely diagnoses my condition:   “Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had: As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight, Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through, Though someone always said I’d be all right— Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad (The nothing rising underfoot). Then later The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch, Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view, The merest thought of airplanes. You can call It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep; But it isn’t the unfathomable fall That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch, It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.”   I can imagine simply standing by an open window in one of those obscenely tall buildings in Dubai and I get shaky. Hold it, and I sweat. The power of imagination.