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Day 164: in which the younger displays enviably robust levels of self-esteem

The younger is chattering exuberantly at an ear-splitting level about two inches from my face. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and exhale slowly in an attempt to calm my suddenly rapidly rising heart-rate.

“Could you please use an inside voice?” I say slowly, in the steadiest, least agitated tone I can muster.

She looks at me quizzically and shrugs her shoulders:

“That’s just the way my voice is, Mom.”

 

***

Later I walk into the kitchen and see muddy footprints all over the floor.

“Hmmm. It looks like someone dragged mud in all over the floor,” I exclaim.

She waltzes in.

“Oh, that was just my feet,” she declares, reassuringly.

 

***

In the afternoon we have a dance party in my bedroom, just her and me. It is hard to say whose jaw drops lower at the sight of the other’s dance moves. Hers involve break-dancing style attempts to spin on her head that end in dramatic crashes to the floor.

THUD!!!!

“Sweetheart, are you OK????”

“Yes! [popping right back up like a jack-in-a-box] It didn’t hurt at all!”

Mine involve standing in one place and shaking my hips, a feat that, judging from the expressions of awe it elicits, is by far the most impressive thing I have ever done in her presence.

“Mom!!!” Her eyes are wide and her tone is at once scandalized and reverent: “how do you shake your booty like that????”

“Oh, just practice,” I say, nonchalantly.

 

***

Later, tired of dancing I flop on the bed.

“Mom, I’m pretty sure I could shoot a bow and arrow with my feet.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah. Because I can pick up this with my feet (picking up,* with her hand,* a tube of moisturizer).”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I can stretch a rubber band with my feet, so ….”

She trails off and shoots me a self-satisfied look that says, plainly, that to offer any further evidence would be gratuitous.

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Day 163: a permanent black

“I had a dream about this weird word,” I announced at the breakfast table.

“Was it ‘inconspiculous?’ asked the younger.

“‘Inconspiculous?’” I repeated. “No. It wasn’t ‘inconspiculous.’” I pause. “Nor was it ‘inconspicuous.’”

“Was it ‘levitation?’ asked the elder.

“No, no,” I continued, impatiently, “it was an imaginary word … I think. I mean, it was a word I’d never heard before, and in my dream I was like, huh, I’m gonna look that up in the OED when I wake up, as you do. And I kept repeating it to myself in my sleep over and over so I wouldn’t forget it. And now I can’t remember it. But it’s on the tip of my tongue, I feel like it’s about to come back to me, I know it’s still there.”

Moments later, it rose to the top of my consciousness.

“Oh! It was ———!” I said. I repeated it to myself. It sounded right. “Huh. ——–,” I said again. “Yeah, that was it. I wonder if it really is a word! I’m gonna look that up after I drop you at camp.”

What came next was probably inevitable.

Right after dropping them off I sat down at my computer. And the word was gone from my mind. What remained was only the vague sensation that it began with a b and that the first syllable rhymed with “meh” and that it had three syllables altogether. I felt in my gut that the word was kin with the words jellicle and blefescu. But I also felt it had the air of a London garden square, like Belgrave or Grosvenor. And I had that sense of sureness that you only get from dreams that I had unconsciously intuited, no, divined in sleep a deeply profound word, the identity of which the OED would now disclose to me, and that it would unlock some kind of LIFE-TRANSFORMING REVELATION.

So I found myself engaged for some, embarrassingly long, period of time in the ludicrous activity of looking up made up words in the OED. At this point, I wouldn’t even remember what any of those words are, except that they are recorded in the search history of the OED home page that I have permanently open in Chrome, so that if I type in the letters “ble” the words blefescle, blefiscle, bleric, and blericle show up.

None of these are real words.

Blericle was the one that seemed closest to the dream-word. I did discover the real word belleric through these searches, which, fascinatingly, refers to “the astringent fruit of Terminalia Bellerica, also called Bastard Myrobalan, imported from India for the use of calico-printers, and used for the production of a permanent black” (OED).

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Day 162: baggage

“ … anyway, I could just tell. There was just an air of fustiness about the way he wrote that said ‘British old man’ to me,” I concluded authoritatively.

La Bonavita stared at me quizzically. “You have a lot of baggage around being British, don’t you?”

“Umm, no, no I don’t,” I said, frowning.

“Yes you do. You don’t even really like to consider yourself British,” he said calmly.

“What?” I was vexed. “Why would you think that? I feel more British than I feel … anything else. What, you think I feel American?” I fairly spat out the word.

“No, but you don’t really identify with British qualities. And you have all this—” rolling his eyes, “—class baggage.”

“If you mean I have … feelings about class, well, yes, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel British—”

What I should have added at this juncture is that “having feelings about class” is surely the very quintessence of ‘feeling British.’ But in the moment I lacked the presence of mind.

“—what, you’re saying I can’t feel British while also feeling ambivalent about certain aspects of Britishness? Don’t you feel ambivalent about being American? You should do!” I added, severely.

“And anyway,” I continued, “I do identify strongly with many British things. Like …. like being a Londoner! I identify very strongly with being a Londoner.” On this I was adamant. “And … a lot of other stuff too.” [1]

La Bonavita listened placidly.

“Why are you being so defensive? Just admit you have baggage: you have baggage about being British just like I have baggage about being from New England. It’s fine, we all have baggage!” he said, cheerfully.

“I don’t. Have. Baggage,” I said, wondering why my effort to affect an air of nonchalance sounded so shouty.

He paused as if summoning the strength to break something to me.

“Look,” he said, earnestly, “you left England and you don’t like Downton Abbey.”

He fixed me with his best trust-me-I’m-a-doctor-stare laced with the barest hint of wickedness, and then cocked his head ever so slightly.

“I’d call that baggage.”

 

 

Notes

[1] Now that I have time to reflect, I’ve been thinking of other “British things” I identify with. So far I’ve come up with: a fondness for tea, gin and tonics, Wimbledon, and James Bond, and a kind of reflexive need to repudiate or distance myself from expressions that seem too pat. I’m not saying the British have exclusive rights to cringing at the clichéd or banal but rather that we have a peculiar way of performing our disdain. Bear with me and allow me to elaborate.

When I was in London over the summer I was reading an article in The Guardian (as you do), when I arrived at a sentence that began, “not to be trite, but …” Upon reading this, I was struck by two realizations: 1) the fear of appearing trite is a British-chattering-classes-nightmare, and, 2) “not to be trite, but …” is a perfectly British way of expressing that fear. My inner Brit tells me pretty insistently to preface every utterance I make with the words, “not to be trite, but …” (e.g., “not to be trite, but, now that I have time to reflect …). Most of the time I stoically repress this urge because the only thing worse than triteness is preciousness, and preemptively fending off charges of triteness is surely preciousness of the highest order.

I want to write a whole post called “not to be trite, but …” but, in the meantime; when I was looking for the article I read over the summer on The Guardian website, I discovered something funny: there are a lot of articles in The Guardian that use the word trite. I limited my search to August and September of this year and discovered that the word trite featured in nine Guardian articles in that period; by contrast it appeared in only two New York Times articles in the same timespan.

I know this doesn’t prove anything profound. Maybe the word trite is less frequently used in the U.S.; and so what if it is? Doesn’t it just suggest that writers in the U.S. turn more readily to some synonym of “trite” like “hackneyed” or “sentimental” or “corny”? (For what it’s worth I did a similar search for the word “corny” and found the numbers were more comparable between The Guardian and The New York Times). Maybe that is all it means. But that’s not the explanation that rings true to me, particularly when I note the painfully familiar way in which many of the articles in The Guardian use the word trite.

Here are some examples: “It’s difficult not to sound trite …”; “The theme may seem trite, but …”; “It might sound trite, but …” I’ve singled out these cases because in each of them the author anticipates and deflects the charge of triteness. By voicing the recognition that she skirts close to triteness’s territory, the author establishes a bond with the reader by implying that they share an understanding of the inherent risks in expressing a sentiment that in its very artlessness may ring false. The author voices this recognition in order to disarm the reader; the author hopes her candid acknowledgment of her vulnerability will move the reader to credit her with a discriminating understanding of where the line lies between true and false sentiment. Obviously anyone can have a phobia of appearing trite (you don’t have to be British, it just helps). Nonetheless, this particular rhetorical move reflects a core belief that feels British to me. This is the core belief that sincerity and pathos are debased currencies, a belief that necessitates saddling any expression of an oft-thought sentiment with endless caveats and qualifications. Now that’s baggage.

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Day 161: pitching in

desk

7:30 am. I look around the room and groan.

“What is it, Mom?” asks the elder.

I sigh. “It’s just that I have so much I need to read today. But this place ….” I gesture helplessly at the carnage of half done homework, dirty socks, granola bar wrappers, Pokémon cards, stuffed animals, library books, power cords, random pebbles, and Japanese food erasers strewn on every available surface. “It looks like a bomb hit it.”

The elder comes up to me and gently puts his hands on my arms. “We can all help,” he said. “We’ll all do it together when we get back from school—it probably would only take fifteen minutes if we all do it.”

I gaze at him in awe. “Oh my God, yes. Yes. Max, that’s a wonderful idea and it’s so so lovely that you suggested it! Honestly, I feel so much better already!”

“It should be a daily thing!” he adds.

“Yes!” I say giddily. “It’ll be so easy if we all pitch in together!”

We hug each other tightly.

Suddenly I notice the younger scowling at us. “What?” I say.

“I think,” she says, “I think there should be a sign-up-sheet.”

 

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Day 160: siblings

This morning I find a gummy bear on the living room rug.

“I believe this is yours,” I inform the younger.

She takes it from me. Then she runs out of the room yelling “Sucker!” at the top of her lungs.

“Max! SUCKER! This is MY gummy! This is MY gummy! SUCKER!”

There is a pause during which I suspect the elder is inspecting said gummy.

Then I hear him say to her disdainfully, “you know this gummy has hair on it, don’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s MY hair!” she crows in triumph.

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Day 159: spiders in milk

When my cousin John’s daughter was very small, like, maybe three years old, she would tell the best knock-knock jokes. I used to babysit her and her siblings when I was in my early twenties so this would be about twenty years ago. I found her jokes so surreally hilarious that I would retell them frequently, which is why I still remember them.

Example:

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Mustard.

Mustard who?

Mustard in the custard.

My all-time hands down favorite continues the tainted-nursery-foods theme, but with a darker twist:

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Spiders. [1]

Spiders who?

Spiders in milk.

This joke’s genius (in case it’s not obvious) lies in the fact that the idea of spiders in milk is so utterly shudder-inducing. (You have to say the punchline slowly and in a whispery yet gleeful tone for the proper effect.)

You know Julia Kristeva’s thing about the abject and the skin on warm milk? Well, that’s only because she’d never thought of spiders in milk. Spiders in milk is a diabolical prospect. Just think of spideriness and milkiness conjoined and tell me you don’t recoil. It’s an unholy union. It’s what a witch would drink before bed. [2]

That being said, until this morning I had never empirically confirmed that spiders in milk are actually creepy in reality as well as notionally.

Until this morning.

This morning, I took a mug from the cupboard.

I poured milk in it for my morning coffee.

And as I poured the milk a tiny spider skittered up out of it causing a strange noise to emanate from me eeeeeuuuuoooohhhhhaaahhhhhhhit’s a spider it’s a spider (in disgust) it’s a spider in milk (with dawning realization) spiders in milk … spiders in milk??? (and finally with an odd jubilation) spider’s in milk!!!

SPIDER’S IN MILK!!!!

 

Notes

[1] Cf. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: “is it possessive ‘Spider’s’ or plural ‘Spiders’’?”

[2] She’d have to open her throat wide to get the spiders down, the way that Andrea says you have to when you drink pulpy orange juice in Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself

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Day 157: nudge nudge wink wink

A couple of days ago, PBJ showed the kids some Monty Python’s Flying Circus skits and we made a magical discovery; Monty Python hits the exact sweet spot where six-year-old humor and eleven-year-old humor intersect.

So PBJ suggested we all watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail that Saturday night. I found I only had a dim memory of the film; although I appreciate Python in small doses, I’ve never been obsessed, and I’ve only seen Holy Grail once (and it was as an adult, in America, at He-Who-Must-Be-Preserved’s insistence. I wasn’t into Python as a teenager; they, along with Led Zeppelin and Dungeons and Dragons belonged in the category I thought of as “Scripts Boys Feel Compelled to Enact Ad Nauseam”) So being the responsible parent that I am, I looked it up on “Common Sense Media,” a website that gives slightly humorless but also useful guidance on the suitability of movies for kids of different ages. (What do I mean by humorless? Their criteria include categories for “positive messages” and “positive role models.” They give The Holy Grail 0 out of 5 on both counts and state dourly under the “positive role models” heading, “the characters are too silly to be considered positive role models.”)

I for one feel comfortable exposing my children to extreme levels of silliness, so that didn’t faze me; moreover, the rest of the review was reassuring, describing the violence as “obviously fake” and stating that, while the vestal virgin sequence is “filled with sexual innuendo and proposition,” that is “the iffiest content.”

As someone weaned on the Carry On movies and Roger Moore as James Bond, I don’t worry too much about a bit of innuendo, so we went ahead and watched it.

It was all going fine. The violence was indeed “obviously fake,” as my children agreed.

However, I would like to take exception with Common Sense Media’s blatant mis-use of the word “innuendo.”

I can pinpoint very precisely when this thought popped into my mind. It wasn’t after one of the vestal virgins has told Sir Galahad they all need a good spanking because they’ve been so naughty. No, it was right after the next line, in which she says, “And after the spanking, the oral sex.”

And then they all start chanting “Oral sex! Oral sex!”

The elder shot me a look and started giggling helplessly. The younger looked confused.

“Thanks, Common Sense Media!” I said to no one in particular. “That’s actually not what the word ‘innuendo’ means,” I continued. “That’s, like, the opposite of innuendo.”

***

Later, the younger came up to me looking sheepish. “Mom, I have a question,” she said.

Oh, here we go, I thought.

I braced myself. “OK. Go ahead.”

She took a deep breath. “OK. What does ‘spanking’ mean?”

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Day 156: one or the other

What is a duck-rabbit hole?

I think of the duck-rabbit hole, like the duck-rabbit itself, as shifting depending on how you squint at it. From some angles it’s a cavernous hollow, fit for burrowing into; from others, it’s a gleaming surface, perfect for floating on.

If the phrase “down the rabbit hole” suggests passage into an obscure subworld, in a duck-rabbit hole that passage is always forked. And whichever path you go down leads to yet another forking.

I say this more in weariness than in wonder.

I wrote in my last post that, in the course of looking up “lights” in the OED, I discovered that the phrase “the living daylights” is a corruption of “liver and lights.”

It is true that this is what I thought I discovered; when I read “to scare the (liver and lights) out of (someone)” listed as a colloquial phrase under the OED definition for lights meaning lungs, I was struck by its similarity to the colloquial phrase “to beat (also scare, etc.) the (living) daylights (also daylight) out of” someone. The gestalt symmetry of the phrases arrested me; and it was the internal likeness between the phrases that persuaded me they were related more than any external evidence.

But after looking a little longer, the gestalt switched, in duck-rabbit fashion. Or, I could say, the path forked. There are several sources that do indeed argue that “living daylights” is a corruption of “liver and lights.” But, the OED argues that the phrase “living daylights” actually derives from the eighteenth-century use of “daylights” to refer to a person’s eyes (“also occasionally: the nostrils”); it cites Henry Fielding’s novel Amelia (1752) as providing the first recorded expression of the phrase to darken a person’s daylights meaning to give someone a black eye (“If the Lady says such another Word to me .. I’ll darken her Daylights.”) “Living” is a general intensifier, said to be an American turn of the century usage.

Both explanations (deriving “living daylights” from “daylights” or from “liver and lights”) require a conjectural leap. The expressions “scare the liver and lights” and “scare the daylights” are both current in the 19th century. Although the first usage the OED cites of “living daylights” is from 1955, a search on Google books shows a few late nineteenth century instances. The point is: there’s no linguistic smoking gun either way to tell us definitively whether the “lights” being scared or beaten out of us are in our eyes or in our chest. (Or both! It’s possible, given that both expressions were current at the same time, that they merged.)

This indeterminacy is difficult for the mind (well, my mind) to accept.

My quickness to leap to the conclusion that “living daylights” is a corruption of “liver and lights” is yet another case of “lights for cats” in the sense (my own, willful sense) of chasing a delusive gleam.

It’s yet another humbling reminder of how difficult it is to fully accept language’s contingency. Even in the immediate wake of having re-learned afresh what is after all common knowledge—that light refers to both buoyancy and luminosity—I somehow couldn’t hold both meanings in my mind at once. Having originally reflexively read “lights” in Barthes’s essay as meaning luminosity, in my exuberance upon discovering it also meant lungs, I simply switched to reflexively privileging the new meaning. It turns out to be as tricky to toggle rapidly between lungs and lights as between duck and rabbit.

I recently read Toril Moi’s new book Revolution of the Ordinary. It’s been a long time since I read a scholarly monograph from cover to cover for the sheer pleasure of it. The fact that I did so in this case is a testament to Moi’s prose (OK, also maybe to the concentrating effects of Adderall), which is luminously clear. The book is about the relationship between ordinary language philosophy—especially Wittgenstein as read through Stanley Cavell—and literary criticism.

After reading Moi’s book, my thoughts turned naturally to Cavell in trying to think more about the kind of literary criticism ordinary language philosophy might encourage, and I found myself browsing through his book Pursuits of Happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. This passage from Cavell’s Introduction speaks to the way that, in my thinking about “lights,” brightness first eclipsed airiness, and then airiness brightness, in quick succession:

“… what he [Wittgenstein] calls ‘seeing an aspect’ is the form of interpretation: it is seeing something as something. Two conditions hold of a case in which the concept of ‘seeing as’ is correctly employed. There must be a competing way of seeing the phenomenon in question, something else to see it as (in Wittgenstein’s most famous case, that of the Gestalt figure of the ‘duck-rabbit,’ it may be seen as a duck or a rabbit); and a given person may not be able to see it both ways, in which case it will not be true for him that he sees it (that is, sees a duck or sees a rabbit) as anything (though it will be true to say of him, if said by us who see both possibilities, that he sees it as one or the other). And one aspect dawns not just as a way of seeing but as a way of seeing something now, a way that eclipses some other, definite way in which one can oneself see the ‘same’ thing” (Pursuits of Happiness, 36).

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Day 155: (lights for cats!)

I encountered it five pages into Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Grain of the Voice,” which is in the collection Image, Music, Text. I was reading the version translated by Stephen Heath—it’s the most common edition, I think; the paperback has a pale yellow cover. “The Grain of the Voice” is about the distinction between two modes of singing. The first is an expressive, emotive mode (the pheno-song), which trains the listener’s attention on the meaning and emotional content of the words being sung; in the second mode (the geno-song), by contrast, the voice resonates at once abstractly and materially, focusing the listener’s attention on the singer’s enunciation of the sounds, not what they mean. Barthes bemoans the prominence of the former mode, which privileges the breath, identified with soul or pneuma, while mourning the dwindling prestige of the geno-song, which privileges the “grain of the voice,” as opposed to the “myth of respiration.”

It’s while reading a paragraph in which Barthes is criticizing the pheno-song, the style of singing that privileges the breath, that I encounter it:

“The lung, a stupid organ (lights for cats!), swells but gets no erection; it is in the throat, place where the phonic metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that significance explodes, bringing not the soul but jouissance.”

I am used to reading literary theory. I am used to it being abstruse and opaque. But this was different. In the subsequent several hours that I puzzled over the phrase “lights for cats!” I passed through several distinct interpretative moods.

  1. Exuberance

Given that the essay celebrates the “voluptuousness” of language separate from its communicative function, my first thought was that “lights for cats!” might be a Gertrude Stein style linguistic experiment embodying language’s phonic qualities. It doesn’t mean anything, silly!

  1. Paranoia (phase 1)

Because the phrase “lights for cats!” read to me like a non-sequitur, but also has a slogan-like quality like “votes for women!” the thought fleetingly but undeniably crossed my mind that this was a cry for help from Barthes’ cat. But cats can see in the dark, I reasoned. Why does Barthes’ cat need lights?

  1. Resignation

Rest assured that I quickly rejected both of these explanations and turned to Google, certain that this passage must have attracted considerable attention. I found that, indeed, these lines are frequently quoted, but that there was an odd quality to all these citations:

“Barthes dismisses the merely technical function of the lungs, ‘a stupid organ (lights for cats!)’ that ‘swells but gets no erection’” (John Potter, Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology, 172).

“For instance, Barthes writes provoctively of the lungs as ‘a stupid organ (lights for cats!), swells but gets no erection,” which, in its dismissal both of the lungs as healthy and functioning, and worthy of dismissal, does present and confirm Tobin Siebers’s ideology of ability” (George McKay, Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability, 56).

“‘The lung, a stupid organ (lights for cats!), swells but gets no erection.’ In good Freudian tradition, however, let’s take this etymological play on words seriously. [Aha! At last!, I thought. But no.] Apart from the implicit reference to Barthes’s illness, which, because it affected his breathing, forced him to give up his singing lessons with Panzera, what we have here is the binary balance in the form of an association between breath and meaning: meaning given through the abstract soul in its opposition to the concrete body” (Diana Knight, Critical Essays on Roland Barthes, 256).

What all these commentaries have in common is that they conspicuously ignore the lights for cats.

This led to stages four and five in quick succession:

  1. Shock with shades of self-congratulation 

No-one knows what this means. I have stumbled across a profound mystery. I am the first with the courage to admit it.

  1. Paranoia (phase 2)

Everyone knows what this means: it is self-evident and therefore unworthy of commentary.

  1. Admits Need for Help

This is when I texted EHA. In an extraordinarily generative and rapid-fire text exchange, and drawing on our combined powers of free-associating, Googling, and native wit, we came up with an ingenious, utterly convincing, and, as it turns out, completely wrong interpretation of the significance of “lights for cats!” one I was fully persuaded by for about two hours.

texts

With the phrase “lights for cats!” we decided, Barthes underscores his contempt for the pheno-song by comparing it to the appeal of a moving point of light (like a sunbeam or a laser pointer) to a cat. He’s already said that the lung is a stupid organ, and he is personifying this stupidity in the image of a cat chasing light. There were, admittedly, a few problems with this interpretation. Was he saying that “lung” was to human as “lights” is to “cats”? But wouldn’t it more rightly be “sounds emanating from the lungs” rather than “lung” for that analogy to work?

  1. Niggling Seed of Doubt Remains

Even though I was now 99% totally sure that Barthes was saying that that the pheno-song is to humans as laser pointers are to cats, I decide that after all perhaps I should consult the original French just to be sure. (Note that reading something in another language is something of a last resort for me.) This is when I discover that the phrase in the original is not “les lumières des chats!” as I was expecting. Instead it is “le mou des chats”.

Le mou? What is this le mou? I look it up and “mou” means something like soft or limp. What??? Is this to do with lungs swelling but getting “no erection”? Is “mou de chat” French for “flaccid penis?” It has to be an idiomatic phrase, but when I look it up in Larousse, I get nothing. EHA asks her French friend who confirms that mou suggests softness not light.

  1. Paranoia (phase 3)

This is the only remaining explanation: the translation is wrong! I email a colleague who works on French theory to see if she can shed any light on either the original or the translation. In the meantime I give up on my quest and compulsively refresh the Guardian homepage for the rest of the night in order to see the British General Election results come in.

  1. Grudging admiration

Earlier in the afternoon I have casually mentioned to PBJ that I am struggling with this phrase. PBJ is on call tonight because he is an actual doctor. Somehow, in between dealing with psychiatric emergencies, he figures out both the meaning of “mou des chats” and why it is indeed correctly translated as “lights for cats!”

He texts me, “Le mou des chats is the lungs of an animal that a butcher will give to a client to take home and feed their cat.”

A minute later he texts me a definition of “lights”: “the lungs of sheep or pigs used as food, especially for pets.”

I look up “lights” in the OED and it’s even more definitive; it defines “lights” as meaning lungs as food “chiefly for cats and dogs.” [1]

And in French lungs as food seem especially identified with cats. The colleague I emailed had never heard of the phrase, but when I pass on the news she finds an entry from a French dictionary of proverbs from 1749:

“On dit encore que le mou est pour les chats; parce qu’on les nourrit avec du mou, qui est le poumon du boeuf.” [It is also said that ‘le mou’ is for cats; because one feeds them with it, that is with beef lungs.]

  1. Humility

I was so sure that I was dealing with an analogy: that Barthes was saying lungs are to humans as lights are to cats. So it is kind of a shock to discover that lights literally means lungs; in fact, “light” and “lung” share the same etymology, lungs being so named for their lightness, i.e. their airiness. So it’s not a non-sequitur at all. It’s entirely in keeping with the language of breath and pneuma. It’s not surreal. It’s not a leap from one plane of meaning to another. No, it’s my brain that’s been leaping, chasing an ignis fatuus when there’s nothing really there. [2]

Stupid organ (lights for cats!).

Barthes

 

Notes

[1] I discover from this definition that the phrase “living daylights” is a corruption of “liver and lights”

[2] Ignis fatuus, n. A phosphorescent light seen hovering or flitting over marshy ground, and supposed to be due to the spontaneous combustion of an inflammable gas (phosphuretted hydrogen) derived from decaying organic matter; popularly called Will-o’-the-wisp, Jack-a-lantern, etc. It seems to have been formerly a common phenomenon; but is now exceedingly rare.

When approached, the ignis fatuus appeared to recede, and finally to vanish, sometimes reappearing in another direction. This led to the notion that it was the work of a mischievous sprite, intentionally leading benighted travellers astray. Hence the term is commonly used allusively or fig. for any delusive guiding principle, hope, aim, etc. (OED)

 

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