Proposition

Words embrace the human mind like water surrounds the fish. The words and the water, both vessels and vassals, package, surround, form, aerate, and do so quite invisibly, under the radar of consciousness. It is only in such unspeakable familiarity that insidiousness supreme can breed.

For this pirate there has always been a perverse fascination for the word. When youthful others sought out the glossy paged naked images in magazines hidden in bathrooms or under beds, this pirate read the forbidden words in abnormally thick dictionaries that came complete with magnifying lens. There were caresses of ink and paper that opened passages to hidden mind treasures that had power to act on my own body and the ire of others.

I loved most the words that flaunted their functions, that delighted in the strip search I performed with weightless ardor.

I love portmanteau words, named by Lewis Carroll in his trips through looking glasses. As I opened them, the slithy chortles excaped (sic), unable to be contained even in large French suitcases. But even more than the mysterious smog of formally portmanteau words, I love the more subtle multi-functional meanings of words. These words seem at the outset less clever than their formal siblings. But these are the pirate words.

I think my favorite pirate word is "sodomy." It hides within itself layer after layer of prohibition. But when all is said, there is only one suitable holder of the lineage, only one. Look not elsewhere, neither to the right, nor to the left. Look not above; look not below. It is monoiconic. It is, simply. There is no other. And we do not speak of it. And we do not dare to recognize any other option.

The word itself comes to us from the Middle East of ancient times, from the name of the five towns, the cities of the Plain, home to father Abraham's cousin Lot and his family.

This town was destroyed in fire and brimstone, annihilated, for within its boundaries could not be found even the ten good men for whose theoretical sake Abraham begged mercy.

Mercy was granted, but the good men, even 10, could not be found.

When the strangers (were they angels?) came to Lot's home in Sodom, the town's people surrounded his home with a proposition. They demanded the strangers be sent out into the crowd, for the purpose of the crowd coming to know them, in the Biblical sense. That proposition is horrifying enough. But it is Lot's response that cries out like the blood of Abel on the ground of the earth.

Lot offers his virgin daughters to the crowd. Better that they be "known" than the male strangers.

After all, the daughters could become temple prostitutes. But the knowing of men by men is truly unthinkable, unspeakable, unimaginable.

Do we really understand what creates the unimaginable? What cannot be imaged? What cannot be spoken? Or written? Is it to this that we take off our shoes? Is this holy ground?

The Holy of Holies?

Perhaps we have been laboring under a misunderstanding. Perhaps the nature of the inviolate has eluded us, hiding in the fleshy folds of our ever expanding portmanteau textual minds.

In a desert universe the greatest virtue is hospitality. And the greatest hospitality is that given to the stranger, to the one from wherever it is different. The practice was called theoxenia, being host to the stranger passing in our midst, loving them as if they were the G*d for whom we have no iconic capture.

I have a pirate proposition: If there are perceived strangers in the cultural midst that honor the culture with desire to assimilate to it by practice of its most beloved ritual and lifestyle, perhaps there is sacred duty to honor that. This may, after all, be a visit by angels who watch our evolving minds for signs of exclusive spoilage. Never minding the basic human fleshy flaws, perhaps they come with only angelic desire to blend cultures in the way humans have done traditionally, even before history.

Perhaps they come to marry, a marriage of flesh and spirit. Perhaps they come to lock in embrace, in wedlock, only in order to free flesh from excessive existence, to free spirit from excessive non-existence.

But what does this pirate know? Pirates do not marry; pirates do not have sex. Pirates are conjugation in every moment, on myriad levels strangers crying out for hospitality. Pirates are mysterium coniunctionis afloat beyond the see of dualing words.

Please come, too. Indiscriminately.

("Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me. Twice on the pipe if the answer is no." — Tony Orlando and Dawn)

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes t o inspire profound mutiny in all those w ho care to read. Our Rx may be wearing a pirate cloak of in visibility, bu t emanating fr om within this shadow is hope that r eaders will f eel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may even inspire the muse. Mak e contact if you dare.