PASSAGES

From Giorgio Agamben's "Consideration of the Nativity Crib" from the small but weighty tome Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience ... commenting on the notion of the crib, the Nativity, as a kind of fairy tale, and the reclamation of ritual:

This is why, at this very point when the crib is about to become an obsolete custom and seems even to have stopped speaking to the childhood which, as eternal guardian of what merits survival, had held it in safekeeping up to our time, together with play and fairy tale, the clumsy creatures of the last Neopolitan figurines seem to babble out a message intended for us, citizens of this extreme, threadbare fringe of a century of history.  For the striking feature in the work of the anonymous survivors of Spaccanapoli is the infinite discrepancy between the figuring of man -- whose lineaments are as if blurred in a dream, whose gestures are torpid and imprecise -- and the loving impulse that shapes the displays of tomatoes, aubergines, cabbages, pumpkins, carrots, mullet, crayfish, octopus, mussels and lemons that lie in violet, red and iridescent mounds on the market stalls among baskets, scales, knives and earthenware pots.  Are we to see, in this discrepancy, the sign that nature is once more about to enter the fairy tale, that once more it asks history for speech, while man -- bewitched by a history which, for him, again assumes the dark outline of destiny -- is struck dumb by a spell?  Until one night, in the shadow-light where a new crib will light up figures and colours yet unknown, nature will once again be immured in its silent language, the fable will awaken in history, and man will emerge, with his lips unsealed, from mystery to speech.

Dictionary of Commonplaces
In The Rings of Saturn, W G Sebald describes the work of 19^th century writer Edward FitzGerald, who was at times afflicted by what he called the “blue devil of melancholy.”  FitzGerald, for a time, inhabited a hermitage and worked on introspective projects – extensive correspondence, and making notes towards a “dictionary of commonplaces,” constructing a glossary of nautical terms, and also a Sévigné dictionary referencing the corpus of correspondence by Madame de Sévigné.  This project, like all of his others remained unfinished.

Dictionary of Exact Meanings
Laura Riding's incomplete project occupied her from the 1930s through to 1948.  Riding's concern was that words were becoming ambiguous through improper usage, and her intention was to create definitive definitions for some 24,000 "crucial words" and rescue them from imprecision.  Riding's dictionary was never completed after the Oxford University Press advised it would not publish the work as it was too "individual and personal" and inflicted a certain linguistic cruelty, as though putting words "into straightjackets."

Dictionary of Received Ideas
Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas was commenced during the 1870s, and never finished.  It presents a compilation of clichés and platitudes for a wide range of terms.  (The entry for ‘melancholy’: “Sign of a noble heart and a lofty mind.”)

Dictionary of Terms of Endearment
Durng the middle part of the 18^th century Epaminondas Spicer began a dictionary in which he recorded a vast array of terms of endearment, and it is still published, perhaps, by Faux Contes.  Spicer was occupied fully in the pursuit of love, cerebrally rather than carnally.  It was the frisson of anticipation which intoxicated him, and fulfilment had to be denied, the archetypical love melancholic in Robert Burton's terms. He wrote over 4,000 love letters during his life of relentless courtship, now archived, maybe, in the Epaminondas Spicer Collection in the British Library.  The letters manifest Spicer's extensive vocbulary of terms of endearment, and provided a vehicle for his comprehensive approach to the topic of love.  Spicer read widely and in many languages, providing him with the material for his never-completed dictionary.  At the age of 62 Epaminondas Spicer ceased compiling his dictionary, declaring that he feared he was too close to finishing it, and that he was "lexically fatigued."  His final entry was in the form of a small exegesis on the homophonic terms in French, which became his posthumous motto, L'amour ou la mort.   

To be continued....

                                      .... but not completed ....