1. ________ absence
2. ________ attention
3. ________ clue
4. ________ dreamtask
5. ________ ice-nine
6. ________ magic circle
7. ________ many-mindedness
8. ________ overview
9. ________ serpent
10. ________ 2tiger
The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.
albionspeak: a draught of language (9.6)
Vocation Final Exam
I’ve mentioned that Scribe spent years of his life—reading, writing, often holding literary court—in his favorite bar, T. Bar & Restaurant, a large operation that also included a full micro-brewery. This, I’ll attest, was a busy place, the center of action for many in Scribe’s university community, and I enjoyed myself immensely just sitting in T.’s rare air among so many legitimate geniuses, although it often was hard to hear conversation even at my own table—it was that loud.
Aside from regularly redoing his calligraphy on the walls there—multicolored chalk on slate, several full menu boards, each a work of art—Scribe entertained himself for a phase with his thought-coasters (I’m sure he had a name for them). Like all bars, T. needed & supplied cardboard coasters everywhere, arriving with each beer, extras at every table; and these all possessed the standard stylized beer-brand logos, ubiquitous beautiful bite-sized billboards. Scribe got the idea to write on some these coasters question-topics for ice-breaker discussions—not, as one might suspect, questions of deep thought, neither the shallow trivia pursued by formulaic board games & quiz shows. I remember clearly one example: “How many different ways can you list that humans have preserved food?” (I think Scribe found thirteen.)
Let’s, as an exercise, consider this example briefly (the only one I recall), to test the functional range of Scribe’s curious creations. First consider, no Ivy League dude just sitting down with friends can resist calling out obvious quiz answers—i.e., freezing & cooking, pasteurizing & smoking, pickling & salting.… A smart aleck quips, “Does ‘embalming’ count?” Another replies, “You have to eat it, not bury it. Maybe in Korea.” Eventually the dialogue includes freeze-drying, air drying, factory chemical drying, and irradiating, sparking sci-fi speculation about ultrasound & gamma rays. How about killing sound waves alone, like a navy secret-weapon? Or maybe the verbal list pulls the bar table retrograde, into reminiscences about prehistoric salt mines & trade routes through Austria’s Salzkammergut, or how our word salary, for instance, comes via Roman soldiers who received their allotted pay in salt? And thus if talk is well-sparked and the gift of gab proves worth its salt, every lucky ivy table will, of course, inevitably return to fire and its many-but-not-too-many germ-killing applications, which somehow makes this a great ice-breaker.
So after coming up with maybe twenty different coaster topics, all quite different & formally skew from each other—each inspiring genuine curiosity & surprise thinking—Scribe meticulously circumscribed each of these questions around the outside edge of a coaster, phrasing each to fit the circular margin exactly (a formal, physical constraint). Then, best of all, he carefully smuggled & scattered these about the whole bar & restaurant, so one might come out randomly just as drinks arrived at the start of a gathering, ideally with all the serendipity of a surprise fortune cookie.
Scribe then got to track his ice-breakers casually around the bar over the course of days & weeks, from bar counter corner to upper-loft rear & back, and he picked up many animated conversations sparked therefrom (again, a university crowd). He liked to think of this as seeding synchronicity, a gift from nowhere that could be taken up or ignored. Free will couldn’t get freer, could it? Of course I realize now what Scribe did not: He was just acting out or reenacting—as a playful game or winking scribal clue—what Josef, his teacher, himself had planted four thousand years earlier; even the raw numbers might be similar: Scribe was reseeding ice-nine. Why not? What harm can come from free will thinking invitations?
Not everyone was pleased though. Beer coaster purists saw Scribe’s work as defacement only, graffiti, narcissistic vandalism. There were actual lodged complaints from other eternal patrons, chumping granfalloons & self-appointed bar police, guys who drank enough to have seen several of these coasters pop up and found their probing questions deeply suspicious, subversive, undermining of bar purity & circumcision. (Sports trivia would probably have been okay.) At some point a new bar manager was hired, and all these coasters disappeared.
Sorry! The test is still coming—that is, if I am still able to edit & amend this webpage curriculum after January 2021. Go Daddy, who runs this website, told me over the phone they would no longer "support" this platform. (They haven't yet notified me of this change of service via email or their website, which I visit frequently.) If I can, I will later add the finished final exam to albionspeak, along with the remaining glossary words I haven't yet defined. Meanwhile, I am doing as much as I can to finish up all that I can, assuming I'll be locked out shortly. By February 2021, this site should be otherwise done.
Below I offer my test's briefest familiar element, the matching vocab section, made slightly tougher for deeper penetration. My envisioned exam itself will not follow suit, however. I plan to use T. Bar & Restaurant above as a kind of geospatial image of a final exam, not one that asks after answers, but new variables. We'll see.…
§1/26/2021
I. Matching: Write the letter of the definition in the right column next to the term that best matches it on the left. Each letter is used once.
A parting image of pure joy: Albion (right) in 1980
a) a physical place that opens space to think
b) a POV distant enough to bracket necessity
c) busy busy emptiness
d) it curls behind projection, poised to act
e) raw power that rips through cave shadows
f) an artifact eternity drops for a figure in time
g) between any two thoughts (exactly)
h) reverse POV, a vector that receives
i) sudden, total paradigm realignment
j) a plan for laying a thread through a maze