What happens when sentient beings gaze at each other? They glimpse each other’s soul. You glimpse into a soul and a soul glimpses back. Earthlings with eyes have evolved them, developed them, and loved them since the Cambrian Period — half a billion years ago.
Do the eyes have it? Aye! What about eyeless sentients? Certainly, there are blind and deaf sentient beings. There are strange and unusual sentient beings. Use your senses to understand, to witness and to share.
Vegans do not kill fellow sentients, in person or by proxy. Dealing death by proxy does not remove complicity.
Hey, I didn’t kill the cow, I’m just eating lunch.
Nor is it okay to eat mor chikin. Humans are already eating 67 billion chickens per year. Small and appetizing, grounds enough?
It was self-defense, your honor.
Slaughterhouse managers find it difficult to fill kill-stations. Only 2% of slaughterhouse employees actually pull a trigger or knife the victim. I say “victim” because a meat-processing plant is a death camp. Once the “farm animal” is dead you don’t have to kill it a second time.
Dairy factories and egg factories are torture chambers. Only after they have produced the requisite quantity are they escorted to a slaughterhouse kill station.
Vegans confront the four stages of cruelty — directly and with kindness. It’s a lifestyle that embraces coexistence and a genuinely peaceful planet.
Slaughterhouses are unhealthy for children and other living things.
A firsthand account of a hearing challenge, one told in the first person. That’s what. Hello in there, hello.
Simone: I know you’re right, Pee-wee, but…
Pee-wee: But what? Everyone I know has a big “But…? C’mon, Simone, let’s talk about *your* big “But”.
Before opting for a $400 pair of hearing aids, I asked some friends and relatives if they were happy with a pair of ear inserts, ones that had cost twice as much as the shiny new automobile I purchased in 1973 (an AMC Gremlin if you must know). Each wearer had a big but that for one reason or ‘tother, so I just kept on mishearing words — mis-heards that made me the butt of many an “Are you deaf?” joke. My sister-in-law works with the elderly, she recognized the dynamic, remarking that many who mishear are falsely diagnosed as suffering from “dementia”.
Oliver Sacks, the sorely missed independent thinker, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that captures his personal experience with hearing loss: “Mishearings.” A timely take on the mind’s capacity for assigning meaning to spoken language.
And yet there is often a sort of style or wit — a “dash ”— in these instantaneous inventions; they reflect, to some extent, one’s own interests and experiences, and I rather enjoy them. Only in the realm of mishearing — at least, my mishearings — can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor (one of my favorite mathematicians), tarot cards turn into pteropods, a grocery bag into a poetry bag, all-or-noneness into oral numbness, a porch into a Porsche, and a mere mention of Christmas Eve a command to “Kiss my feet!”
Hearing loss had removed many unfortunate sounds: the song of birds, the snores of Loki the Cat, the sussurance of the familiar, the soothing and the calming. However, at this very moment I am listening to the sharp, measured and deliberate crunches Loki is making — less than a meter away.
Bird Sounds on DirtNKids 🙂
I am able to attend Arabic language classes at the local masjid once again, to actually understand the critical meanings lost to mishearings. It’s wonderful to join in with a measure of confidence that was quite impossible before 🙂
Now here is an unexpected but welcome circumstance: turning the devices off stills the din, the conical insert even acts as an earplug of sorts.
Now I jump into a wild cacophony of sound with a grateful soul. According to the instruction manual, it’s a gradual process that takes a bit of patience. I’ve only worn them for a week now, so my mind is still refreshing the inventory of sounds unheard for many years: floorboards squeak, a wall clock clicks with each passing second (I’ve timed it!) and my feet make a sweeping sound on a carpet.
At its largest extent, the Roman Empire surrounded Middle Earth, literally “The Mediterranean.”
In the parlance of social media, the Romans SHOUTED all their written words — minuscules would not arrive to soften the literal commotion until the 7th Century. Latin seems suited for chiseling into stone, mostly with straight lines that run from left to right. It’s not easy to curve while chiseling your way along a flat rock-face. A glance at the English alphabet reveals that individual letters also run from left to right, letters such as B D E F K L P R
The letter “J” is quite the exception. It’s one reason that some school children do this:
That letter never appears in Roman imperial inscriptions, nor did U, nor did W.
K, Y and Z were adopted to accommodate Greek vocabulary. They are not the Etruscan uttering way. Nay, they ain’t.
Let’s look at a language that appeals to my left-handedness. It’s quite a relief to see my writing as I write. Arabic was not designed with a chisel in mind. The language begins with cursive in mind, not a bland sequence of letters imprisoned within imaginary boxes, then proclaimed “words.”
My last post looked at a procrustean camel, an animal led to the eye of a needle by dint of faulty translation. Why are mistranslations carved into stone? Do not allow your metaphors to become stilted, clunky, confusing and hackneyed. That’s what I say.
Well, Arabic comes equipped with a J-sound. In fact, it’s standard equipment. However, the language does not permit a “P” letter, so please apply a “B” for words like Paris: call it Baris and learn to live with it. Palestine never needed a “P” because that name is an imposition anyway: they are the Philistines. Arabic comes equipped with an “F” sound.
Instead of imaginary boxes, Arabic allows for up to four ways to write each letter of the alphabet. Learners of this language and readers of the Qur’an receive the gift of ten diacritical marks to aid the learning process in a clean and coherent manner. Should you ever decide to tackle Arabic, this is handy indeed. Those marks reveal the sound one millimeter at a time; however, once you become comfortable and confident with the words you can dispense with diacriticals altogether — you’ll recognize the pattern and you won’t need the training wheels.
Returning to the Romans for a moment: would you ever wish to return to Roman numerals once you’ve learned the efficacy of Arabic numerals? The word “cipher” in English is from the Arabic word for “zero”:صفر
Here is a tip for my readers who consider learning German or Arabic: if you can pronounce Cincinnati you can pronounce صفر (sifr). Just pedanting.
Learning languages removes artificial separations between cultures and lifestyles. Those separations take the form of borders, walls and prejudice. In their stead you acquire perspectives that remove each border, wall and prejudice. They serve the minions of geopolitical advantage and the clarion to endless war, endless confusion and endless imprisonment. Producing propaganda is criminal activity. Always. Whatever your intention.
And go vegan while you’re at it. No sentient being benefits by closing the book on the Anthropocene 🙂
“Those who know Arabic are jinn among humans, they can see what nobody else can. Imam Shafii
“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
— Matthew 19:24 (NIV)
You know this Bible quote. I am certain you’ve seen it countless times. It might be your favorite chapter and verse. But why a camel? Well, ‘camel’ is a misnomer — a mistranslation immortal. The intended object was ‘rope’, specifically a thick twisted rope: a hawser.
Which is the more eloquent simile:
it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle…
it is easier to thread a hawser through the eye of a needle…
Why is this obviousity never mentioned?
The Bible Hub, an online resource for Bible scholars, provides English language variants for every chapter and verse, among them Matthew 19:24. Click that link to compare 28 translations regarding a rich guy’s odds of entering the Kingdom of God.
Mistranslations are the coin of many a realm, perhaps this one most appropriately so. I am hardly the first to learn, two millennia after the coin was struck, that the writer intended something comparable to a thread.
What is the camel doing in the sewing kit with the needles and threads anyway? The original metaphor roots in Aramaic language, one of the Semitic languages that use consonantal roots to convey meaning:
An alternative scripture, The Qur’an, provides just such a footnote. Here is one from the well-respected translator M.A.S. Abdel Haleem:
The gates of Heaven will not be open to those who rejected Our revelations and arrogantly spurned them; even if a thick rope a were to pass through the eye of a needle they would not enter the Garden.
— Quran “The Garden” 7:40 M.A.S. Abdel Haleem translation 2004
Haleem inserts this footnote for 7:40:
Not ‘camel’. The roots of the words for ‘camel’ and ‘thick twisted rope’ are the same in Arabic and ‘rope’ makes more sense here (Razi).
billziegler1947 