Found 136 posts tagged ‘unicorn’ |
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Unicorn Sonnet, by Gary Barwin
I send you this email. I am no unicorn. You ask the number of my horns. A hundred? A thousand? Perhaps they are uncountable, considering body surface area and thickness. Needle-like, perhaps they mirror flesh in slivers, a silver aura of pixels or data points, a fiber optic network of breath or light. Perhaps they are beams sent from the cemeteries of distant stars, or broad as trees, root you to the ground while reaching toward a rhizomatic sun.
I reply: No, I have no horn. Unscrewed from my forehead, I keep it in my desk at work, my mother, father, sister, son. Springtime a shopping cart or unicorn, moving air and light in its chrome matrix. Soft familiar music from everywhere, winter, its white pelt & warm skin now also in a desk. I am no unicorn, but send this email. I am a spammer of friends and of feelings that bud like sticky leaves now unfolding.
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To paraphrase José Ortega Y Gasset, when we hear a unicorn, it is the unicorn that is present and evident, not our hearing it. We do not hear our hearing when we are listening. In order to realize that there is such a thing as our hearing, we have to stop listening and remember that a moment ago we were hearing. We hear our hearing when we are outside it, when it is not immediate to us, when the reality with which it had to do -- hearing the unicorn -- is reality no longer, but rather we are in another reality which we call 'remembering a past event': recalling that we heard a unicorn. To those who think that unicorns are not real, we reply that what we think is never reality; a thought doesn't and can't think itself -- a thought, far from being fundamental reality, is no more than an invention -- something hypothetical or theoretical. To truly know unicorns, it is necessary to subtract all of that which has been thought, to realize that the reality of unicorns is always different from that which is thought. In a nutshell, the pre-intellectual executive act consists in the coexistence of oneself with unicorns. |
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We're astonished to receive, in spite of an omission of biblical proportions, a five-star review of our unicorn field guide: The book is nothing if not thorough in reproducing what seems to be everything ever said anywhere in literature pertaining to the sounds made by unicorns. Listening for all of these will charge your humdrum, everyday reality with magic, or at least give it some zip. Conley's omission of the many references to the unicorn in the King James Bible, however, is a puzzler (see Nu 23:22; 24:8; Dt 33:17; Job 39: 9-12; Pss 22:21; 29:6; 92:10; Isa 34:7). Surely Conley knows that fundamentalist champions of the KJV in their millions would find themselves theologically bound to agree with him in presuming the existence of unicorns. Was this deliberate? And if so, was the omission a contemptuous snub or a gesture of respect? I'm almost tempted to deduct a star, but I'm going to take this as a refusal to divide his audience by religion, seeing as how fundamentalist bashers are at least as vocal and nasty as the worst of their targets, and it would be difficult to hear even the clumsiest unicorn over the cantankerous clatter that could result. —Dan Olson
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Book of Whispers –
December 19, 2012 |
(permalink) |
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Intriguingly, freshly fallen snow can actually store sounds as well as project them with clarity. A carefully gathered snowball is like a library of sounds stored on crystalline shelves. When held to the ear like a seashell, it may whisper the secrets it has absorbed. Ergo, composer and music theorist John Rahn describes "a little snowball of sounds” ( Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, 1995). Snow expert Nancy Armstrong explains that "When snow is newly fallen, sound waves are absorbed into its soft surface. Later, when the surface has hardened, sounds may travel further and sound clearer, because the snow reflects sound waves, sending them more quickly through the air” ( Snowman in a Box, 2002). Barbara Blair concurs: "snow is a wonderful substance to enhance awareness” ( Communing with the Infinite, 2006). [The preceding is an excerpt from our Field Guide to Identifying Unicorns by Sound.]
Listening to a snowball, from Guernsey's magazine, 1882.
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Philosopher G.E. Moore suggested that there must be such thing as a unicorn, since the human mind can think of it and can distinguish the thought of a unicorn from the thought of a griffin. H is convincing explanation:
When I think of a unicorn, what I am thinking of is certainly not nothing; if it were nothing, then, when I think of a griffin, I should also be thinking of nothing, and there would be no difference between thinking of a griffin and thinking of a unicorn. But there certainly is a difference; and what can the difference be except that in the one case what I am thinking of is a unicorn, and in the other a griffin? And if the unicorn is what I am thinking of, then there certainly must be a unicorn, in spite of the fact that unicorns are unreal. In other words, though in one sense of the words there certainly are no unicorns–that sense, namely, in which to assert that there are would be equivalent to asserting that unicorns are real–yet there must be some other sense in which there are such things; since, if there were not, we could not think of them. — G.E. Moore, Philosophical Studies, 1922
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"If we can all think about unicorns in this world, then anything is possible." —Camomile Hixon, explaining why she hung 2,000 "Missing Unicorn" posters all around New York City. Read all about it here. (Thanks, Gary!) |
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The Unicorn of 4th Street. Jonathan Caws-Elwitt writes: "Guess it must be Spinoza's day off."
"You're thinking of Market Street."
"No," said Dylan, "I'm positive it was 4th Street."
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