MAD3PAD 28-30 - pollicate // Borges - AF ? // GRGR 1,8 -

[Michael Bailey]

 Toby G Levy wrote:

> vw#11: Pollicate - Having a curved projection or spine on the inner side
> of a leg joint; - said of insects. (not in my dictionary but found at
> www.thefreedictionary.com).
>
>         "Ethelmer smiles and amiably pollicates the Revd..." Is Pynchon
> saying that Ethelmer shows a "lack of spine" here?
>
> Toby
>

I parse it thus: poll = head (as in "poll tax"), indicate is to point
(with the IND-ex finger) - so pollicate is to make a motion with the
head indicating what to look at

_____
Glenn Scheper quoted:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/loy/joannes.htm
> On "Love Songs" / "Songs to Joannes" ... Poems of Mina Loy
>and found that the innermost essential "Self of
> selves" consists, when examined in detail,
> "mainly of [a] collection of ...

 >peculiar motions in the head or between the head
 >and throat,"
 >so that "our entire feeling of spiritual activity,
 >or what commonly passes by that name,
 >is really a feeling of bodily activities whose
 >exact nature is by most men overlooked".

>...!new coitus term: "intersubjective friction"

somewhere in the long ago I read that the ego was equivalent to the
face muscles...the peculiar motions in the head (such as policating)
and throat (such as subvocalizing) surely are connected to entheogenic
experience...
I would argue there is something else, an elan vital imbuing such
movements - that if one was to map and duplicate the head movements of
a rapturous experience, still, even the same person trying it again
mightn't experience the same or equivalent rapture
(and that the sine qua non is love "...or I am become an empty cymbal"
as Saint Paul wrote somewhere)

anyway, I've been perusing your website and am trying to re-find the
place where you linked to an online tachistoscope
- this device figured in a Heinlein book, wherein the protagonists
used it to increase their reading and comprehension skills - something
I could use
(also, could have sworn you had links to your posts on a Nabokov list
- of which list I do not know the location either)
and while reading and searching, and getting distracted (and wondering
with much wonder about this AF phenomenon), it crossed my mind to also
wonder - was Borges an AF practitioner?

--------

GRGR 1,8 "What I want," Pointsman leaning now into the central
radiance of the lamp, his white face more vulnerable than his voice,
whispering across the burning spire of a hypodermic set upright on the
desk, "what I really need, is not a dog, not an octopus, but one of
your fine Foxes.  Damn it.  One, little, Fox!"
(P, 53, 1-3)

I suppose hypodermics in the 40s were glass, and heavier, and not
disposable (thus the autoclave) and might have been able to balance
point up...
an arresting image, anyway...
If one can cure anything by running around the building and not
thinking of a Fox, Pointsman is obviously not seeking a cure


--
"Acceptance, forgiveness, love - now that's a philosophy of life!"
-Woody Allen, as Broadway Danny Rose