Word Fugitives by Barbara Wallraff

Author:Barbara Wallraff
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061758706
Publisher: HarperCollins

And Samuel Jay Keyser, an M.I.T. professor emeritus of linguistics and a professional trombone player, has a word for, um, a particular kind of thing-ification:

The pyramids in Egypt and the temple at Angkor Wat built for Suryavarman II in Cambodia—what do they have in common? They share the conceit that the soul of the dead lives on in the stone. That hard gray gilded edifice is not merely tufa or granite. It is the abstract become concrete, the ineffable expressed, the soul in the stone.

It is hard to know who needed this conceit more: the king who ordered his own memorial or the priest who attended him. Immortality was at stake for the king. For the priest, it was his livelihood. While the king was alive, the priest thrived on his living presence. But kings do not live forever. The problem was how to make the beat go on when the drummer left town. The answer seemed simple: Don’t let him leave. Let the stone become the soul. We need a word for this. I suggest incairnation.

Incairnation is a big idea. It is no accident that kings, priests, medicine men, writers, composers, artists of all stripes, have taken it up. After all, incairnation is precisely what happened to the Earth. The Earth was a stone that became imbued with life. The incairnators of history were trying to replicate that ancient magic act.

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