Verb Air Quotes

You do look a little pale," the army woman said. "I thought maybe it was air sickness." "Pure hunger" She gave him a professional smile. "I'll see what I can rustle up." Russel? the gunslinger thought dazedly. In his own world 'to russel' was a slang verb meaning to take a woman by force. Never mind, food would come.

I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: “I mean, are you happy with your life, Rajima?” “I don’t know,” she said uncomfortably, as if she’d never really considered such a question. “When there is little you can do, you do what you can.” Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could.

Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: noun, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life.

While you're alive it's shameful to worm your way into the Calendar of Saints. Disbelief in yourself is more saintly. It takes real talent not to dread being terrified by your own agonizing lack of talent. Disbelief in yourself is indispensable. Indispensable to us is the loneliness of being gripped in the vise, so that in the darkest night the sky will enter you and skin your temples with the stars, so that streetcars will crash into the room, wheels cutting across your face, so the dangling rope, terrible and alive, will float into the room and dance invitingly in the air. Indispensable is any mangy ghost in tattered, overplayed stage rags, and if even the ghosts are capricious, I swear, they are no more capricious than those who are alive. Indispensable amidst babbling boredom are the deadly fear of uttering the right words and the fear of shaving, because across your cheekbone graveyard grass already grows. It is indispensable to be sleeplessly delirious, to fail, to leap into emptiness. Probably, only in despair is it possible to speak all the truth to this age. It is indispensable, after throwing out dirty drafts, to explode yourself and crawl before ridicule, to reassemble your shattered hands from fingers that rolled under the dresser. Indispensable is the cowardice to be cruel and the observation of the small mercies, when a step toward falsely high goals makes the trampled stars squeal out. It's indispensable, with a misfit's hunger, to gnaw a verb right down to the bone. Only one who is by nature from the naked poor is neither naked nor poor before fastidious eternity. And if from out of the dirt, you have become a prince, but without principles, unprince yourself and consider how much less dirt there was before, when you were in the real, pure dirt. Our self-esteem is such baseness.... The Creator raises to the heights only those who, even with tiny movements, tremble with the fear of uncertainty. Better to cut open your veins with a can opener, to lie like a wino on a spit-spattered bench in the park, than to come to that very comfortable belief in your own special significance. Blessed is the madcap artist, who smashes his sculpture with relish- hungry and cold-but free from degrading belief in himself.

We grasp onto self-esteem as if it were an inflatable raft that will save us—or at least save and prop up the positive sense of self that we so crave—only to find that the raft has a gaping hole and is rapidly running out of air. The truth is this: sometimes we display good qualities and sometimes bad. Sometimes we act in helpful, productive ways and sometimes in harmful, maladaptive ways. But we are not defined by these qualities or behaviors. We are a verb not a noun, a process rather than a fixed “thing.” Our actions change—mercurial beings that we are—according to time, circumstance, mood, setting.

Then I try to tell her what I really mean by that simple four-letter verb. That not only does my world revolve around her, but she is my world. That she’s not just my reason for breathing, she’s air itself. That she’s the meaning behind every one of my thoughts, every thrum of my pulse, every whisper of my conscience. She’s my entire everything. It’s as simple and as complex as that.

The World card shows the fully balanced and integrated human as the Wiseone pictured in the Hermit card. Wiseones are those human beings who have married their Selves and become fully unified, living, flesh-and-blood manifestations of the Divine presence, described in the Qabalah as the Shekinah, derived from the Hebrew verb shakhan, “to dwell.” Persons of this stature live on Earth, yet are validated by and depend upon the greater world (the universe) alone, shown by the fact that they are supported by and dance on air (another reference to the Fool and Spirit). They continually turn inward and upward to their God/dess Self and the Source, while turning outward and downward to the work of the everyday world at hand. Wiseones embody the concept “Trust in the universe and it will support you!

She is sitting right next to me. I want to run my finger along her arm. I want to kiss her neck. I want to whisper the truth in her ear. But instead I watch as she conjugates verbs. I listen as the air is filled with a foreign language, spoken in haphazard bursts. I try to sketch her in my notebook, but I am not an artist, and all that comes out are the wrong shapes, the wrong lines. I cannot hold onto anything that’s her.

(Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”)

Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers - that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a once common means enough to warrant its own verb: *burke*, which the OED defines as "to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim's body for dissection.

Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: non, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life.

Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In

was a commonplace among his colleagues—especially the younger ones—that he was a “dedicated” teacher, a term they used half in envy and half in contempt, one whose dedication blinded him to anything that went on outside the classroom or, at the most, outside the halls of the University. There were mild jokes: after a departmental meeting at which Stoner had spoken bluntly about some recent experiments in the teaching of grammar, a young instructor remarked that “To Stoner, copulation is restricted to verbs,” and was surprised at the quality of laughter and meaningful looks exchanged by some of the older men. Someone else once said, “Old Stoner thinks that WPA stands for Wrong Pronoun Antecedent,” and was gratified to learn that his witticism gained some currency. But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak. And though he looked upon them with apparent impassivity, he was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade when many men’s faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect

As I watch [the world],’ wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, ‘it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles.’ It is a brilliant observation about observation. Shepherd knew that ‘landscape’ is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant – a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us. Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum.* I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.

Marie est la « servante du Seigneur », la servante par excellence, ce qui indique une similitude annonciatrice de la fonction du Prophète de l’islâm. Ce caractère servitorial est lié au symbolisme du voile. Selon Michel Vâlsan : « La Réalité muhammadienne constitue le mystère du Verbe suprême et universel, car elle est en même temps la Théophanie intégrale (de l’Essence, des Attributs et des Actes) et son occultation sous le voile de la Servitude absolue et totale ». C’est parce qu’elle est la servante parfaite que Marie est toujours voilée, aussi bien dans ses apparitions que dans les représentations de l’Art sacré, notamment celui des icônes. Comme elle est, par ailleurs, le modèle de toutes les vertus, l’Eglise aurait été bien inspirée de reconnaître que l’attachement islamique au port du voile pouvait constituer un exemple pour les femmes catholiques. Les querelles et les résistances modernes sur ce point sont révélatrices d’un état d’esprit antitraditionnel. Ibn Arabî enseigne que le statut subordonné de la femme exprime, non pas un abaissement, mais au contraire sa supériorité spirituelle sur l’homme qui, créé directement à l’image de Dieu, a tendance à oublier sa servitude et à se poser en rival de son Créateur . Toute forme traditionnelle est fondée sur une alliance impliquant une soumission à la volonté divine ; c’est ce qu’indique parfaitement le terme « islam » qui apparaît, par là même, comme une désignation de la Tradition universelle. Au lieu de reconnaître cette signification traditionnelle du voile de Marie, l’Église, sur cette question comme sur beaucoup d’autres, donne l’impression de suivre l’air du temps et, sans doute pour mieux se démarquer de l’islâm, d’encourager les femmes catholiques, en particulier les souveraines, à se montrer tête nue ailleurs qu’au Vatican. L’enseignement de saint Paul est cependant fort clair, et semblable à celui de l’islam : « Femmes, soyez soumises à vos maris, comme il se doit dans le Seigneur » (Col, 3, 18) ; « Je ne permets pas à la femme d’enseigner ni de faire la loi à l’homme. Qu’elle se tienne tranquille. C’est Adam en effet qui fut formé le premier, Eve ensuite. Et ce n’est pas Adam qui se laissa séduire » (I Tim, 2, 12-13).

The flowers are springing up, the season of singing birds has come, and the cooing of turtledoves fills the air. —Song of Songs 2:12

Line 10: The fact that the inhabitants of the Netherworld are said to be clad in feather garments is perhaps due to the belief that after death, a person's soul turned into a spirit or a ghost, whose nature was wind-like, as well as bird-like. The Mesopotamians believed in the body (*pagru*) and the soul. the latter being referred to by two words: GIDIM = *et.emmu*, meaning "spirit of the dead," "ghost;" and AN.ZAG.GAR(.RA)/LIL2 = *zaqi_qu*/*ziqi_qu*, meaning "soul," "ghost," "phantom." Living beings (humans and animals) also had ZI (*napis\/tu*) "life, vigor, breath," which was associated with the throat or neck. As breath and coming from one's throat, ZI was understood as moving air, i.e., wind-like. ZI (*napis\/tu*) was the animating life force, which could be shortened or prolonged. For instance...Inanna grants "long life (zi-su\-ud-g~a/l) under him (=the king) in the palace. At one's death, when the soul/spirit released itself from the body, both *et.emmu* and *zaqi_qu*/*ziqi_qu* descended to the Netherworld, but when the body ceased to exist, so did the *et.emmu*, leaving only the *zaqi_gu*. Those souls that were denied access to the Netherworld for whatever reason, such as improper buriel or violent or premature death, roamed as harmful ghosts. Those souls who had attained peace were occasionally allowed to visit their families, to offer help or give instructions to their still living relatives. As it was only the *et.emmu* that was able to have influence on the affairs of the living relatives, special care was taken to preserve the remains of the familial dead. According to CAD [The Assyrian Dictionary of the University of Chicago] the Sumerian equivalent of *zaqi_qu*/*ziqi_qu* was li/l, which referred to a "phantom," "ghost," "haunting spirit" as in lu/-li/l-la/ [or] *lilu^* or in ki-sikil-li/l - la/ {or] *lili_tu*. the usual translation for the word li/l, however, is "wind," and li/l is equated with the word *s\/a_ru* (wind) in lexical lists. As the lexical lists equate wind (*s\/a_ru* and ghost (*zaqi_qu*) their association with each other cannot be unfounded. Moreover, *zaqi_qu* derives from the same root as the verb *za^qu*, "to blow," and the noun *zi_qu*, "breeze." According to J. Scurlock, *zaqi_qu* is a sexless, wind-like emanation, probably a bird-like phantom, able to fly through small apertures, and as such, became associated with dreaming, as it was able to leave the sleeping body. The wind-like appearance of the soul is also attested in the Gilgamesh Epic XII 83-84, where Enkidu is able to ascend from the Netherworld through a hole in the ground: "[Gilgamesh] opened a hole in the Netherworld, the *utukku* (ghost) of Enkidu came forthfrom the underworld as a *zaqi_qu." The soul's bird-like appearance is referred to in Tablet VII 183-184, where Enkidu visits the Netherworld in a dream. Prior to his descent, he is changed into a dove, and his hands are changed into wings. - State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts Volume VI: The Neo-Assyrian Myth of Istar's Descent and Resurrection {In this quote I haven't been able to copy some words exactly. I've put Assyrian words( normally in italics) between *asterisks*. The names of signs in Sumerian cuneiform (wedge-shaped writing) are normally in CAPITALS with a number slightly below the line after it if there's more than one reading for that sign. Assyriologists use marks above or below individual letters to aid pronunciation- I've put whatever I can do similar after the letter. E.g. *et.emmu" normally has the dot under the "t" to indicate a sibilant or buzzy sound, so it sounds something like "etzzemmoo." *zaqi_qu* normally has the line (macron) over the "i" to indicate a long vowel, so it sounds like "zaqeeqoo." *napis\/tu* normally has a small "v" over the s to make a sh sound, ="napishtu".}

La danse du stylo Les pas au bout de la rime pompes et son hip-hop style des sauts aux performances un air rétro dans le flow les muscles dopés burpees une graphie au corps courbé l'entorse scandée des mots le verbe pulse ses métaphores gainage des souffles traction au sol salto arrière crunch abdos pour les virtuoses le sens décolle la langue s'étire mouvement au bout des lignes tendons s'habillent novelangue beatboxing géants et les platines smurf même à genou le stylo fou gratte la feuille Athlète au rythme US rapper in-utéro pour les adeptes un rendez-vous soupçon mégalo virevolte dans l'air du temps

Bee’s Wings This washed-out morning, April rain descants, Weeps over gravity, the broken bones Of gravel and graveyards, and Cora puts Away gold dandelions to sugar And skew into gold wine, then discloses That Pablo gutted his engine last night Speeding to Beulah Beach under a moon As pocked and yellowed as aged newsprint. Now, Othello, famed guitarist, heated By rain-clear rum, voices transparent notes Of sad, anonymous heroes who hooked Mackerel and slept in love-pried-open thighs And gave out booze in vain crusades to end Twenty centuries of Christianity. His voice is simple, sung air: without notes, There's nothing. His unknown, imminent death (The feel of iambs ending as trochees In a slow, decasyllabic death-waltz; His vertebrae trellised on his stripped spine Like a 'xylophone or keyboard of nerves) Will also be nothing: the sun pours gold Upon Shelley, his sis', light as bees' wings, Who roams a garden sprung from rotten wood And words, picking green nouns and fresh, bright verbs, For there's nothing I will not force language To do to make us one — whether water Hurts like whisky or the sun burns like oil Or love declines to weathered names on stone. George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls (1990)

Taxonomically the bora and mistral are katabatic (downhill) winds, found anywhere that cold mountain air can make a steep escape to ground. Wind names in the Mediterranean derive largely from geography. Llevantade has roots in the Spanish verb llevar (to rise) and is one in a family of winds that originate from the east. Poniente means west in Spanish and denotes fair breezes that blow in off the Atlantic, funneling through the Strait of Gibraltar. The sirocco is drawn up from Africa, a gritty inhalation that grows wet and foggy on a diet of evaporated water as it makes its way north. Microparticles of airborne sand form nuclei for condensation, bringing tiny bits of the Sahara down with the rain onto Europe. The sirocco is called the arifi (thirsty) in Libya, and the jugo (south) in Croatia. I posit that we are experiencing the Mediterranean’s unnamed breeze, the nonwind. “Ah, yes,” she replies. “El sin viento.

At its most basic and bare bones, a story is this: Characters do shit. Characters say shit. Repeat until end. And even in that, there maybe exists a needless deviation—we often separate action and dialogue but, really, dialogue is action. Talk is a verb. To communicate is to do something, perhaps one of the most vital forms of “doing something” that we have available to us as humans. We often dismiss that, though, right? Oh, that’s just talk. We pretend like words are not meaningful, like they’re just hot air. But that’s not true at all. Dialogue and communication are as vital as any other action, and in fact contain layers—because dialogue can be savvier, more sinister, more affecting.

Une bouchée d’absinthe mon village à moi qui portes dans ton ventre deux vénérables pleurs d’acacias parfumés des fleurs rouges dégoulinent des ardeurs les coquelicots suintent et Cervantès dans les étoiles panse l’argile le mal que tu me fis ô mon enfance encore m’obnubile Dieu en proie aux rêves secrètement chenu et engourdi caresse sans fin chaleureusement l’icône de mon frère Panait pénétré du repentir Il éteignit la céleste aura saisi d’adoration Il considère Marie et Stoïana tout frémissant l’abricotier s’embrase à l’air d’un bûcher les étoiles tétins en flammes brisent les barreaux de l’empyrée et sur cette terre marâtre se déversent nombre de nouvelles fragrances grâce au Verbe l’éclaircissement de la pluie passe en nous s’élance et du noyer toute l’amertume passe en toi doucement suinte mon village à moi je porte dans le ventre cette bouchée absinthe