Contemplating Apricity

It’s so rare – too rare? – that a completely new word slides into your vocabulary.

A delightful new word for a delightful thing? Even rarer.

But it happens.

Like a bird you never saw before flutters by and lands on a branch only for you to see, to admire, for it to bathe in your gaze – and then it’s off in a blink. A new word.

Apricity.

Words are like birds … suddenly away.

Apricity: for when on a cold day the warm sun surprises you and gently caresses your face.

Apricity; it’s one of those things Autumn is so good at, up there with the colours and the mist. It’s what a homemade soup does to your innards, and a soft word from your love to your other innards.

A burst of photons born in a mad furnace, travelling for millions of miles to hit the tired soil, only for your face to block it.

Why?

It has been said, declared even, that whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.

No: when a warm sunbeam touches your frosty face, don’t remain silent. Say: apricity. Add an epithet or two, enjoy the word in its entirety, resurrect it from the crumbling pages of a Dictionary printed in 1632, and weave it into your voice. Be bold: sing it, alliterate it, appreciate apricity.

Let the dried apricots, the gleamy red leaves, and the aroma of roasted sweet chestnuts roll off your tongue into sunny, golden Autumn:

Apricity.

Because the skies will close, and … these humicubations, the nocturnal irrorations, and the dankishness of the atmosphere, generated by a want of apricity, are extremely febrifacient.

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Kites are inherently philosophical, aren’t they?

Just look at our boy Wittgenstein here:

Whereof we cannot remain on the ground, thereof we must fly – right?

Kites can fly, but they can’t fly away. Tethered they float among the clouds, yet, like our language, can never float unbounded into the unknown.

What is the word for the silence of the kites?

Wittgensteinan silence is not absence of words, it’s their incompetence to fly above and beyond thoughts, actions, and events; thus silence of the kites is not absence of lift: it’s a place where they can’t go even on a thousand miles line. Kites can’t speak of vacuum.

But … like so many philosophers, Wittgenstein fought the coolest Greek, and lost: the one who wrote cryptic sentences on ostraca and threw them around so we’d be baffled for millennia.

Heraclitus the Jester, the Sybil who with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her.

Never can a kite fly into the same wind, he said. We both fly and do not fly into the same air, we both are and are not.

Heraclitus’ world is in flux – it is flux – and if words do mirror the world (mind you, the old misanthrope coined new meanings for both logos and kosmos!), then a new word – a new ripple in the fabric of the universe, a new curl in the foam of space and time – opens a new view.

Like a camera lofted up on a kite does.

A new view, a new word, a new click of neurons. Say, apricity.

Kites may never leave the line, birds may never fly above the soft cloak of the atmosphere, words may never convey the inconveyable. But every new flutter of the wings changes the future, every new flight opens new views, every new word re-forms the mind.

Like a sunbeam caressing a face.

Birds are like words
some of them will stay …