Disorienting
Unfortunately
I have been zeroing in on this particular blog writing session, with the title
as you see it: DISORIENTING. But only now do I realize why this was so
compelling for me. A few words and
phrases get me to my starting point, and will share all this with you. Experience this and when it is over and you have
a few minutes to reflect back and rate and evaluate what has just occurred, you
can bend things back in favorable light and see the value of it all. But what if the first word that comes to the
top of your Word Que is Disorient and one of its off-springs like disorienting,
and you are not quite sure or ready to pull the toffee apart and let things get
messy or sticky or too sweet to consume at one sitting?
Words
and how the mind will process them, brings me to saying things like: Is he trying to trick your brain? Is he challenging your limits. He brings me to the edge of strange
landscapes that begin with words and description and narrative I don’t quite
understand. He has the unique ability to
confuse, even during the regular course of just rehashing the daily menu. Confuse and even mystify and put in play some
puzzling circumstances from his corner of the world, and he does so with
unexplained motive and display of phenomena not really familiar to me.
In the end I try to follow, but realize the
end game is that we all get lost together.
Not sure if that was his intention, but I find this blog disorienting,
and bewildering at best. Just words, but
now has me stumbling around wondering why I came here in the first place. His world.
His words. His rules. And I have one word for all of this just
now: Disorienting.
I
am stuck in the middle of some ill-defined location in my mind. Stuck between Dis and Dat. Where dis means one thing to me, and dat
means something quite different to you, but put together dis and dat become a
respectable pair and we come to some agreement when he says, “…dis and dat…” and understand it is an idiom composed of
demonstrative pronouns. Go deeper and we
realize that it is a vague filler for…”…not much….” Is where I am in a short blog, and am with a
natural restriction and delimiter, because I can’t expand this into something
we can really sit around over a cuppa, and tea or coffee, or ‘…mud..’, as some will say.
So
for me we start small and expand on it, as we have space and time to do
so. Dis and Dat could contain so much
that when typed into Google or Bing search, it could provide us with hours of
reading. Goes back to the sense of using
keywords. Not filler, but specific words
that set up a whole structure of grammar and conversation. At the beginning, arbitrarily will say, “1900’s” and Latin was taught as an important language
and tool for literary subjects, and perhaps subjects of the crown, and of the
church.
Dipping
into the pot of word origins, we find “….dis..” as a latin prefix meaning “ apart “, “ asunder
“, “ away “, “
utterly “ , or having a privative, negative or reversing
force. So will stay with this line of
reasoning, after all its Latin and they made us learn it, so will use that as a
baseline for all that follows.
Need
to tell a minor story so I can complete my thought. When young and there was so much I didn’t
understand, and yet as an innocent, I put my nose where it might not have
belonged, became a bookworm and would sight-read, but couldn’t really comprehend
so much. Sight reading and sounding out
words by breaking them apart, I would concentrate on fragments and partial
segments, that when compounded became something others easily understood, when
I would try to use a word and attach the right meaning with it. So dis
and dat became a short cut to
understanding. Keeping it simple I would break things apart and then later put
it all back together.
That
worked when I was young, but so much has changed since then. Take the word Disorient and separate where
you can and what makes it easy for you to pronounce or recall at critical
moments. Dis and
Orient. But remember this worked
back then, when learning Latin was mandatory in lower school. Today all of this has morphed to
something that needs time and space to
bring into full meaning.
Like
it seems, in the space age and where we have mixed the local with the universal
or international, spelling it out as global and local and then invited
everybody to the party at the same time, using devices and conventions and
social media, and something we refer to at Wikipedia. The new place to sort things out, on the
Internet. Fast and efficient, just type
it in and see what happens. And this is
where the disorienting part comes in.
Before
you know it you want to get out of where you find yourself. Mention that and ask for help on line, and
suddenly you will get conflicting reply and response. Suddenly you are lead to a site that adds
another ‘S’ to your simple dis, which
for me was just a way of breaking down the word, Disorient, so I could
pronounce it and then figure out what it meant.
So
dis become diss and if I dare to become too inquisitive or involved, I will
find myself going off-course and into a
mind swamp of my own making. Online, but
being pulled into the popular culture lane and having to navigate and negotiate
my way to a more stable off-line position.
Disorienting becomes a strain of diss, and now somebody is asking, “…is
it dis or diss?” And before I know it am
somewhere digitally speaking and am being pushed one way and then another. Example and then I will try to bail: ‘….Did you hear that? That guy dissed you.”
Suddenly
none of this is simple to talk about.
Dissed as a shortening of disrespect or dismiss. That is one way to see ‘…dis..’, but not the only way. But if you are in bully-land, and is where I
have been for the last 3 years in America, with elections going on and the
major candidates or players, being close to what dissing is all about. NO respect.
Dismiss others as quick as possible so you can rise to the top and get
credit for all that. All that and it
becomes confusing.
Disorienting,
actually. “All that…’ becomes “dis and dat ‘ in the hands of the skilled manipulator, and
without adequate time or fact checking, everything is reset out of place and
out of mind.
Is
where disorienting becomes a state or condition that we must learn to live
with. And be forewarned, it will get
worse.
Turns
out there is something called Orienteering and is a course I can take, like
going back to school, which lets us or
me learn to read a map and use a compass to make it possible to go from point A
to point B, and in real time and on landscape and ground, one can actually get
somewhere you planned to be and do so in a timely manner. Introduce these new things, such as
orienteering maps that are bewildering to folks who have never used a topographical
map, and to make matters worse, have just been given a compass and night
googles as stocking stuffers at Christmas time.
Disorienting
to say the least, to open a nicely wrapped and colorful package with your name
on it, and when open and you are saying, “Thank You.”, becomes worse when your
bewildered-state of behavior and response gives ground to somebody dissing you,
because they see this differently. Bully-land and dominate, because they know
what to do, and you do not. Orienteering
is a dreadful state and place to be, when you have no experience and utterly
are lost. And everybody knows it.
From
here things get worse. Not so simple
breaking down a word you are unfamiliar with.
Disorient and make it two parts that you intend to put back together as
soon as possible, Dis and Orient, and if you go and ask what each
means separately, the quagmire defines itself and suddenly you are sinking into
something you don’t have control over.
Something so simple as breaking down a word into parts that you can
sound out and make whole, an utterance that others understand and share with
you, becomes chaos in the city of Dis, which is part of Dante’s levels of
hell.
Dis
is no longer what you have learned it to be, rather it morphs in the scholar’s
hands to the city of Dis and is a level of hell to which all non-believers, who
have not otherwise sinned greatly, will go.
Chaos when you go too far. And
maybe that is where reading a map and having a compass and night goggles and
knowing how to use them, fits in this conversation.
The
idea is not to go too far. Not to get
lost together, so that the people around you are as disturbed and lost as you
are. Take a class. Don’t disassemble things. Stay away from slang and bars where people
are dissing one another.
Remember
it is the holidays. Whatever gift you receive,
like compass and map and night goggles is not proper for you, and up your
alley, and you know that keeping it will be both disorienting and chaotic, just
know. You can return it and get
something else. Even in Bully-Land. And you can return it online, digitally
speaking.
