dunderhead

Dunderhead [ˈdʌndəˌhɛd]

n

a stupid or slow-witted person; dunce Also called dunderpate

[probably from Dutch donder thunder + head; compare blockhead]

Are there any words or phrases in the English language that borrow from the Dutch in a positive, non-sneering way, you wonder. To think: worldly events centuries ago would shape our use of words, the way we coin an expression. 

Starter for ten: The only word of Czech origin? 

Robots are such dunces because they always do what they're told. 'Dunce'..now, there's a word with a history! Dunces are such dunces because they can only think. Theoretical intelligence refined, boiled and distilled down to a tee ceases to be intelligence. The road taken ceases to be a road. As long as I am unsure of myself I am human.

~~~

One thinks of one's own clumsiness (gosh, that makes me sound like the Queen!). Is it because I've moved about so much, being neither here nor there, with only a vague sense of belonging? (There's nothing worse than a failed mullah, except for a failed nomad). A life in parenthesis. Trivial decisions made by successive generations of idiots means that like Paula Fox you don't really have words for the place you are. The worldly non-events that carve out your silences.

~~~

JB.

The 'sin of despair'. I suppose we've dispensed with biblical terms and so this won't do. But there is something ungrateful about the terse, puritanical soul of the  fundamentalists for whom any relation to the world-music, art, women-is suspect. Desperate characters who despair at their sensibilities being refracted, dispersed into the myriad forms of worldly attachments.

Is this so very different from the pornographic soul?  The soul laid bare: repetitive, mechanical in its operations, robotic in its processing of what only amounts to 'information' at the end of the day, two-dimensional in its outlook, world-weary, predictable in its nihilism, cliched, cheap and artificial.

The sin of not connecting, of not wanting to.

Provence and the southern light. Camus's First Man, of course. Camus kind of redeems himself here since he finally sees the Arabs as human beings. 

Michel H.: An old, drunken ranting sod. So very, very, boring.

The best essays are undoubtedly on Ford Madox Ford, though Kipling (and Lahore!) and Orwell do make an appearance. And there's also the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald whose short stories are quite mysterious, nearly as good as Karen B. (note to self: you really must stop making so many notes to yourself and actually read The Blue Flower).

In 'levels' he leaves sentences and thoughts floating in the air, half completed. It's as if each broken line could be made into a story itself and sail. This is from one of the essays:

'It is sometimes to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness an frugality of life in the Midi which includes a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone...Sunlight reflected from red tile floors on to whitewashed walls..and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled , hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it....Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear...

And you are released from the necessity of owning things. There is no need to be cosy...Your comforts are the warmth and light provided by nature.'

Perhaps only a northern soul could write so lovingly of the light. To be truly a part of it would make you speechless. 

That was Stella Bowen by the way. A terrible fate to be remembered as only the spouse of someone great.What she says sounds right, rings true. And that is all one can want -or at least all I want-from any writing.

From the same essay:

'There are in this world only two earthly Paradises...Provence ...and the Reading Room of the British Library.'

Yes! The 'exalted silence' of the book. If you cannot bring yourself to be religious in the formal sense then academia or books may be the only other way, the only viable alternative. And yet, you don't really see them as alternatives, do you. Religion has always had a profound relation to the arts, to poetry and music and architecture. It is only the corruption of religion at the hands of the fundamentalists that make the world 'the world', a mere palace of dreams and fantasies. For the traditional Muslim the Prophet's words remain true: 'The whole world is a mosque'.

~~~

I dunna why, I canna say, but this word sounded Scottish to me (not just Dundee). Unknowingness and clumsiness, stunned by too much music until one is out of one's sense (or is it too much light?), music and ec-stasy...and as if by magic:

' But the most likely source is the Scots verb “dunner,” meaning “to resound with a loud and reverberating noise,” especially “to fall with a loud sound.” This “dunner,” in turn, has been traced to the Old Norse “duna,” meaning “to thunder,” which in turn goes back to the Germanic root “dun,” which also gave us our English “din” for a loud noise.'