The Search for the Perfect Word

Whither Thou Goest, or Went

(or onto goulash we turn, by need or deed, as dictated by odd and awed sources in the spoken language of our common use):

Writing a Foreword for an issue that includes a work of your own, prompts a writer to seek the brother-bond, the club-house joy, the duet-voice of another soul searching for whole messages by the addition of one word at a time, a brick at a time in a wall at a time, looking for the lone or hidden word to complete the next text piece in line, hoping to find the same soul in another soul looking back at you, a mirror-host, a new voice in an old body, a replication whose thirst for words is endless, is the same as yours, or, indeed, surmounts it.

This search for one word you think is the perfect fit, fits the goulash that abounds for this use, the market, we dare agree, is huge, centuries in the making, lives in the making, books bound or loose for the fitting.

Your own history leaps at you as your eye searches these entries, this content, for the next guaranteed word swiped from the aisle or stall of deli, bakery, produce, dairy sections, to be in a place in this very sentence you are trying to exalt; brave soul daring to believe you will find it, in your mind, in a piece of this issue as a spot that says, “It shall be here, the next perfection of thought, this now on-going sentence, this paragraph, this story or this poem, this mixture, this potpourri bound to be: there is no other word to fix this space.

All the differences we know, what read seen, what heard spoken, the massed diversions of use as old as man, as different as his speech, as his goulash:

In cooking, goulash is a rich stew, originating in Hungary, made of beef, lamb, or veal highly seasoned with paprika.
In Bridge, goulash is a method of dealing in threes and fours without first shuffling the cards, to produce freak hands
In adapted current use, or slang, goulash represents a hodgepodge; or a jumble or collection of things not necessarily connected.

Since my childhood, where I first heard words as read to me by parents, grandmother, grandfather, one each side of the family, once in a while listening to a drunk in his hallway glory, a rent collector who knew swear words, mailmen or delivery men who had their own brands of word choice, the twists and turns and grips of them, musical, phonetic, otherwise memorable, have come to me in snippets, shortened phrases, new words of self-translation, hurrying for connectives in case they escape to someone else, words standing alone on a page waiting just for my tongue to deliver them from my mouth in celebration. I have been captured by the goulash of their gathering, their bits and pieces, their chunks, their pared-down almost kitchen-purities of sound in sound’s glorious god-awful mix, its potpourri of words seen in inscription or delivered as spoken.

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The words come from diverse sources, behind corners, from a distance, in a speech, on a sign, echoed from some paramount, like a near-knighthood at address, a lawyer in summary, from favored poets named Willian or John or Robert, or like Tom Wolfe in books such as You Can’t Go Home Again or his Of Time and the River in a manuscript crammed into a suitcase (oh, the energy of that thought) as he presented it to an editor who spent more than a year in its wild perfection, its utter drama.

In a football huddle once in the middle of a game at old Manning Bowl, I accidentally broke into a rhyming couplet, which must have happened before (as loose as “Old Reverse 42 ought to do”), and a knowledgeable teammate said, “Oh, boy, here he goes again!”

A few detachments follow, in a matter of course.

So, it comes, around a corner of this issue, from a page the goulash explodes, the other soul is found, the page, the paragraph, the line leaps at you, at me, in soft ink, in hard being, the stew at a boil here in Jean Maria Nunes’ “In Her Walls,” a coveted piece, a piece glad-found, a piece you’d loved to have written, even if somebody beat you to it. This has lines that fit the taste of goulash: ”Like the bow on a present, she had her room, and on top of that she had the bees.” And “From March to October the sun pressed the insides out of everything in the south.” And “They fed from fat, waxy blossoms the color of fire, smelling of fire, wide as fists.” Those are wake-up words, goulash words, words another person besides me will wish they had written, ‘be it thus written and sworn to, Jean Maria.’

Tesla Cotter’s “What Do We Do with Our Dead” and its rich imagery, which speaks from and with tombstones, getting on with the living.

Robert Gil’s “Agnomia”, an excerpt from a novel, saying, “Even wanderings have their pasts.” with the parts and pieces of goulash. If time and tide allow me (it is snowing here again on the east coast), I will read the novel, if my eyes allow.

I’d forgotten the rhyme too quickly in Penn Kemps’ Couplet du commedia”, but the fun was not done.

Samuel Harr’s “Peasants under Glass,” a load of fun, without using a new word, and so much for goulash, as a breather.

And Kayley Thomas’s “Ask Pavlov’s Dogs” for what kind of response?” Not a note, none at all, but I heard the ‘zip’ flip.

George Moore’s “Ode to the Smallest Fish” might be titled “Getting a Grip on Yourself.”

Arthur Elch’s “The Tower Room” might be renamed “How to Get Far from the Madd’ning Crowd.”

Este Yarmosh’s “Threads” got spun without a needle.

Though I will not touch at masters in the collection, I will seek goulash with every breath.

All in all, take the haul … and run with it.

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This post is republished on Medium.

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