Ha ha. Fun stuff, Scout and Penny. And I agree, animalhands, that it looks very similar to the whole buddhist nonduality paradigm. Don’t get me started on my anti-buddhist rant though! Just kidding. Sorta.
To tell you the truth Scout, I think you deconstructed English too much. You run into a problem here, that conventional English has a rhythm and sound that pleases the native (non-indigenously - I mean someone born into it) speaker’s ear, and if you change it, it “clangs”. For example, no one has to teach you grammar, you know it instinctively. Ebonics has a very consistent grammatical system, even though we consider it “dumbed-down english”.
Just look at “nouns” as “verbs”; re-verbify them. I should have said in my last post (for example), not that ‘talêpês’ means to “act like coyote”, but rather it means “to coyote”. As in, I coyote, you coyote, he coyotes, we coyote, they coyote, ‘they coyoted across the field’.
We do this all the time in English. He ‘fishtailed’ all over the road. I ‘cupped’ the water in my hand. Let’s ‘table’ that vote. We can just do it more and more, staying aware that the nouns speak more accurately when used to describe a pattern of appearance or movement.
So, “I traveled to the store today”, could work just fine, if you think of “store” as a verb (to “store” boxes). Think about it - those U-Store rental places actually have quite the e-primitive ring to it…they’ve named themselves after the pattern of activity that best describes their business.
Actually, that demonstrates some unconscious brilliance on their part. Never thought of that before.
To change “traveled” to “leg lifted” doesn’t make it more accurate, in my mind. One lift’s one leg to pee (dog), to do excercises (leg lifts), to put one’s pants on, to step over things. I would imagine that if you wanted to make “traveled” more descriptive you could either use more involving verbs like “ambled” “strolled” “jetted” “trotted”. Think about it in terms of tracking…how exactly did you travel to the store? In what “gait”? That might rewild it a little bit.
Changing “sun” to “fire-ball” just changes it from one noun to another. To verbify it you could say “it shines”, but really, you could also just use sun as a verb. We already do it. “The cat sunned himself on the porch”. I wouldn’t change today anyway…it acts more as a time marker than a usable noun.
Not to criticize what you wrote, of course. The play of it makes it worth while. The most important game I play:
Whenever I track, or observe, I look at the world in terms of its activity. Like David Abram says in Spell of the Sensuous, colors beckon and grab my senses, inspire feelings. Dirt doesn’t just sit inertly on the ground, it consists of living tissue, quite literally. Concrete doesn’t just lay there, it holds-me-up, it sweats moisture.
I’ve got an idea: every time you notice yourself looking at something as if it just “exists”, as an object, I want you to come up with all the ways that it actively interacts with the world. For example, a glass cup not only contains liquid, or air, but the glass that forms the cup oozes downward at an imperceptible rate (those who’ve studied chemistry will know that glass behaves as a liquid). Also, the glass may have fingerprints on it, or scratches, that slowly age. Also, it refracts light in diverse ways. Old glasses will have more character than young, freshly crafted ones. Etc. Remember, if you hold the glass, it pushes back with an equal and opposite reaction. The glass literally vibrates at an atomic level. Everything enacts patterns of movement.
Just play with looking at the world in this way. It’ll totally screw with you, but it’ll shoot your tracking through the roof.
And funny how quickly this way of observing/interacting takes you right into the heart of animism.