Word Playing

Childhood in a polylingual family, hyper-polylingual mother and brother. Polylingual punning never quite outgrown. Proust’s temps perdu, for instance. Memories of Tom Perdu: title of a section in my first book, incorrigible author in his twenties.

Or, much later —recently, that is, writing this book—coming across Renaissance musical laments evoking the soul’s ordeals, grief, and that knock-knock-knocking on Death’s door. Consider John Dowland’s Lachrimae (1604):

Come heavy sleepe the image of true death;And close up these my weary weeping eyes:Whose spring of tears doth stop my vitall breath,And tears my hart with sorrows sigh-swoln cries.

Such compositions are tombeaux. Tomb, French for tomb or tombstone; plural tombeaux. Tom beau? Tom no longer beau? Tom’s beau tomb?

Tombeau, in any case, (mis)led me to threnody, a memorial poem or song, from the Greek threnoidia (threnos, “wailing” + oide, “ode”). Think dirge. Or coronach (Gaelic comh, “together” + rànach, “outcry”). Which delivered me to banshee, a female ghost wailing—keening!—that a death is imminent.

Thence to the notion of the older self, this older self, as male banshee...