My spirit is on edge. I can enjoy
Nought which has not the honeyed sting of sin …

A very long poem which no one reads, and a quote from it which retains an appeal even through its verifiable clunkiness. I’m trying to figure out what Festus means, out beyond Gunsmoke. The answer in a word seems to be something like ‘graspable’. Good enough for the short term.

Mani- is very simple, going back all the way to Proto-Indo-European. It’s hand, or to get fancy, “of or pertaining to the hand; done, made, or used by hand”. As in labor which is manual.

Put them together and things get nebulous again. The etymologists fuss:

De Vaan writes, ‘If manifestus may be interpreted as “caught by hand”, the meanings seem to point to “grabbing” or “attacking” for -festus.’
But he finds none of the proposed ulterior connections compelling, and concludes that, regarding infestus and manifestus, ‘maybe the two must be separated.’ If not, the sense development might be from ‘caught by hand’ to ‘in hand, palpable’.

That quote is ripped from the etymonline page, and they don’t attribute it further. Another interesting thing to notice there is that our title word is one of those gems that is at least three separate words really.

Noun: A public declaration. Later debauched into ‘certified list of a ship’s cargo’, but still in reach of being reclaimed, for the purpose of making ‘manifesto’ redundant, right?

Verb: To show plainly. This meaning is central, especially because it is less about declarations, and more about disclosures. You don’t have to say it because you’re actively and probably silently just showing it.

Adjective: Clearly revealed to the eye. “We hold these truths to be be manifest; that all men are created equal“, et cetera; an exact stand-in for self-evident.

That which is self-evident is easily grasped.

We Hold These Truths is the declarative part, and a luscious piece of writing those first two paragraphs are. “This much is obvious”, saith the Authors. But wait there’s more–the King’s been a fuck, and “To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world”.

The Declaration of Independence is the very model of a manifesto, a “public declaration explaining reasons or motives for a course of actions done or planned”. We are equal to you; the Creator said it his own self. You, monarch, have not acted like this truth is true; here are the Facts. Thus, we’re rebelling against your rule and your rules. Even you have a boss, and we can call it God or we can call it reality, but we’re siding with it, and therefore (maybe with some regrets, but inevitably) against you.

But that’s all off to the side of the point.

The most ubiquitous advice to writers is “Show don’t tell.”

Translating it precisely, it says: Just manifest, don’t hand us a manifest.

Always reveal. Never make declarations.

It’s good advice, pointing neophytes in the right direction, but if you break it down logically it’s pretty much impossible to follow, I do declare.

Imagine a short film that consists of nothing but a plastic bag blowing around in the wind. Taken on its own, it is a fair approximation of pure showing, without any telling.

Does the voice-over by the author of the film within a film, declaring what it means to him, lead to it failing as art? A strict interpretation of show-don’t-tell suggests so.

In written art it’s even trickier to parse out where revelation ends and declaration begins. In fiction you might say that Hemingway often comes close to the ideal. In non-fiction, it is easy to see where John McPhee tries to align himself with pure showing, and thus with some sort of ultimate objectivity. In poetry, Bashō:

An old silent pond…
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.

Yet I’m still going to hold this truth to be self-evident–someone is declaring the pond old. Relative to what? Someone is declaring a non-absolute definition of silence. Someone believes the jumper to be something called a frog, and declaring it as such. This someone is the narrator, and to narrate, however unobtrusively, is to make declaration …

… to offer a manifest, rather than … manifesting, in some idealized artless sense. Unavoidably.

Clarity, clarity, all good. But I am on board this far:

You don’t walk up the mountain thinking this walk will be true or false. You don’t say this walk will be poetic or prosodic. You walk. I just want to tell you something.

It makes for beautiful letters to rein in the tendency to make frequent open declarations; to limit how much one holds to be self-evident, obvious, with no need of proof. To hold back as well on the urge to prove at all.

What I have in mind right now is more like manifesto, but without the exclamation mark of some action at the end. Just the act of continuing to spill and perhaps religiously.

I have obviously and frequently allied myself with the part of writing that is belletristic; outed myself as a belletrist. Britannica declares that belles lettres is writing “that is an end in itself and is not practical or purely informative. The term can refer generally to poetry, fiction, drama, etc.”.

This post is an attempt to narrow the definition of “etc.” It is a “public declaration explaining past (spilled) actions and announcing the motive for forthcoming (belletristic) ones”.

I am explaining what spill is and announcing the motivations for what comes next:

A) To spill is to offer a manifest, sometimes declaratively, but sometimes with more of an intention to just show, share, disclose.

B) To manifest is what all things, including rocks, skies, galaxies, tiger lilies, ponderosa pines, and belletrists do, when observed. The difference being that belletrists are not passive parties to the observation.

C) Lots of things can be manifest, and this includes truths and lies. Deciding what is clearly revealed to the eye, however, depends on an observer, and even more on the observer. (Fuckin’ relativity!)

A Noun. B, Verb. C, Adjective.

Paths fork.

Sometimes there is no path.