how the cipher found her name

the hundred percent true -- the minimized metaphors colored green if not otherwise identified as such* -- story of how I met up with and enabled the effective genie, in no way a Gini in name only, who tricked me into wasting a wish on my becoming veronic(k)a.  

The irresponsible (released from responsibility in disclaimer below) consummately cosmopolitan, accomplished, elegant, aristocratic effusion versed in comic repartee was first sighted on earth in Egypt, then made her way to the USA via Rome, Paris, India, and elsewhere.  Seen through a glass darkly, and difficult to release to my service, finally, after a year or two of ferocious flirtation -- rubbing the lamp as it were -- at any event where we both happened to appear, her vague, aromatic essence materialized, and she called for a date, granting the first of my openly expressed wishes.

She chose the spot, the open air terrace of Tavern on the Green in Central Park.  I brought her the gift of a gimmick I found on a gag website -- a traditional phone receiver you could hook onto your then novel i-phone to simulate an old-fashioned phone, for which she had earlier expressed longing.  You see, a part of me was already scheming to block her return to the bottle.  What better way to transmit my huge pile of wishes than through an old-fashioned telephone receiver?   Of course it is impossible,  Gini's only grant three wishes, but kerries are furies.

To celebrate our so long awaited date, my first wish come true, keen to show off, as Gini's always do, so far as I know, the uniquely all-, even over-fulfilled qualities of the Gini-granted wish, she insisted on feasting at length on fishes, mollusks, soups, greens, fruits, cakes, candies, champagne, and fine wine,  before we staggered over to the rowboat rentals.  After miraculously managing our way on board, I plied the oars, and soon she had me in stitches with her rendition of Henry James' shamelessly awkward introduction to The Awkward Age — which subway reading material I'd removed from my handbag to share with the highly literate Gini the world's most hilariously convoluted sentence — in her unassailable Indian accent.  If I’d been putty in her hands during lunch, out on the waters in the throes of uncontrollable laughter, I was now melted butter she’d begun to lick off her fingers, of course too discretely for me to notice.  

Then a religious deployer of the brainwash approved by the fosterers and overseers of the too scientific to be exactly scientific age, even with what was unfolding right before my eyes, and the mustard seed of a believer in me plotting to seize more than her fair share, the majority of my selves in no way suspected that I was dealing not just with a Gini, but an actual genie, effectively, so I did not keep close watch over my tongue, lest it spill out a wish I didn’t mean seriously to wish.  Maybe the Gini -- or genie (effectively -- concerning the effect -- the same thing by official roamin catholic (all-inclusive) read marksist (spiritual* determinist; Marx marked the spot but got it perfectly backwards, which is why Mother Teresa and Castro made such good dance partners.) doctrine, in which the word penetrates and impregnates via the ear (this outrageous doctrine being one of the reasons for the schism)) --  in liberally funding lots of libations, hoped to clear away the blocks to my heart’s desire,  or maybe she just wanted to trick me out of making a deliberate, conscious wish, so she could wreak a bit of havoc by seizing on the first one I blurted out by accident.  Probably though, she was a normal disinterested effective genie, and had only gotten me drunk because all that wine and champagne came with the lunch that constituted the replete fulfillment of my first wish.  She, like all effective genies who are not just nominal Gini's, was just a wish-granting machine.

*linguistic, idea-centric as much as idiosyncratic -- like the form of a tool, whose precipitated form, its evolution caused by, as much as causing, the result, is crystallized language, as time breaks free of its nature as such to become space, just as the larva becomes the butterfly, the mere sensor the seer.  The master who loves her tools and lets them do the work inhabits the fluid oceanic present, time's currents as chaotically multi-directional as those of New York Bay, like a tennis player in the zone, and before she knows it, the job is sadly done according to those clocking it linearly who press the buzzer. 

In any case, as we wove back to her apartment, the conversation had somehow turned to names, and excessively inebriated, I came to confess that I secretly harbored an occasionally surfacing childish wish (for reasons that soon unfold) to change my name, but of course it was too late for that, and really I had nothing but scorn for people who change their names. Who do they think they are, movie stars?  What if you become famous, or even have a show in Chelsea, and your old, long lost friends find out?  That would be mortifying!

Legally, you can change your name whenever you want, but what it really was too late for was to change my second wish. I had already uttered it. 

The part of me that wished it was of course glad I spent my second wish that way, as this part had long entertained a nagging superstitious suspicion that my name, though I liked it plenty and was very attached to it, was cursed -- maybe not intrinsically, but as it flowered in the particular petri dish of me.  It probably wouldn’t matter to most people that though Kerry is widely held the most beautiful county in Ireland, in Greek, the kerries mean the furies, and only some accounts hold that they were finally reformed and settled down.  

The part of me that got granted the wish it wanted, like a lot of me, though, is very sensitive to words often seeing right through them into the tangled roots of our oneness; so even if the kerries did finally settle down, their earlier form could seep up through the sounds in my case. There could be no other explanation, this part of me insisted, for everything that ever went wrong in my life and the long standing disproportionate largeness of that piece of the pie, or so it appeared relative to the high expectations of a person named after the most beautiful county in Ireland.

As the effective genie, no Gini in name only, and I sat on her couch pouring yet more flammable wine on the glowing inner coals, now perfectly prepared for a barbecue of "kerry", she advised me in no uncertain terms to trust my feelings and dispose of a name I thought cursed in my case, for whatever reason.  The ingenious effective genie reminded me that I’d abandoned the world of scientific scholarliness, was now an artist, and an artist is duty bound to do as she likes, deep in her heart.  Friends shake their heads and say you've changed, well something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day — that's the artist's credo! 

Then she brought over her critically acclaimed memoir and addressed the inscription to Veronica, the sheer veil, my saint's name claimed in a sacred ritual -- before I met the ron in the middle of it -- after crawling out of a two month bout of Stendhal syndrome that verified I'd been stigmatized by the stigmata of Saint Francis, as transmitted in an unusually cold image by Giotto, where it was Caravaggio in his rendition of the subject who captured the telltale ecstatic swoon.

The next day it seemed to me kerrazy, also deeply embarrassing even at my ethereal, not to mention material, age, but the ron in the middle of the name took to it immediately, as if he’d been in cahoots with the effective genie, no Gini in name in only. In retrospect I noticed the name Kerry never seemed to roll off his tongue, it was always baby, sweetheart, etc. but he loved saying VeRONica, that narcissist!

Meanwhile, each time the name was uttered, and I received it as my own, I felt long nested demons drain out of me, as I ached, wrenched, deep in my bones.  Over time for each one banished, eleven more rushed in, decidedly lower than the kerry ones, but the guardian angels of Veronica were also higher, and as multiplied in number as the yet lower demons, and it least it was a change, one suitable to artistic production, in fact.  Anyway by then it was too late to turn back. But feel free to call me cursed Kerry or dopey, or anything you like. 

Oh and then the k of kerry, which had somehow survived the barbecue, danced back to produce an ongoing rivalry between that toe pointing, spinning rockette -- the two armed two legged k being the two armed two legged x that died on the x suddenly resurrected for a stroll in the garden and a night on the town -- and the mournful, devoutly bowed c, as veronika and veronica -- no resurrektion without crucifixion -- vie for supremacy... well by now the k seems to have won, why else go through all that?  There's a similar dispute between an e and a in the second vowel of the last name shear or sheer, by which it's unclear whether I'm the name itself, the real sheer veil or I transcend the name as the surreal veil that shears — thus spakeSheer?  or thus spakeShear?   My works in progress take a long long time to resolve, but beware, tortoise wins the race — maybe just by staying in it.   At least that I'm a thorny Rose, my given middle name, is not in dispute, and as much as it is so many other things, a Rose is a Rose is a Rose…and so was Rosie, my black mama.

(I'd rather not mention the terrifying billboard soliciting funds for sprinklers in schools that shortly after appeared from the Williamsburg bridge referring to the fire that killed "Kerry Rose", rest in peace, but veronika means true, not diplomatically edited (that's fake news, as Joan Mitchell points out) veil.)

GINI DISCLAIMER: 

The effective genie, no Gini in name only -- a rose by other than the name from which it flowered on the other (where we have ventured) side of the looking glass would not exist, therefore in no way smell as sweet, of which truth Romeo, unlike Shakespeare and spakeShear, is unaware -- whether malicious or mischievous, is here called irresponsible (not responsible) because I'd learned from The Monkey's Paw, in which I'd starred at Les Chalets Francais, a hoity toity all girl's summer camp in Deer Isle, Maine — cultivating skills in locating and uncorking hoity toity, Egyptian born multi-lingual effective genies — and with my adequate acting almost scared myself to death, to wish, thirdly, for the power take the other ones back if and whenever I want.  But whoever would be so mean-spirited as to put a Gini to the test by commanding her to take back a perfectly delicious, nutritious, amusing lunch would never have been able to release a Gini in the first place. So I will claim it as my choice, and whatever endures of that magical moment is not the irresponsible Gini's fault.  Yet she endows the eventuality with such supernatural significance as should cause some pause before the cats bare their claws, in my opinion.   

It might sound a fish tale,  but it's a hundred percent true and can be corroborated by the genius Gini herself; this kind of thing happens to me all the time, ever since I built a time machine to travel to the origin of perspective in around 1330 and ace my dissertation, but you're not supposed to ace it, that's not allowed.  That's lucky though, as I never really wanted to be a scholar, I'd far rather spoof them, as well as steal from their files and distribute the booty, Robin Hood style. 

to gain access to all posts, eventually, begin, if you not already done so, at themongreldiscourse.blogspot.com.  The Previous Post list above and to the right always shows up to ten most recently posted posts previous to the opened one,  the posts in this list reversing the chronological order of their appearance, the last appearing first.  By continually clicking on the one at the bottom of the list, you gain access to more posts until you have reviewed the whole index.  (I have, though, falsified some dates in the program, but not on the page, as this order is not always the order in which I choose to present the posts.) 

kerry rose shear (veronika) krvs at me dot com