Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/586

The and He. But I am getting closer to h which is a most interesting and paradoxical consonant. For h has no sound as such—it borrows from its contiguity with other consonants. The h in shhhhhhh is different from the h in thhhhhhh. One is roughly close to issssssssssssh, the other is roughly close to thuuuuuuuuuhh. Next to a hard vowel he has a huh quality. I feel that h is one of the mystic cryptic sounds—I cannot express it better yet—but by its oneness as a letter (that is, its apparent oneness) it is able to make the necessary and many mystical self er sounds which are necessary to the life of language. That is, h is a number of er sounds which are masquerading as one, for h invariably appears in social words—just as s which is the most social of the consonants is also the most onomatopoetic of the sounds, and expresses wind and water—the sighing of the sails.

So back to h. I expressed a hidden spiritual quality in words which are ostensibly social institutions, parts, acts, etc. So h is in hide, head, Head of Department, whore, (what a word to explore)—ore is wealth, real wealth, present in lore, roar, pore, store (societies hoard) more, nor (the reduction of ore) b ore (be, that is, b is beginning and end, so boredom is an end and a beginning, a beginning and an end. What is so painful and pregnant with new possibilities or disasters as when our friends bore us? For is a continuation—the fuck of ore, the succession. (Prepositions are the key to language.) Also, door—the death of ore, the new beginning.

Gore—what a word, the God-killer of wealth (that is natural wealth); floor—the support of ore, the basis of it, the fuck-love, draw and drawer, glore—glory and glower, hore—whore—the mystical orgy embodied in degraded social form, jore—jaw, pour, plore as in implore, explore, deplore (Letinisma colored) prore—prow, prore as preyer, quore as in quorum, sore, score, shore (society and man’s natural wealth mated in the meeting—a shore is the meeting of one and infinity which is reason) slore—slayer (the matricide is a lover wielding the sword of society) smore (some more) slore (slower—reduce, says society, the rate of increase of self) snore (society’s negation of the self) spore, sprore—sprawl, vore as in devour.

I am very excited by these. For the preposition or is the alternative, the two of one, and therefore it implies natural wealth. Of the words I forced like jaw from jore, I was doing it not so much to ram a thesis home as to explore, for it is perfectly reasonable that Anglo-Saxon put out mutations, like all languages, from the first basic grunts and groans and sighs and smacks of the self.