Carafe
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
Sounds
We start off with hard K’s and C’s with “Carafe”, “kind”, “cousin”.
In the next part, with “spectacle”, “strange”, “single”, and “system” we start to hear a lot more hissing sounds.
Finally, we get a lot of O sounds that yawn the mouth: “not”, “ordinary”, “unordered”.
And as we move from hard sounds and slowly open up our mouths, the sentences shrink from long flowing remarks (even the title is abnormally long it’s more of a sentence than a title), to awkward inversions of inversions (“not unordered”), and finally ending on a short imperative statement.
Rhymes
We have “blind” with “kind”.
Meditations
A carafe is indeed a kind of glass, and one might describe it as a cousin of other glasses that we normally drink from.
Spectacle could mean that the carafe is somewhat sensational, rising above and flaring out over its glass cousins on the dining table. A little melodramatic, but “nothing strange” as we’re reminded.
But one can’t help but think of spectacles as in eyeglasses because of the blindness that is summoned in the title. Looking through the carafe, we see a distorted world, one that is resembling of the world that we’re familiar with. And looking at more objects in the distance, the difference spreads.
One wonders what colors may hurt. A “single color” makes sense, but a “single hurt color” makes you pause. Could a “hurt color” be an allusion to redness? To the wine that often rests inside a carafe? Looking through a ruby liquid would further distort the world that we see than if we were to simply look through water.
A carafe is a system to pointing in that it always “points” towards other glasses, directing the liquid to another container for imbibition. One only drinks from a glass pointed to by a carafe, and never directly from the carafe itself.
We are given all these characteristics of a carafe. However, at the end of the day it is not an ordinary glass and we rarely see one outside a restaurant. There is a system to things so it is not unordered, and it resembles the other glasses that we have.
The difference is spreading. The present continuous tense tells us that the descriptions in this book were not set to begin with. The world will shift as we read. Let us now turn our attentions to other objects.