A pocket calculator. Another pocket calculator.
Dear Grantor of Wishes,
What I want, O Enobled One, is a learned little pocket sized person to have with me at all times, to consult with on terms like "chiasmus." A portable being who could unpack for me, the meaning, in the literary sense. Not the foul block of text generated by our Robot Overlords that I must train my eyes to shut out when I see the degenerating* phrase: AI Overview. And not even, the kinder, much more useful sterile dictionary description, because I see, that chiasmus, chiasma, has a meaning used in genetics as well as in literature. It means, Alice, in part, the little crossed section in the center of say the letter x. Now, as a space**, an interstice, well, it's terribly evocative, but that still doesn't let me know what it might mean for a translator to talk about the formal preference of chiasmus found in Borges.
And well, damnmit, Jim, I want to know!
Beyond this desire, for defining specificity, the contextual knowledge of a word, I want this little pocket being to be gentle, kind, but never condescending. I want to it beckon me, with an excited little hand gesture, and say: "Looky here! It is this, the text refers to, to this concept, and that is only really the beginning, because the text might also share some of the context of its life in another field, and you must also want to know who uses a term like this, and when, and also, why. So grab a cup of tea and I'll get a little bit of scrap paper and pencil and we can make a diagram of all the arms this word has, all the roads that lead in and out from it."
* "At this use of 'degenerating,'" my little pocket person would say, "the writer suggests that the AI is both degenerating itself and the things it overviews, and also that it degenerates the user, or reader of the AI Overview, hence the writer's rush to avoid reading the Overview. A concept like this invites us, as readers, to wonder if writing, if words, become less potent with overuse, over reading. This could be a question, in the writers' mind, of efficacy. Tangentially, we know, from other pieces this writer has given us, that the writer believes that one measure of a story's value is the number of times it is retold, referenced, or read."
** In a church, the transept's "crossing." Certainly a liminal area.
