Shoonthree
May. 26th, 2008 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI’ve been very productive this morning. I have a thesis statement and a batch of cookies.
The kitchen in my dorm is in the basement, a creepy basement with tangled branching corridors, a stairway to nowhere, an elevator so ghetto that it once trapped a group for nearly an hour, and pipes that rattle and gurgle and appear generally on the verge of collapse.
Today there was this horrible high-pitched sound on the edge of hearing, like one of the hot water pipes squealing steam. So I’m standing there stirring chocolate chips into cookie dough and contemplating death by boiler explosion.
But the sound got lower and then I realized it was music, although eerie and monotone. Clearly live but totally disembodied, as if the Phantom was lurking in the basement.
So I went to check it out. In one of the back rooms tucked into the twisty corridors, there was a woman tuning a piano.
This is where shoonthree comes in. It’s pronounced “shoon-tree” and it means, in Gaelic I think, a song for sleeping. Not a lullaby but a song about sleeping, a song that is sleep. The word has captured my imagination, won’t let go, demands that it be given a foothold in my world, and now I have a sound to go with it.
If my dreams had a sound track—they don’t; do people dream in sound?—but if they did, this would be it. My own personal shoonthree: the eerie and inexplicable sound of strings being twisted back into harmony.
The kitchen in my dorm is in the basement, a creepy basement with tangled branching corridors, a stairway to nowhere, an elevator so ghetto that it once trapped a group for nearly an hour, and pipes that rattle and gurgle and appear generally on the verge of collapse.
Today there was this horrible high-pitched sound on the edge of hearing, like one of the hot water pipes squealing steam. So I’m standing there stirring chocolate chips into cookie dough and contemplating death by boiler explosion.
But the sound got lower and then I realized it was music, although eerie and monotone. Clearly live but totally disembodied, as if the Phantom was lurking in the basement.
So I went to check it out. In one of the back rooms tucked into the twisty corridors, there was a woman tuning a piano.
This is where shoonthree comes in. It’s pronounced “shoon-tree” and it means, in Gaelic I think, a song for sleeping. Not a lullaby but a song about sleeping, a song that is sleep. The word has captured my imagination, won’t let go, demands that it be given a foothold in my world, and now I have a sound to go with it.
If my dreams had a sound track—they don’t; do people dream in sound?—but if they did, this would be it. My own personal shoonthree: the eerie and inexplicable sound of strings being twisted back into harmony.
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 03:24 pm (UTC)Have you read Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk? It has nothing to do with actual definition of shoonthree, but the definition reminded me of it.
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Date: 2008-05-27 07:57 pm (UTC)I haven't read Lullaby, but it's actually creepily consonant with something I was thinking about while writing the entry. A song for sleeping leads almost inevitable to a song for death, but if i made a death song related to shoonthree I would want to figure out the roots of shoonthree, make an etymlogically consistent word for death song, and thus spend an exorbitant amount of time on something that no one else would care about, which, furthermore, might confuse people into thinking the story had something to do with the Celts or at least was Celtically inspired.
And then they would read it and be so disappointed. Because I am very uninspired by the Celts.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 08:09 pm (UTC)