A note on terms

A note on terms

In writing across cultures we have been obliged to adopt a working vocabulary. The choices are ours, not the world’s.

We have written the world-blood where the southern academies write gravitas, the mountain-smiths the lode, the mariners the deep-pull; the recovered glyphs gesture at the Bearing.

For the breath we have used the breath. Others, in their own registers: psyche or anima; the wake or the line; the ember or the fire; the Quick, from the fragments.

For the two kinds of breath we have written the restless and the anchored. Others write the drifting and the moored, or the lifted and the sunk. The southern scholars, who are not without their precisions, distinguish the kouphos from the barys.

For the place below the world we have written the under-place. Others: the kata, the abyssos, the deep dark, the heart-mine.

We claim no authority over the vocabulary of the world. We claim only the right to fix one for our own page.