Prepositions: Excerpt from a Personal Dictionary

Marion: prep.;

1. the shape one word takes when it approaches another

2. a character in "The Wings of Desire" by Wim Wenders

3. a trapeze artist who loses her job when the circus closes and falls in love with an angel who has become a man

4. narrative arcing over the heads of the crowd

5. the rung seized

6. the hand that seizes the rung

7. a French woman living in a German city

8. a nasty fall taken between languages

9. a weightless thing

10. flung up

Etymology: When I moved out to San Francisco, fall started and I decided to learn German. I could never remember where to put each word. It was always windy on the way to class and I used to warm up my brain by thinking in French, hoping this would help with the German. It never did, except for words like "restaurant" and "parfum" that they share. Most borrowed nouns are neuter in German, but looking for meaning in the gender of a word is like trying to climb a Jacob's ladder. It was around this time I became fascinated by the figure of Marion.

Preposition: n.;

1. a weightless thing

2. concrete

3. a hinge between the moving and the still

4. a way of traveling

5. the shape one word takes when evading another; the slither of a word in retreat

6. something that cannot be touched

7. something necessary to the touch

Etymology: I struggled most with prepositions. Misled by the false cognates between English and German, I expected them to be straightforward. I thought the relationships they describe -- in time, in space -- would be the same in any language: how much disagreement can there be that the cat is on the mat? But soon they came to represent for me everything irreducibly different in the different ways there are to view the world and, more than that, my own dislocation as I moved between them.

Concrete: adj.; a metaphorical way of describing that which is solid, real, and can be touched or walked upon

Auf: prep.; German

1. at, as in " at your own risk"

2. in, as in "in German"

3. on, as in "to be bent on something"

4. to, as in "to nail something down to something else"

5. up, as in "to be up to something"

Etymology: This is an example of a German preposition. As you can see, it maps onto many different English prepositions, depending on the situation. Some of this must be the fault of our own overlapping prepositions, but not all of it.

At: prep.; English

1. am

2. an

3. auf

4. bei

5. im

6. uber

7. um

8. zu

Etymology: It's just as bad in the other direction.

Jacob's Ladder: noun;

1. a ladder that Jacob dreamed connecting heaven to Earth

2. a toy made of wooden squares connected with ribbon

3. a metaphor for Jesus

4. a figure of string looped around the fingers

5. a ladder that is difficult or impossible to climb, that slips and sways when stepped on; an unstable ladder

6. in nautical usage, a ladder whose outside edges are rope

7. a plant of the Polemonium family with variegated leaves

8. the path that moonlight weeps onto the ocean

Etymology: Approaching the world is difficult; it shies, it slips. Prepositions remind us of our separation from the world: Marion becomes the path we follow towards it. She is both the flinger and the flung, the hand and the rung. Climbing up she carves out a way between languages, between a preposition and its object, between a speaker and her tongue.