I have been looking for a word. Sort of a noun, sort of an adjective.

There is this goal in my mind – a something – that I want to create. Something I want to bring into being out of the pure ether. I can’t see what it is but I can feel it – feel it all the time like a burr in a sandal. If I’m going to see it, I’ll have to name it. To name it I need a word.

When I started this quest I assumed there would be a word – one single perfect word – that would mean what I had in my mind, a one-to-one correspondence between this thought and the written language… but I have come to realize after a long period of time that what I was looking for doesn’t exist. There is no one word that fits the meaning I need. I have scoured the thesauri – crossed off the whole unabridged – googled the ungoogleable and come up empty.

But I haven’t given up. The quality I want to express is still there in my mind and if there isn’t a single word that will work… well, maybe a set of words, a series of syllables, a cluster of tokens that, taken together, will deliniate the space that I’m trying to define.

You see, I want to do something and I want to define the quality of what I want to do. The word “good” is a starting point… I want to do something that is “good.” But that’s not enough – what I want to define is more than “good” – more subtle than that. As a matter of fact, “Subtle” is a quality I want to include.

So I’ve been working on this….

Let’s start with Subtle and include the other words I’ve settled on:

• Subtle
• Sublime
• Provocative
• Exquisite
• Elegant
• Transcendent

This is what I have so far.

Some of these seem to be incompatible.
Subtle can’t be Provocative, can it?
Elegant and Transcendent?

But what I’m looking for isn’t a synonym for these words, but an unknown space that is, maybe, bracketed by them. So two opposites can define the limits – even opposites can have aspects in common and this commonality is what I seek. What can you define by the commonality of opposites? Something as Subtle as smoke, as Provocative as a kid that doesn’t know any better, as Sublime as a symphony, as Elegant as mathematics, as Exquisite as a Monet and as Transcendent as that what is left when we are all gone.

I want to create something like that. What it is, that doesn’t matter. As long as it is like that. Everything else is a waste of time.

Do you not understand what I’m writing about? Ok, fair enough. I’ll give you an example.

This is pretty damn close: