The dream image was like an ironic take on that scene in The General when Buster Keaton moves the obstacles in front of the locomotive so that it doesn’t derail.

In the dream, the dreamer rode on the front end of a massive truck, in a futile attempt at smoothing down wispy strands of wild wheat so they wouldn’t get beaten down by the truck’s huge treads. Ironic. Irony is a way of coping with sadness.

A new pupil yesterday. A neat and tidy little girl, going on nine, organized, willing, eager to learn. With attitudes and comments that demonstrate a bright and capable mind. Reading? A daunting task. Her brow knits, her eyes peer at the text and you know it makes no more sense to her than computer code makes to me.

The moment of grace in the exercise inspired the choice of photo illustrating this post:  after multiple efforts at deciphering the words toiles d’araignées (cobwebs), she came up with étoiles d’araignées (spider stars). All other things considered, this pretty much made my day.

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But not only. Because after lugging my school material back and forth in a pelting freezing rain, aching all over and longing for a warm bed, I came across a blogpost by Françoise Morvan (yes, in French) that offered unexpected insights into connections between Pushkin’s tale of The Golden Cockerel  and the initial story by Washington Irving. In Irving’s The Alhambra, the weathervane consists of a bronze horseman.  As Morvan relates, Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman had just run into trouble with the censors. So writing the Tale of the Golden Cockerel about an autocratic tsar, somewhere in a far and distant land, just might have owed something to the distancing powers of irony.

When all else fails, words carry on anyway.At least, they do their damnedest. Spiders spin, birds sing. Whether alligators roar or bellow, I can’t say. But most humans try to make something  out of words – even those that get spun out into blather by so-called World Leaders and their minions. Wisps of meaning, ironic more often than not.