‘I write in order to peruse myself.’
– Henri Michaux
‘I write in order to pursue myself!’
-KarM
When I write it comes from nowhere and ends up solid. Inscribed and fixed on paper, on a digital page. Words fill space, yet are composed of shaped space.
The letters emerge and words form and ideas coalesce. Appointments can be kept and essential items remembered at supermarkets.
It is a strange magic, digestible, transferable, they are mine alone to be shared for any who see them, so they are my part of a shared inheritance; they are my words, they can convict me, they can get me fired, they did get me married, but as much as they are mine alone they don’t belong to me: I am renting them, leasing them, borrowing them, reordering them, playing with them.
So it may be that words are nothing but signs, they direct and they point but the horizon is broad, there is no one place at which they settle.
Words cannot be translated unless I craft them with precision, dedicate them to a form and framework, socially compatible citizenship, citizenship of shared sign consumption.
Yet still they are translated in myriad ways, is there a right way to read my words? Do I inform myself through them? Do I inform of myself through them? Psychologists earn money from this.
Life is written every day, everyday life is written every day. There are different modes and speeds and different times and places and moods. The newspapers, the headlines on telly, the bus ticket, the cab receipt, and the numbers punched on tills for shopping bills. There is a recording of signs pointing to where your life has been; a trail of crumbs through the woods of existence. It leads in circles. From the registrars note about your birth to the full stop on the registrars note on your death. It is extended through an elegant obituary for those with friends and families or who have fallen into graves from high places, but the government make mention of even the pauper, albeit in cold, blank terms.
The poor are never loved by government machinery, instead they are hidden by words such as ‘scrounger’, ‘selfish’, ‘lazy’.
Words begin in space; they describe space and that which space forms from its absence. Space is around a chair but not exactly where the chair is, except between the fibres and crevices, the braces and glue. Words describe space when it is no longer space but another thing.
Words are borders; they describe coasts and boundaries and give them names – sometimes they create countries. They instigate wars and are signatures to peace. They are causes and consequences, they are love and they are hate.
Words are keys to unlock the mysteries of the inner to the outer, to be ingested back again from the guru to the gut. They clarify maps and tables and graphs so we can measure and know what we measure. A number can be a word but can a word be a number?
Numbers and words live together in minds and on keyboards. They inhabit every size and every shape. They are descriptions and facts, fairytales and love.
We are human because words let our consciousness talk to us.
Without words we would be indescribable.
We are in the end, the words in our heads.
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