the life of language matters

all work in progress:  UNLESS A TERMINAL TACKLE HAS FORCED ME TO RELEASE IT, PROGRAMMED THEN TO EXPAND TO FIT THE SHOES OF THE QUITE ESSENTIAL THING ITSELF (ALMOST EQUALLY FETCHINGLY (IMHO) SKETCHY), PLEASE GO AWAY AND MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO CATCH THIS GROSSLY WOBBLY FORWARD PASS, PRESENTLY A SHRUNK OR STRETCHED, LOOMING FORESHADOWING OF ITSELF.   OH WELL, I GUESS I CAN'T STOP YOU, BUT PLEASE KEEP MY DISCLAIMER IN MIND. 

Respectable words efface themselves to conjure up ideas and track present events, report past ones, or predict future ones, real or imaginary, such ideas and events having nothing to do with the words doing the work. They are demonstrably arbitrarily related, affirming the distinction demanded by modern semioticians beginning with Saint Augustine.  

However, when I was in architecture school, I began to gain awareness of another way that words work.  They secretly conspire in creating things and bury themselves deep into the nature of things, imitating what we call Creation, the world that language forms out of the ongoing chaos of all the gazillions of contradictory ways of perceiving it — if perception itself is not a function of language.  

After all, all sentient life, in some ways all being in states that require energy to deviate from, that is, all being, depends on perception of an I and a thou persisting in all the changes, however there might only be one “I” in the end. So long as something isn’t it, it can hide from itself and pretend there are others to keep it company — happiness! Just as singing can’t be singing without producing songiness, so happening implies the happiness of those who enjoy it, where misers would prefer to prevent anything from happening, as it might mitigate the misery that makes them themselves. As penance, punishment, in sheer generosity, or just by happenstance in the lottery of life, they suffer to stand outside and endure the nausea of infinite space to hold the vase of happiness and keep it from breaking. 

Language in the creative modality, living language, lazily languishes in its own physical nature communing with that of the materials it meditates on, as word and world entwine gradually to imagine things into being that would otherwise be impossible for nature to conceive. Not just terrible things, but beautiful and glorious things.  In fact, only language can make something good that's enormous and powerful enough to take on the bad things people make with it. 

Like the monster of Loch Ness, autonomously creative language surfaced a few times in the early twentieth century, but in this militantly skeptical or ultra-blind faithful age, with hardly anything between, though it's happening all the time, nobody but a nobody believes in or can see it anymore.  Many are no doubt afraid of conjuring up another cataclysmically creative twentieth-century by bringing the beast into focus.  An undeniable risk, but perhaps there’s a greater one in denying what's there anyway. Moreover, in my chosen role of woman as such, I am not only at pains, but possibly empowered, to domesticate the phenomenon, as easy to ride as a whale. I agree that we're caught between a rock and hard place. I only propose both sides be heard and mused on with open minds, assisted by objective calculations concerning immediate and long term effects, before we choose — repression or expression.  

True, some makers don't think in words exactly, but have a private language that is in fact quite parallel to our spoken version, they just have not achieved fluency in their native tongue.  Once escaped from the wild mayhem out there, where words forged into myriad types of weapons foster war all over the world, they slam and lock the doors of their houses, rush to the back yard to shoot off a few irresistible rounds over the fence, then move quite unreasonably to punish and constrain whatever words they let into their house.  Language languishes having hoped in vain that good peaceful folk might make tools of it as diverse, intricate, and imaginatively, effectively formed as all the language weaponry. But no, its keepers just generally put it to punishing work — which, don’t get me wrong, is often well rewarded and masochists adore it, especially those in the entertainment business — subject to many rules and regulations. Otherwise they bind its feet and gag it under a host of circumstances in which it could be very useful. 

Not that I do not loudly laud self-sacrificing service when words aren't forced into it against their desire and nature and made to conjure up fake news and flat fiction that isn't even funny. However the crime rate might be way higher wherever language lives, the no less officious for being unofficial cops' expanding, denigrating stop and frisk policy -- it's words, no doubt up to no good, it's in their genes. Send them back to Africa where they came from, now that is an avant garde idea, we alt-left language cops are the new cutting edge cool -- is not hurting but helping the systemic situation that fosters so much crime wherever language lives.  One word whose looks they don't like by the way that word is commonly used triggers their longstanding prejudice against the whole nation of words, those unemployed then losing hope, and after lying around doing pretty much nothing, the die hards killing time with cute, clever, even a few poetic captions, just revert to the crime that's expected of them. 

In the fluid world of language where most all we merpersons live -- after a few decades of unbroken silence perhaps a few lose their tails, grow feet, and crawl onto the ground, a dubious direction -- the inky squid of the uprooted word was born in the kiss of a newborn body in which all things destined to play that word game serve as members and come alive, as somebody loves them — just as somebody who loves me will love to say my name, however I might only be the golden ass of the body of all Veronikas.  Apart from it I am nothing, which feels great on an acid trip, but it's also great to be back home, indeed without home somewhere in sight, the trip might well turn dark. Back home, I’m not just a free-floating Am-ness, I’m me alone, an object to another subject. I play -- the play's the thing -- a Veronika, I have a social purpose, a job, a use. However bad a bum I am, they're not allowed, or shouldn't be, to sweep me into the trash bin as they would be if I were only the unbounded nobody, the dust in the wind, of my mystical flights -- and/or just a social security, or in this case, among others, social insecurity number.  

I really feel that words have feelings and intentions of their own, that they write us more than vice versa, but you don't have to accept that wild idea to accept the fact that they act as if they do, however modern semioticians (Biting the hand (Saint Augustine's) that feeds, these social security officers scorn mystical flights.) had them body snatched and replaced by mechanical functionaries with shutters closed on the windows to their souls.  Then we project ourselves into them, operating them like puppets into which we throw our voices, and then blame them for the dramas we act out through them, considering ourselves pretty much innocent victims of those who abuse language more overtly than we do, throwing our shadowy criminal activity into yet deeper shadows, and of language itself.

Yes, by now many blame language for their abuse of it and honor silence far above it, as if nature were the nicest thing in the world, everybody just needs to leave her alone and let her be.  They forget what it was like to expect to die in childbirth or try to get a good night's sleep on a winter's night before Prometheus, after taming language fire and confining it to a hearth in his head, got the bright idea of stealing real fire from the gods, for which he was sorely punished; but was it the gods on Olympus who really punished him? Or was it humans who, grabbing the fire he stole with hardly a thank you, viciously played with the mute button to scare language into submission until it consented to make up that story about the gods on high?  Is it not humans who, after grabbing his gift, bind him to a rock in envy of his superhuman courage and accomplishment?  Do not humans, respected members of the jury, screened for impartiality -- remember the fate of the free trial rests on your shoulders -- use language, again at effective gunpoint, to hide their evil deeds from themselves -- such that many are saying huh? wuh? and have no idea what I've been talking about. By its very actuality, it eludes them, as the actual inheres in an action flying to ever novel states; and to them, any fish they can’t catch must not exist. 

Language never lies until we twist it and break its backbone; the people all built it together, kings and peasants all carting stones, as with Chartres Cathedral, which, by the way, by the laws of statics, should have collapsed a while back. I believe the naysayers really don't have any idea what I've been talking or about, or think they don't.  I should pity rather than despise them perhaps, your honor, but I do believe they do know, somewhere they know and are responsible. 

to gain access to all posts, eventually, begin, if you not already done so, at themongreldiscourse.blogspot.com.  The Previous Post list above and to the right always shows up to ten most recently posted posts previous to the opened one,  the posts in this list reversing the chronological order of their appearance, the last appearing first.  By continually clicking on the one at the bottom of the list, you gain access to more posts until you have reviewed the whole index.  (I have, though, falsified some dates in the program, but not on the page, as this order is not always the order in which I choose to present the posts.) 

kerry rose shear (veronika) krvs at me dot com