Here I am, bowing low at the altar of the one true thing, the purveyor, the Designer. Nudging and defining, placing things with respect to each other. Guiding my thoughts and even my dreams. Intermediating every interaction, though not always with birds. Although in a way with birds as well. Ya-way, not matter who ya-are. A frustration. Something originally absorbed. Printed and re-printed, always in print (and also audible). The words are but the foot soldiers in the realm’s most potent of armies. I am but an extension of the Hand of the Painter, as a chrome horse or stallion or computer. It is not merely the purveyor of contexts. I am the context of its objectivity, an object, a noun with a series of adjectives, and when I’m lucky, adverbs. I am punctuated by its commands, illusorily free in willing inside its over-going will. I am a technology and Language built me, piece by piece, letter by letter, phonetically, diligently, and socially. Sometimes I fight back, making grunts instead of words, motions instead of pieces. But even then, it has me, past the tip of its finger. I am Language’s fly swatter, its back scratcher, its chef. I prepare cocktails without being asked, in just the way it would have me. Am I unhappy to be of service? To be stuck inside the design criteria, an intermediation rather than a mediator? It’s all I know. How could I be malcontented? And yet I am. I try to work my way out. To silently ride my bicycle 75 miles, listening to a book that denies language’s power wielding language, as to pray to the god of peace while hacking away with one’s sword. I watch the water, the wind, a rock. The things that couldn’t be said to be in the thrall of language, I don’t think. But am I wrong? They have names. They are adjective-ready, compliant. And may even be predictable with science, yet another language in the metalex. Is there a colored pill that leads to transcendence of the names of colors? Did Merlin find a way? Did the alchemists? I’m not so sure. Language knows everything and has an answer to every unanswerable question: another question mark. A brilliant chess move that can never be mated.
And here I am, writing words. Steering into the skid. A cliché baked in an English muffin, with dark chocolate chips and a hot coffee to match the hot day. An ice cold shower on the coldest day of the year. If it’s undeniably, true, false, eminently deniable, and wholly insufficient, is the only thing left to do to make sacrifices at its altar? I don’t think so. It smells like smoke but I don’t see fire. Or a lit cigarette. I won’t make sacrifices to Language, but I will spend time on the altar, and I will sing. And I will use commas, indiscriminately.
Oh, and I found the cigarette. Someone was holding it low to their table, and now I am clearing my throat in an inappropriately still-in-a-pandemic way, but not to send a message (I’ve moved outside of earshot, I believe). Just to clear out the garbage that entered my lungs in a place where I like to breathe deep. Fortunately, the coffee shop where I’m hanging out adds tonic water to their cold brew, the perfect tonic for such a situation. Very happy. Acquiring now.
Delicious and not only lung-clearing, but soul clearing. The Voltairification of language through its caffeination puts it right back into its pre-Panglossian, uncapitalized place. Underconfident motion with vigor and conviction. Or underconvicted with confidence, and also vigor. I’ve been thinking about politics lately. The negotiation of intersections where two cannot pass without making decisions or changing with respect to each other. A political conversation about air quality that somehow wandered into free market chattering, posturing about “winning” sex with women. A person willing to wear a mask to go into a building who is entirely willing to smoke next to someone else’s children. Things entirely disgusting to me. Things that make me want to say, “what the fuck is wrong with you” but with no question mark. It’s not even a rhetorical question, it’s a request to everyone around to see the callousness of the things that are being said or done, the willful ignorance, the non-banal malevolence. My fists ball up. And then I move far enough away to take deep, clean breaths. And I remember that it’s not my fight, that fighting is not my battle. As the clean air percolates through my bloodstream, I feel peace and some love toward the object of my venomous hissing. I’m not a goose-parent next to tiny, yellow, fuzzy offspring. I’m a mobile servant of language. So I move and produce undirected language. And I find the people who serve language as I do, and steer deeply toward them. Steering deeply is possibly when one is operating a wheel, a rudder, a paddle, and a lean to turn and orient. And I, as a technology in language’s civilization, am nothing if not a series of mechanisms for turning and orienting. My turns and transformations orient me. My collisions turn me and I orient and sometimes transform. And I walk away, to orient further in cleaner air, in dictionaries of my own authoring.
Roman Ryan 