Monday, March 22, 2010

Silence is Our Only Hope: Silence, Impossible



Every word an individual believes to have originated out of his/her self is a vehicle of delusion, for what issues forth has equally... almost surely more than equally.. been ingested and regurgitated from a linguistic and cultural pool as broad and deep as the history of our babbling species, the effects of which return to that pool in the form of consequences, almost all unforeseen and beyond the control of the speaker.

Like Blake with his Muse--language will serve us... rather than we it, in a degree strictly proportionate to our mistrust of its powers, a mistrust that follows our recognition that it is never an instrument we can claim to own or control or bend to what we believe (deluded creatures that we are) to be our purpose and will. We speak, and others speak through us; they are numberless, and we do not know who they are or to what end we are being used.

I have relatively greater trust in the language of art precisely because it is a scam, and doesn't require me to believe otherwise to grant me the pleasure of  being lifted from the stream and redeposited more deeply disturbed than I was before the encounter.

What I've written here stands as demonstration of the depth of my disease, of the pathologically seductive power of language and my own helplessness in the grip of its powers... so much so that I find I'm in thrall of the sound of the words in my head and will, against all reason, likely copy and paste them--or some variant thereof--onto the back of the Dog.

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