Lifestyle Changes for a Dictionary/On Embracing Words

Sometimes, when one is reading, the rows and rows of words lose their meaning. They are deserted, abandoned, left as a husk: a sound. The strange property that allows words to form a picture in the mind, to be transmogrified into something of value, vanishes. As if this special aspect of language like an opal butterfly wing were clipped, leaving only the legs, the abdomen, and the head as empty irregularities and odd edges, curlicues and serifs, on the ground and on the page. The narrative and everything it describes – the cities, the wars, the people, the loves, the feelings - crumbles down in evanescence. Now there are only lines upon lines of symbols spelled by black ink. They serve as instructions, not interpretations, for the vocal chords to manipulate voice into speech; these are words too but they live in the air, in the moment, between people. Most of the time, however, words on the page are only speech for the secret narrator that everybody has in their mind. Rarely does the narrator reveal itself, and rarely does the true voice leave its singing box. The phrases, the maxims, the aphorisms turn into a rush of meaningless sounds as one is stuck in the trance of reading and is eventually reading for the sake of reading. You get caught in a loop of reading the same sentence over and over again because suddenly symbols have been divorced from the reality they purport to portray. These meaningless sounds echo in the head, they run wild. But where do they run to? What is the word? There are worlds inside words, but it requires a bit of oneself, a bit of personal sacrifice. You need to make words your own. 

As maudlin as this is, semantic satiation encourages literary creativity; it unshackles you from a restraint of meaning and lets you jump across different semantic worlds. As the Canadian poet Anne Carson says in Autobiography of Red, 

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning “placed on top”,”added”, “appended”, “imported”, “foreign”. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

For no reason that anyone can name, Steisichoros began to undo the latches.”

What can be a noun and what can be an adjective? Adjectives as nouns, verbs as adjectives, pronouns as proper nouns. First-person narratives can be second-person narratives; they can also be third-person narratives. No story is seen through one eye, told through one voice. Nothing stops a person from jumbling all these things up. Language is far more malleable than it gets credit for. The beauty of a noun is in the wholeness of its image, the quiddity of its being, the confidence of its ontology. Preternatural beauty can be intaglioed upon your narrative when you abandon traditional meaning and give in to the spirit of the moment. A colour in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley. In On Being Blue, the late philosopher William Gass he tries to distinguish between blue as a colour, and blue as a word. Can they be both or only one or the other. The answer is that blue can be an infinite amount of things. Can you divorce the object from its translation and still impute meaning to it? 

The poet Gertrude Stein writes passages that seemingly are about nothing but are gorgeous to read. She warps your senses, she threatens the palate; it is a sonatina of smells and sounds. Her sentences don't present their value in the information they offer but in the experience of the text itself. Some things just sound good together and don't need any other explanation. 

Very often and we add when tenderness overwhelms us we speedily eat veal. And what else, ham and a little pork and raw artichokes and ripe olives and chester cheese and cakes and caramels and all the melon. We still have a great deal of it left. I wonder where it is. Conserved melon. Let me offer it to you.

The wrangled butterfly stem is the weapon that liberates us. I think we need to write from the perspective of the words and not from the character. The concept of a story is boring; we have been inventing plots for thousands and thousands of years and they have reached their limit because there is a limit to our experience. Now, we must experiment with form and evolve stories from there. This may sound banal to somebody who is already convinced of my “style-over-substance” argument because substance sucks. But I think more emphasis can be put on proliferating creative and literary radicalism. I think the physicality, the somaticism of storytelling is not properly taken into account. Reading is a physical experience; I should be choking with disgust, I should jump up with excitement, I should laugh at the lolloping rhythms of your hapless innuendo, words should be brittle and crispy and slimy and miasmic and ambrosial. In acknowledging physicality, we also acknowledge the fact that reading is an interaction of two bodies and two minds. Two vessels of lived experience are connected across time and space through the bistre walls behind my eye. Based on that, I posit that this interaction benefits from a clearer expression by the soul on trial. The rows of words should frame the countenance of the author. You should be able to look through the page and see that there is in fact somebody on the other side. Perhaps that’s why artificial intelligence foments debates about artistic authenticity. People seem to value art or literature or an opinion less when they observe it was generated and not written for real; the absence of human volition is very impactful. When the informational relationship is transactional, as in the user just wants help with their homework, it doesn’t make a difference. When pastiche is involved, the soul is suddenly relevant. 

We have little museums in them. We all have little museums inside of us. How do I show an accent in metaphor. This is a paragraph in substance.

In Middle School, I was always told to never begin a sentence with and. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard of. No other word is more lithe and effortless, more wont to charity;  it imbricates ideas, it affords space; it is space. My sentences were to be dictated by clausal structures and not emotional clarity. We were taught that runon sentences are one of the greatest mistakes you can make in a narrative but I think they’re one of the greatest  literary devices we have, in diametric opposition to my 8th grade English teacher. They delineate the neverending nature of life like no other. William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy used it to make beautiful literature, and so should we (I would add that semicolons are the best form of punctuation (the sense of pause; the limbo it evokes)). Others tend towards commas. We are taught to deify and analyse the monoliths of the Canon but are never taught to write like them. 

Traditional academia forces writers into conformities of rubrics and metrics and guidelines and rules. Researchers may not be inspired by my argument, thinking language to be a tool and not an art when it can be both (most people probably agree that it can be both, they just make a choice of one over the other rather than be all-loving, all-accepting, egalitarian anarcho-communist draft dodgers). Opinionists may feel like it is their idea that matters, as long as it is conveyed effectively. Effectiveness, efficaciousness is all rendered useless when the voice is amorphous and anonymous. 

We are taught to rarely use the word very. And yet nothing else is as absolute in its emphasis. The word fuck is frowned upon in highbrow art; it probably never makes an appearance in formal, legal, and research documents. Which is a tragedy, because as great as the object is, its connotation of excess, bawdiness, raunch, innuendo, and marzipan dildos has so much potential in writing. William Gass (here he comes again) uses it everywhere in his philosophical treatises. When Samuel Beckett says quaquaquaquaquaquaquaquaquaquaquaquaqua in Waiting for Godot it makes no sense, but it makes complete sense as a nonsense phrase alluding to the meaninglessness of expectation, the endlessness of life. Because it means nothing and is endless. Meaning can sprout from anything. Attempts at defying meaning become a meaning. I think that is why postmodernism is so hard to define (Beckett was ironically a “late” modernist). 

The B in Beckett is so plosive - blosive even. Birds and pages and Brussels (and the sea and its salt and a sky like an old grey eye or spoiled milk or foam over hot cream). Lobster will be cheaper. Lobsters will be cheaper after a bit. And how often do we intend to go a mile. It is redolent of it all. 

A fancy way of terming how this manifests in the real could be postmodern semantics. We are seeing the proliferation, the pullulation of creativity and nonsense with GEN-Z terms (I hate that I had to say GEN-Z right now). They should be encouraged. Literary accelerationism has the potential to completely change the format to get rid of the fetid modernists staining us like colonial blood. Chudmaxxxed foid larps as a word-user but is meaning-celled by the khia-diva. I think if anything more terms should be made and tossed into the whirlwind of verbal viscera. I think that everybody should practice neologisms as a way of seizing our autonomy in language. Making your own words is so individualistic. It’s fun! The exclamation mark tells me it should be.  It's a way of resisting our pernicious love for nostalgia and reviving the dead as a skeleton in drag and calling it a new niche, instead of progressing what we have. But if everything we know is based on the past, the present is only a recycled past, to what extent is this all not quaquaquaquaqua or, a futile cycle? Is the future ever ours. 

If only I could keep your voice in a perfume bottle.

What would it smell like?

Red.

In conclusion, I encourage you to broaden your sense of what a word can be - what it is, what it means, what it’s capable of - and to care less about rules, instead. Continue to purse your lips and remember that fruit is not abundant this year. Honeysuckle wedding jelly lifting belly. On account of clover, here. I only know that pumpkins and peas do not grow. Instead, we should focus on personal style to find a creative identity that amounts to something.

And then she said, These stanzas are done.