No one succumbs to a temptation they find unattractive. What is it, this compulsion to scrawl things on blank pages? Why this boundless out-flowing of words? What drives me to it? Is writing some sort of disease, or - being speech in visual form - is it simply a manifestation of being human?
Language is lyrical. I become offended when people don't make the effort to understand what I say, and why I choose the words I do. Why is no one curious? I don't understand how someone could not be bewitched by language, enthralled by linguistic propagation, the miracle of inventiveness that can spawn such gems as 'cyanosed' or 'perspicacity'. When I wrote essays in school, I was chided for using words that are less commonly known among people. This confused me. People don't savour the gift of a sentence, or delight in how a word defines the object and becomes forever inseparable from the concept. And this, of course, the very essence of humanity, is the universe I set out to conquer.
Sometimes I fear that I reduce language to a quantifiable process. I peel back the skin to examine semantics and split seams to make sense and extract the logical clauses. I conduct autopsies to excise its tumourous ambiguity, classify and grade the natural exuberance, demystify the miracle, bag it up and explain it away. It's a deflowering of sorts, this desire to harness the fundamental power of language - and it's entirely preposterous - it is tantamount to a rejection of language as irrational, illogical, inexplicable, impure. Perhaps it is a response borne out of fear - a fear of the inexpressible, all that cannot be explained. For all my efforts in understanding language, I do see that mystery is closer to love than familiarity.
I am a theatre of processes. I am the prey to an imperfect vision, to the grandiose colossus that is language.
It is a process of demystification that creates the illusion of control.
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