The Enigma of Language

My prose exhales the mutant strain and a million microbes spread out like a flood, like a fever, finding the moist and welcoming surfaces of a viral garden.  Still lyrical, the lines are, nevertheless, a dose of  something dark, diseased, a slow poison.  My blood is rust burning; my skin is a kind of mold.  My corrosive mistrust of words infects what is said and how I say it.  

It is gravity without balance.  Half the time one clings to the delusion of precision, as if the right words--teased from the rat's nest of vocabulary--might overcome the slippery nature of "meaning."  Or, when I am feeling less committed, lazy, the disruptive futility of language overwhelms me;   better to focus on assonance, rhythm, and even rhyme, rather than pretending that (even at its most precise) words are capable of any sort of approximation of idea.  

There is that notion that "idea" itself is only the words one uses to describe it.  In this analysis, writing is the act of two gloved hands groping an object in the darkness, managing outlines, making sense of that which one's dulled fingers might, by this point, have some semblance of.  

This sounds silly when one is speaking of actual objects, after all, "a rose is a rose is a rose."  But, under the influence of either arrogance or even misguided confidence, and applied to ethereal memes such as freedom, love, or God, one gets a sense of the space between "wondering" and "knowing".  There are apparent (if not malicious) lies that allow one to abandon the prior in favor of the throne of the latter, in order to sit in the chair  of certainty.                        

Hmmmm.  A writer who does not trust himself to be clear nor his reader to be capable of understanding, a writer who conceives language not as communication so much as an amorphous cloud that both writer and reader can work on only with imagination (both parties projecting visions--by way of producing names--onto the quickly evolving cloud animals, but never knowing if the vaporous details--the elephants trunk, the horse's mane, the swan's wing--are being organized by the individual mind in the same way), such a writer operates with a handicap that effects both his pen and his tongue.

        
This is not the disease speaking; this is the malady...