The Realm Of Fugitives

Writing is the realm of fugitives. If you don’t like reality, you can write a new one. All you need is a few words. You do the work of a mason: you assemble the words one by one, you slather on some mortar and voila! a freshly constructed reality.

Will it be an actual reality? No. Reality, at least the parts of it we can see and smell and hear and touch, is not made of words. It’s made of actual bricks and actual mortar not the words brick and mortar. It’s made of hydrogen and water and iron and clay. Molecules. Atoms. Subatomic particles. Chamomile and cement. Ginger root and rocks. Pittsburgh and breasts.

I recommend chalk. You can go much further with chalk. You can do equations. Equations are where it's at. Equations tremble with abstraction. Equations of power. Equations of mass and density. Torque, rotation, angular momentum. These all help describe the smell and activities of a hardware store.

The virtually soundless circulation of blood. The absurdly ordinary assurance of parachute receipts. The strangely unreadable expression of people's faces when they are in grocery stores.

 Is there a physics for this? Of faces lost in reverie? People enraptured by a smartphone?

This is where words and equations fail. Everything is conjecture. Everything is a blip on the radar of the heart. Just be sure to place a separator on the conveyor belt. Try to be friendly. Move with the stealth of a moose in a hastily drawn cartoon. Use your words carefully. But remember: they’re just words. If you drop them, they won’t break. You can drain a word of meaning by lying and equivocation, but you can’t break it. They’re made of air and sound. They have the power to heal. They have the power to injure. But they can’t duplicate a banana unless you inflate them with ontological uncanniness and step back and watch them explode into giant fireballs of semantic instability.  

If this happens, apologize. Construct another sentence. See if you can create a paradigm that can be shared with your neighbors. Or just say fuck it and write poetry. Put your words into the developing fluid of extreme speculation. The image will slowly appear. It won’t be my image. It will be your image. It will be the image of a compass. Or a chair.

Add some invectives. Cultivate refusal. Spit. Chew your food. Grow a library big as Belgium.