Eschatological Llama

Think of language as a hyperobject, this thing, this energy that moves through us, creating our moods and thoughts, putting us all in a trance of eschatological llama, a people of mountains and sun, the sweat of rocks, the frost of duty, the glaze of negation, the blaze of affirmation. Machu Pichu. Old Mountain. Language is contradictions. Because they’re unzipped on a plate of opera. Quest along a coast moving through space creating nostrils. A little popcorn goes a long way. Even if our experience of actual conversations, of dialogue in Pinter’s plays, and of the dead metaphors that talk of argument in terms of war, doesn’t tally with our dalliance in monarchy, the luxuries of power, questions raised during squabbles, quirks of behavior, and everything else too nebulous to articulate, too thick to think, too pale to say. It’s all more than mere sensation. Because as soon as a language gets hold of it it no longer belongs to us. It belongs to simulation. And skillets and railroads and lacrosse. Dragons belching fire. Grosbeak in a ponderosa pine. There is this to say about grooves. They once gave us voices and music. Now they give us graves. Grave are the grooves that gravity grooms with her gravel. Everything has its tag and temper. Everything dipped in language has an ulterior spirit, an energy that can’t be captured in German or French, Urdu or Zulu. This is understandable. This is a violent world. There have to be things – beings, spirits, auras, halos, paracletes, parakeets, divine messengers, treasures not of this world. But why say “have to be.” Does anything have to be? This is language asserting itself again. Language insists it has dimensions available to us if we’re willing to be inventive enough. The most inventive writer soon finds a gimmick and finds it fun and worthwhile to expand on its antinomian generosity. The truth appears clear and cold as glass on a barrel of rain and then one day a knock comes to the door and she must answer a summons. And that call is nothing anyone ever predicts. Call it the call of the wild. Call it illocutionary. But Jesus. Get up & open the door.