Week VI: Words

When I publish this week's writing, I'll have committed about 26,000 words to this blog. Seems like a lot. Perhaps it is. It's about a third of a novel. I gather up a thousand words weekly and cast them into the internet. They were mine, now they're yours. They're read by friends and family and the odd stranger. People are mostly complimentary, or mum. The words are there, and sometimes not.

What does a word say? When I say 'love' what do I intend? What does it mean? Something unique to each of you, most likely. When I type the word 'mortality,' how does it translate when you read it back? What of 'music' and 'government' and 'jabberwocky?' Our words and our relationships with them are idiosyncratic. Our histories have complex roots - some real, some imaginary.

What are all these words? They seem to shift shapes with context - when it's applied and when it's lifted away. I can say one thing and mean quite another. Will my intention reach you? It's tricky through a textual medium. I sprinkled heavy metal lyrics all over an earlier post and secretly hoped someone would send me an excited message - Dude! I totally loved your judicious application of Napalm Death lyrics, bro. That reference to "You Suffer" was totally was sick bro, like grindcore scholarly. We should jam some time. Nobody sent me that message. I still thought it was funny.

If I apply metaphors or similes or allusions most tasteful to seem cleverer, am I? I'm inviting you to a mental screening. A reel full of imagery and analogues to things. But you're not allowed to watch my copy, it's mine! Mine! Not yours! You have to read the subtitles and fill in the rest yourself. Will our mental pictures and neural pathways to these things be identical? Such verification is presently impossible. Seems unlikely. Things are tough to catch without a net. You have to be shrewd.

Do my chosen images anchor my words or buoy them? Do they hold water? How about the metaphor I just used? Am I allowed to use 'anchor' and 'buoy' as verbs? Something to think about, anyways. I'm sure I've violated some grammatical rules here. How many of you would point to a word or a dash or an absentee comma that seemed glaringly obviously missing?

I'm trying to ignore the finger-wagging grammar disciplinarian who moved in while I was bullshitting my way through half an English degree. I was so preoccupied twisting words into clever rebuttals to post-modernist scholars that her Oxfords clapping on the steps barely registered. She has a stern glare and the bun she wears is tight like a facelift. Her eyes are lead grey. She scolds me when I misuse the semi-colon and throws sharpened #2HBs when I have subject-verb disagreements. It's hard to say no to her. I might be a sucker for punishment.

I know how it feels to write. How does it feel when you read what I've written? I publish on Sundays most weeks, then spend most of Monday and some of Tuesday dissecting every sentence one-by-one. I wonder what stuck and what missed. I miss ten minutes of lecture because I'm thinking about whether I should've said 'discombobulated' instead of 'confused.' Might have seemed a bit pretentious.

I haven't quite decided how to feel about all this ambiguity. I love it, mostly. And then words come up short or I use them incorrectly, and I can tell. But I don't have time to examine every syllable. And still when I read it back something doesn't feel right. Words are frustrating. Ergh.

I'm releasing a bit of myself into the public. It feels narcissistic. I'm trying to find my voice before it's stolen by witches. Sometimes I sound like myself, other times not at all. It's challenging for me to translate my ideas into text every time, because words are just symbols for things. They're the basis of such a massive part of our understanding, but do we give them more privilege than they deserve?

I've heard some writers call themselves servants of words. I climb that mountain, they say. I bear that weight. I am but a vessel to carry language, to transmit text, to disseminate syllables amongst the public. Never the master, ever the student. Mad at the pen and sweating the deadline. Words ask of me, and I give.

My pile of blog leftovers could feed a lot of hungry people. Dozens of stories I didn't write, essays I didn't finish, and musings I didn't publish fill notebooks and wait in Google's cloud. Words failed. I failed them. They were wrong in time and wrong in space or too verbose or too hippie or too sad. I'm sorry... they're not gonna make it. I did everything I could.

I wonder how many ideas I've offered in words could have been explained better with music. Or interpretive dance. A painting? Maybe just a simple pencil drawing. What if the rhythm of accents and consonants was played on percussion while you read the text? How many would resonate longer and deeper and richer in song and texture and colour?

I love to word. I just finished reading the biography of my hero, Dr. Seuss. I love his words. The biographers quoted Anna Quindlen, who called him "a man who took words and juggled them, twirled them, bounced them off the page." I'd like to do that too. I like words that twirl. I don't understand all of this.

Word count: 918