Words come easily. Flow. Words flow
and dip and swim and swing. Words dance in the air cold air, air currents on
wings they fly out like a swallow in a Russian proverb. Words disguise words
hide in the currents, words hide in language. Words and language become
conflated; are not the same.
What happens to words when we share
them? We mark the words to our steps to our breath to our heartbeats; our
breath and our bodies take on the words, are the shape of the words. We speak
in shared footsteps, we speak and we do not understand what we are saying even
when we have met the words before. We take the words that once belonged to
other mouths. We take them and we let them inhabit our mouths, travel down and
settle in guts. We spit them, sing them, whisper.
Use these words to tell, to teach, to
bind. Use them anyway we want, they still hold their own meaning and keep it
hidden. Take a word, take a phrase, hear it said, repeat it, roll each sound
around your teeth and across your tongue. Take the words and try them out like
a three year old building a first vocabulary. Listen as they change and take on
new meanings.
But these are the words that are
spoken, read out loud, sung. And these, these are the words that are written
once as they flow from my unedited thoughts to my hand to the pen to the page.
And which stage of this process is the writing, the act of writing or is it all
a moment a section of thought an unexpurgated free fall that has no context
other than to land in symbols on a white page and become a system – part of a
system – that is learned, given and received. What if a character enters this
set of symbols – a protagonist or antagonist, an actor in the pattern of the
signs and sines and symbols – are they absent receiver, the present do-er,
distant. Are they the flow or in the flow? What if the actor is Austin, telling
me to read it again, telling me not How To Do Things With Words but How Words
Do Things To Me?
What if it is Acker telling me I read
her wrong, placed too much imagined meaning on what were only other people’s
words, repurposed. What if there is no materiality other than this borrowed pen
and the blank page. And the coffee cup drained of coffee and my notes of all
the words we’ve read and talked about so far. And what if I am the character
and this isn’t a story and my character is struggling to understand because
this language only looks like their own language and it becomes increasingly
opaque as it is written (and typed up and rewritten) and sometimes the only
reason for the action of writing the words is to fill the blank
page and when it is written
and if it is typed then it is no longer about the blank page and the actuality
of it, the material ink on the page becomes the original act, (the art?) and
the transcription, the rewritten, this is the re-action, the next action, the
changing meaning, the version, the punctuation, the reading back for sense and
spelling, the edit (but not the final edit).
