i will not write that
i say, i say
i will not write that
i pray, i say
i won’t write about what i see
i won’t write about what i hear
i won’t write about what i think
i won’t write about what i drink
i will not write that
i pray, i say
no not that, delay
delay
what is writing? what is it really? an impulse? is writing a conversation? writing is a conversation frozen in time, frozen on computers, frozen in email, frozen and spoken language that repeats endlessly on a radio, on a television. writing for television. is that what writing is. where did writing come from?
pictographs right? writing came from pictographs. why did language become writing. writing weaves bad medicine. bird track marks. cats don’t write.
writing and rambling when you don’t have anything to say. that is very boring but who is the most entertaining person. what about the homeless person i pass every morning on my walk. i hate it when the cats throw up. its just so gross and totally interrupts my concentration and they just don’t stop throwing up.
i remember someone i talked to one time. they told me stories i was hoping to hear. i wonder what all the stories are that i never got to hear that i wanted to hear. isn’t that what life is? mostly sitting and listening to stories. what are we hurrying about so much for. what is the point of the rushing about, people driving all over the city, all over the planet, traveling everywhere. what is the point of it?
i want to go back to the idea that writing is a conversation frozen in time. i don’t know that it is actually a conversation frozen in time. that isn’t a scientific argument. writing is just writing, but who can say what it is. as i write i am just reproducing a dead language of a colonialist power that evolved out of historical trauma from conquest and suppression. the language i inherited is itself the product of yet another legacy of conquest and historical trauma perpetrated on its ancestors, and the perpetrators of that historical trauma, really the first perpetrators of an attempt at a universal language, well that isn’t exactly real, but the first perpetrators of that historical trauma in the west were actually just the best historical sharks. they learned conquest, violence and suppression from the 4000 years of practice that came before them. so there is a connection, only in my mind i don’t know if any of it is real, only in my mind, there is a historical legacy of violence, subjugation and trauma that is the root of a universal language.
so the colonialist language i speak, the same language that some people speak in India and the same language that they speak in birmingham and manchester tennessee, alabama, uk, that language which they don’t speak in germany or israel, but of course everyone is trilingual. so which imperalist language of the conquering overseers is the best language? arabic? mandarin? english? spanish? french? portugese?
there is a narrow band of land connecting two continents, north and south america, called the Darien Gap and there is a reason that people there don’t speak Goedelic. In 1698 with the backing of most of Scotland’s landed gentry about 1200 set sail in five ships for New Caledonia, the name they had given to their settlement on the narrow isthmus of land connecting south america to panama. This small gap of land was a desired point of connection for global trade. The efforts to settle this narrow segment of land with 1200 mostly Scottish families ended in failure as settlers fell victim to disease, poor planning and a seige and blockade from the spanish. The economic ruin this caused forced Scotland to join Britian in order to escape economic ruin and devastation.
in the meantime, Darien Gap remains unruled. it is simply part of the vast forest canopy ecosystem of central america. it continues to evade efforts to build a road through it thus failing to completely connect the pan american highway from patagonia to nome alaska or wherever, just to alaska don’t try to be clever. thanks wikipedia for making me think i am smarter than i am.
so what is the point? what is the point of writing. what does that prove or what does it have to say about writing? so the point is that New Caledonia is a metaphor for the failure of language. language has been a product of conquest and colonization and as a force of subjugation, as a form of empire language must have its associational root somewhere in language. that is clear, isn’t it? do i have proof an invisible annoying metaphor asks me in my head , (all those voices in my head, what are they saying? listen to the music) so the reason we don’t speak Goidelic the language of the Scotts is because they didn’t conquer north america and kill millions of people through disease and slavery.
can you just imagine? living in paradise well maybe not paradise but something happy, someplace happy. that is the language we possess. it isn’t just patriarchy, it is also language, it is history. the text of subjugation. so you might say we are always subjugating ourselves this is just the nature of language, write? right? the nature of human beings after all we are killers right? isn’t that how we spread all over the planet, wasn’t it our collective subjugation of the planet and wasn’t it based on our unique abilities to organize as groups to collectively solve problems so isn’t language simply an evolution of the problem-solving strategies of the species for survival, isn’t language a survival tool, an adaptation designed to ensure our collective ability to overcome? isn’t language evolutionary, isn’t it about survival? is it? is it? is it?
Chomsky thinks there is an evolutionary adaptation, a language module, that evolved in the species perhaps 200,000 years ago. here’s how that would work. someone would be born with a mutation, a language mutation or just a very different way of thinking and processing information. from that one person, who randomly had a mutation in the way their brain was organized, from that one person comes all written language. but then how to i explain random dissociating thoughts the hill i am about to walk up to, the creme-colored fiat sitting in the driveway plugged into the 220 amp, the homeless people i pass by every morning, the language that creates homelessness. the language that creates white savior who give the homeless nothing and then come put out the fires they start inside of their tents to stay warm. this too is language. this to is torah. so that is the theory of evolutionary adaptation of language.
so that is writing, and yet i was taught writing is some sort of future. it is an obsession and a connection with the past. an obsession and a connection with everything. language is everything write? it is everything. religion is language. law is language. everything on television has been written except for the speeches of the last republican president who obviously didn’t write anything ( i won’t say that name. i won’t give it any attention. remember amalek. remember to forget. every day remind yourself to forget. remind yourself to forget) language is capable of constructing the world. so there is the world we experience and there is the world of language. i’ll let you guess which world we spend most of our time in.
i don’t want to write
i say, i pray
i will not write that
i think, i drink
i will not write about cheese
i will not write about that
i will not write about birds or bees
not about nestling geese
instead i will sit and think
sit and think, and what will come
of all those thoughts, contained in
those prison cells, in those sleeping
overhang
minds nestled in their sleeping bags
staying warm in the near-freezing temps
sleeping wherever they can find an overhand
overhand minds nestled in their cottages
what is happening in that empire of silence
sleeping under the railroad tracks, nestled in
tents with the rush of steel, that sound what is it like
sleeping under that sound the flares of steel
flying overhead, that screaming of the rails overhead
does anything every drop on your tent? a Scotsman
from 1698? a vessel of Ur, with language telling
of eons gone, forgotten, slipping into silence.
what empires of silence fly overhead as you sleep
in your tent, unwritten language, smoke drifting from
the nylon tears in the rayon, tears in the roof of your
second hand tent sleeping in the cold, in the rain,
under the railroad tracks warming yourself with the fire,
wood from the ax throwing company next door
burning abby road, the white album, that smell of
plastic melting, staying warm, inventing language,
wrapping yourself in the dirty sleeping bag smelling
of wood fire smoke, shivering to stay warm, shooting
up to forget this world, that train flying by overhead,
the police and people rushing by, who is going to see
them, who will see this language being written in the dark?
