Words like you and I

Words like you and I, they are meant to console you, assure you that yes, you exist, I exist, and we are all family. The irony of their emptiness is part of their charm. See, I’m already referring to them as things, objects, people, who have qualities that distinguish them from others. Our language is a populated place, with words neatly arranging themselves in rows, or strewing themselves in pathways, there are always...things that occupy space, written space, narrative space, discursive space, physical space. In other words, in all this jostling, we (the beauty of language) are afforded with a space which we can inhabit. There are others who would uphold that words are not expressions but are spoken, enunciated in an endless system, self-perpetrating, self-sufficient. Who can dispute their position? But we, who wander in these little white spaces between this and that, that and this, climbing from word to word to climb onto more words, we, who are entirely dependent on them as a matter of distinction, find their hollowness consolatory, their lack of substance reassuring.  We find no trouble in being endlessly replicated through them, or acting as a medium through which they can be enunciated.

Systems are important. I’m not disputing that fact. Rigour is the only thing that can lead us anywhere. There are many who would say that in fact, rigour is not the means, but the end. I despair to hear suchlike. For I am naturally not given to rigour, but to ease, as if the fairy that presided over my birth conferred this little property unto me. But of course, situations have been such that they have allowed this native ease to exist, rather than attempt to evict it, but I say, yet. There is no glass into the future. If thrust into a situation that demands rigour as an alternative to dissipation, I might have to choose the former, swallowing all my personal predilections. But is it a crime to exist on ease, in ease? If situations haven’t formed me, am I not formed? Isn’t this particular combination not good enough? Not enough variety, you say, not enough resilience. Am I a plant?

These spaces allow me to be intensely polemical, intensely defensive, helping to bolster my flagging self-esteem. But how long does it last? Words, are after all shells we play with.