WordPress’ front page has a little counter that tells how many people are yammering at any given time. When I signed up just now, it said this:
3,211,053 blogs with 113,080 new posts today.
The world I inhabit is a world where lots and lots of people are talking all the time about lots and lots of things. And the trick is that most people are claiming to be talking about THE thing. I suppose they are, too, in the sense that everything we say is function of the universe. The things we say are so married to the context we’re in, and to our own sense of being properly balanced on the cusp of thought, that there’s really no good way to separate ourselves from the words around us, whether we like to call them our own or not. From Terrance McKenna’s Food of the Gods:
“The twentieth-century linguistic revolution,” says Boston University anthropologist Misia Landau, “is the recognition that language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language, but instead is actually produced by language.”
There is an apocryphal story about the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued for a deeply contextual, intensely dialogic approach to artwork. He was famously said to have systematically rolled up and smoked all the pages of his unfinished manuscript when cigarette papers became too scarce during the Second World War. He was the sole possessor of the work, since the publishing house to which he’d first submitted the manuscript got blow’d up. The lonesome little fragment that remains talks a bit about Goethe, but the it’s the things that the fragment doesn’t say that really gives it its weight.
Bahktin, who certainly had an appreciation for metaphor, couldn’t have failed to grasp the heft of this statement. His words were immolated, and then inhaled, and then finally breathed back out again, as soulful and intangible as they were before they ever thought to speak for themselves.
It is in this vein that I submit to you words that I didn’t write in any technical sense, but which feel as though they came from me.
In other words, We said this (from AC Graham’s translation of the Inner Chapters):
And this (from Wulf Zendik’s a Quest Among the Bewildered ):
And it felt good, too…
