Saturday 14 February 2015

Why I hate words

Every day I lose myself – perhaps by now in a state of perpetual loss. I spend so much time, beyond time, in reading, writing, other people’s narratives. I guess we all do to some extent. Whether watching television, engaging with social media, writing letters… all are words in an attempt to covey ourselves. There is a beauty, yet a tragedy in the multiplicity of it.


I read when I cannot face the narrative of my own life. I cannot say whether it is shaping me or not, but I guess the attempts to write as a result highlight an extent of paradox though. If I continue to read, I exist through other peoples narratives. But if all everybody did was read, there would be no writers, and in turn nothing to read in the first place. In an attempt then to avoid, or to attempt to re-organise the concept of relationships, I perhaps uncover yet another one to maintain – that between reader and writer. You need one for the other, like life with death, love with hate, pleasure with pain. Yet it seems to think I could shuttle, reading from library to library, no true fixed abode, and yet occupy more buildings can evert would be physically possible. Like the child’s fantasy of the everlasting sweets in Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate factory’, I remain suspended in awe at things which evade concepts I have been fed since young – like time,  good and bad, and wrong and right.

Words can help overcome, but also set me down. My signature is meant to be myself, the flick of a wrist at a certain time. Will my hand trace such a similar shape for ever? It is a bigger question than it seems.

What is interesting the general wordlessness of dreams – a floating then, without immersion. Those times before I look up I wonder if I am breathing air or the hellishness after.


I guess this singularity of consciousness gives a dreadful singularity to the interpretation of language. This makes me potentially  dangerous. There is no need to justify my ‘spontaneity’ to anyone, ‘love’ needs no boundaries. I could go to London tomorrow, and live in so many narratives, even just a short one. It will likely be short.  Though my reading gets slower. And while there hovers the face in the mirror, of myself, other people, I will still read.

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