Language does not exist…
Language does not exist…
not in the sense of
something we can touch,
engineer, pass from hand to hand, feel
the grain. Language…
the shared delusion is an
illusion. We understand chocolate cake,
a concrete thing:
we agree the broad idea
but only one of us recalls Paul, at two
years old,
smothered in the stuff.
Less agreement with abstractions: my love
is not your love;
and my sovereignty
doesn’t exist at all.
How much worse when we get to something you don’t know.
You
mention that you like to go kayaking
but I have never
experienced the sudden cool
of near ice water running from a
paddle into my sleeve
or the semi-resonance of millimeter-thick
fiberglass
rebounding from submerged geography.
Language does not exist…
although the
dictionary says otherwise.
The words in the book of lexical
lore
will claim to, with precision, pin a meaning on
every
possible utterance. They do not and cannot;
Dictionaries
do not exist…
Language isn’t definitive or declarative,
it isn’t even
functional at heart. It’s metaphorical.
Let’s get high!
We can do that here on the hill,
with the stepladder,
and
you are very tall;
and the guitar solo goes up and up;
and
you've been promoted, by a higher power;
your salary is now so
much,
but this meat’s off;
the electricity is
strong;
your church is formal;
and your fashion sense is
very sharp today.
All these things are someway “high”
but the only way
in which three octaves above middle C
is like a piece of rotten
meat,
is buried deep
in our psychology/neurology.
Language does not exist…
not as something
fixed
which you can grasp with thought or pen.
Continual
flux is all there’s ever been:
spellings, meanings and
usages
shift beneath our tongues
like extreme sushimi.
You, I hope, understand me.
Shakespeare, however, would get
me less
and Chaucer might think I was speaking
a foreign
language.
I take my words back,
I take them back in time
until,
somewhere maybe in the 9
th or 10
th
century
there comes a point where they have no meaning at all...
...because language does not exist.
Not
even in the other direction.
My words are of course
recorded
for posterity, but after I die and as they age
what anybody
understands fades out.
Until there comes a moment
when my
great, great, great, great grandchild
—factoring, loneish in the
interspace
—
wonders what planet I was from.
If I was truly great,
people would update me
once per
generation,
but we can't all be Shakespeare
—if nothing else Shakespeare's already done that.
So there that's us evolving once again.
Language does not exist…
Je
suis un éléphant.
I might say,
if I
was French,
and an elephant.
Those who are the sort
to understand
French elephants would
shrug
expressively
and wonder why I stated the obvious
but my words would be gibberish
to the
differently linguistically endowed.
English
exists,
French exists,
and they’re
langages…
but
they’re not language itself, which does
not exist.
English/French
dictionaries, in particular,
do not exist.
Language is a maelstrom, language is a storm.
People think
they pin it down, control it...
define it;
but they may as
well bottle the hurricane.
Grammarians will claim they can explain
and lay down every
part of speech in grammar books.
Grammar books do not exist
and
as for the people who write them:
I've never met one.
Language does not exist…
so set yourself free!
No
ploddy, tetrapody emphraslement for me!
No momentary ding.
Talk toboggan listen
all everness towards myself true wordy
and
ultimatum infiltrate the thing
of do magnificence, superlative,
and evermore unstopped.
Nobody can stop me doing this
and nobody can touch me for
it...
because language does not exist.
