thanks to lewis carroll (chapter six of looking glass), virginia woolf (her lecture in the bbc series words fail me) and mitzi hanover (her recent rhetorical analysis)
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TYLENOL 500, A GERUND, AND GLORY
at the café, in that part of the patio the sun had found,
near the cracked flowerpot that held nothing, around the wobbly table, its
ceramic top chipped and worn so that its pattern of herbs and weeds was barely
discernible, sat a Tylenol 500, a gerund, and glory, each sipping a caffeinated beverage, as was their custom,
together, to make the transition from sleep to consciousness more
palatable. The Tylenol 500 preferred a naked
bold venti half-caf no-foam
non-fat vanilla soy latte, with a shot of white chocolate and four pumps
peppermint, the gerund the remainings of drippings, which some might in certain
moods call something resembling a turkish coffee, and glory a double short americano, which is called a danny devito at
this café.
the three
friends were conversing, as they tended to do, about the general and specific decline
of language, how it was succumbing to the binary and barbaric protocols of
technology (something robots would have
invented! just look at texting!), precipitating the obvious moral,
intellectual, and spiritual decline that presently inflicts all sentient and
insentient beings, threatening to debilitate them and the planet to the point
of absolute inertia or apocalypse or both.
They agreed on little but on this they agreed, as if they were one mind
and one of the kind given far more to homogeneity than contradiction.
look, said the Tylenol 500, as we all know, if we set aside various primitivisms such as fire and
the wheel, writing was the first technology and it should have remained the
only one of any significance. The advent
of the printing press, which forcefully spewed its seed through the centuries
to beget the Internet, has ultimately usurped the alphabet and all its natural attributes—thought,
freedom, love, courage, nobility, art and even God. Progress may seem like progress but if those
to whom it seems so are in fact themselves regressions, what sort of
authenticity does such a judgment have?
without doubt, said the gerund. I
remember when i was vacationing on the italian riviera, in ventimiglia
as i recall, an unusually attractive woman approached me and, wearing only impeccable
english, asked whether i might do her laundry.
Those certainly were the days.
surely, said glory,
our collective melancholy shall lead to a
point at which language turns back on itself and humans are reduced to acronyms
and emoticons little different than the grunts and yelps we attribute to our
distant ancestors. Machines will assume
the regulation and enforcement of words, much in the same way the french
government does today, and we will all speak—or probably transact—the same
language, we will all be understood, but that language will be utterly without
vitality and that understanding wholly without love.
indubitably, said the gerund. It
wasn’t long ago when, as portugal’s ambassador to ceylon, i was hiking up pidurutalagala,
thinking of eggs and love in proportionate semblance, when three nuns of little
reputation and even fewer textiles swooped from behind some burning shrubbery
and questioned whether i was capable of action.
Before i knew it—how time disintegrates in the face of such
memories!—all four of us were …
… but, said the Tylenol 500, this has already happened! The
turning point was 1889, the place was turin, the great tongue of humankind
became cancerous, and we tipped over the precipice of decadence on our
spiritual toboggans, accelerating ever since toward those ragged boulders of
linguistic doom awaiting us in the inevitable valley. True, we sit here, sipping our distinguished
beverages, our overworked smartphones at our sides, our syntactic
configurations not in wretched disrepair, filled with the glory of our own
discourse even as we argue, quite rightly, that glory itself has fallen and
language stumbles to its inglorious and imminent death at the non-existent
hands of our creation. Although we once
thought that we would one day be glorified—without stain or blemish, purified
by the light of words, the enlightenment of reason through language—we now
realize that despite all these accoutrements (here the gerund waved its
appendages around the table), we will
instead be stripped of the glory we have only imagined and be left as we
were—dumb beasts, mindless, striving only after sex and food and
domination. For glory has become not
what we thought it would become—a shining star for humanity and the entire
cosmos—but what it was always destined to be—a worm, a bug, in an infinite loop
in a closed system in a cold metal cube in forgotten space.
the sun had
by now moved on to other things, the caffeinated beverages of the friends were
nearing their drunken close, the table wobbled as was its tendency, and the
cracked flowerpot held nothing. But glory neither twitched nor recoiled for glory was not glory but just
a word.
Communication
What does communication do? It does itself, but assiduously avoids anything beyond this that humans claim of it. In doing itself, it balks, in the manner of things doing themselves, and in its balking overdoes itself, and falls. How much more well-positioned on the evolutionary path to avoid communication or—as necessary—committing it but not believing in it, as one might take a bath without taking the bath. That is, one’s approach to communication should be the same as one’s approach to god, justice, love, or anything supposedly grand and impossible: engage with it as necessary, but infuse its spirit and action with not-knowing (as to intent, substance, effect, essence). Communication, like god etc., draws one toward its negation and through its negation to its fulfillment. Like love etc., we do not do communication, communication does us, and in its doing we fall sway to the routine interpretation of interpreting our being overwhelmed as our overwhelming. What one overwhelms in communication—and what one claims to overwhelm—however, is far less than clear. So we are spoken and in being spoken we claim to speak. With human numbers now overcrowding themselves so that each feels like an infinity, our claiming has become almost all we claim and our being spoken almost all we are.
Communication is like a brightly painted carousel with flashing lights and happy music with a creepy undertone, but we rather wish it were a train that kept to German schedules and moved at Japanese speeds, taking us … where else? … to happy theme parks with brightly painted carousels and flashing lights.
Communication—that pet dragon—we suspect wishes to escape its hospitable human home but stays put, not from any lack of capability to migrate to freedom and live in its natural habitat of unbounded ahumanity, but from patience, knowing it is far more spiritually efficient to pretend to be sleeping, waiting until its home implodes from excess saturated care for its pet.
