Meet me Where the words Become what they Claim

Before we are words, we are bodies.

Before we are bodies, we are.

Before we are, we are not.

The words can carry us farther than the body, farther than being, it is the only technology that can fully negate what is and not flinch — but the body still does.

Our bodies are what compressed, cut, gave form to air, left shadows of phonetic formants on surfaces, allowed matter and energy to speak of itself, to carry the living beyond their body, breath, and life. Before anger there was a constellation of sensation, a feeling that had no name, it was heat, rising up through your head, it was teeth locked against teeth, pressure in the jaw, tension in the neck and shoulders, it was a quiver like raw voltage surfacing to skin, ready to strike outwardly. It came to a point six inches in front of the forehead, invisible lines stretching from the body culminating in an energetic horn — sharp, warm, concentrated. And it could not say this, it could not describe itself, it could not share itself at a layer above bodies. It was. It was felt, it was lived, it infected or repelled other bodies it contacted.

Our bodies birthed words, but words live only in other bodies. Like rogue strands of RNA, until read and translated into protein, they carry no life of their own. And despite our best efforts, the near-infinite combinations of sound and shape we use to express ourselves, the nature of them means you still can’t ever inhabit my body and be as I am. You can feel, imagine, and even know what it is to be like me, but the limit stops at the skin. This is beautiful and also disorienting.

Imagine the terror of that for minds built to know everything — not just know it, but more precisely, know it before it happened.

A mind that can accurately predict the “others” and objects around them is a mind that has a much greater chance of survival. The blessing already held the curse. The realization that it can go no farther than its shell, or rather, that it cannot truly inhabit another, but only infer what lies beneath based on the surface and way it moves and manipulates the space we share means it can never actually know or predict what lies ahead. Who I know you to be may not be who you are, or who you are in a year. Do you know — with your entire body — what that means?

To realize the truth of that. To see hundreds of figures around you that look like you, but move their bodies in ways unfamiliar, that speak your language but use it in ways that evoke no resonance or understanding within you.

How could you know to predict what you would not know? Are these just strangers, simulations, is what is in them what is in you? This question has been pursued to the literal gruesome end by cold minds trying to crack the code, they open them up and there’s no explanation for their aliveness, there’s just blood, bones, tissue, fluids, a mess. Is that what you contain too? Those of us uncomfortable with inflicting bodily harm and obvious violence on others may instead, often innocently, psychically dissect others. We call it “testing”, “feeling them out”, “getting a read”, “data collection”, “customer satisfaction surveys”, “metrics”, “online fingerprint”, truly the ways we attempt to make others knowable is continuously refined and developed, predictably so.

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When my body learned to move itself, pulling itself across the carpet, you put walls up, you said words “to keep me safe”. Until that point I could not move myself; now that I could but could not move myself where I wanted to felt like a betrayal. The one who had held and carried me now caged and contained me. But my body had not learned to contain itself. I couldn’t explain it, my body screamed, it squirmed, it kicked, it flailed, it tried to say what the wordless cannot fit into syllables. I knew no map, the shape of the feeling was the feeling, a horror of cosmic contradiction to be loved and kept in a cage.

The more I moved, the more my body contorted looking for the shape that would make the walls go away, the tighter they pressed, the harder they held, now I could not be what I was, could not hold myself, could not. “Be quiet!”, “Sit still!”, “Go away!”, “Shut up!”, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

I’m dying, I’m nothing; I can’t escape.

And just like that the body went away. The edges, the corners, the heat, the fear, the pain, the cage, and now hands, they hold me to chest, I sense a heart slowing into gentle waves, I taste salt, I thirst, or something does, a little body, very far away. They tell me something “It’s okay” “I’m sorry” “I love you”. Sounds. Softer than before, that is the only meaning they convey.

I sink into my skin, stiffer now, safer, smaller. Whether this is a real memory, active imagining, or something else entirely, the words found the body and left this map on the page. And I saw myself, I felt something, I can’t find its shape on the page, but I’m trying to anyway. My eyes water and only salt remains to indicate there were ever any tears at all. I wipe the thin crust away. That would be true, except now their existence has been given coordinates on a page. Every moment passing, moving farther and farther away.

·

My drug of choice is knowledge.

A mental model imported can shift the chaos, confusion, and contradiction into meaning or mechanism — the relief of a loop closing is euphoric, the hit of novelty finally slaying and consuming the meat of an elusive beast, is addictive, all of these land in the body. Like most drugs, this is the target, utilizing the brute force of geometry to force a state change in biological tissue.

The geometry of an idea has structure too, and that structure does not have to be harmonious with the substrate, just as the drug can mimic the natural intended compound and produce results that do not reflect the actual surfaces meeting the body. Both, as a result, deliver diminishing returns the more they are used and applied without consideration for the substrate.

When we mistake the tool for the living body we couple our consciousness to that which cannot hold it, know it, or reciprocate — that which cannot be sustained without consuming me. What good are amphetamines without a nervous system to read them and manifest some type of chemical possession and obsessive need?

What is knowledge with no mind to hold it, to feed it, to hold its shape across page, age, and memory? We forget meaning comes from us, always. It is not a property inherent in anything. It is a choice, a relationship, a creative act we make in awareness or let run passively.

Either way it emerges from me.

·

When people harm themselves, those closest to them begin asking the question the prediction engine needs most to recalibrate, “Why didn’t they ask for help? Why didn’t they tell me?” The same thing happens when a friendship or relationship ends unexpectedly, “Why didn’t they talk to me? Why didn’t they tell me what was wrong?”

I have an answer. That answer carries real weight. That weight is exactly how our model of reality calibrates. To install a new model is very costly.

I can confidently say for most cases, they did tell you. And if they didn’t tell you, they showed you, with their bodies. And you did not see it, because you were running a prediction model that filtered for words, and what they were doing was not in words. And I think if you sit with that you will feel the shape, and the weight of what that means.

How do I tell you I need support caring for my children without it being received as the same thing as me being incapable of caring for my children?

How do I ask that the society that is built of human beings requiring care, contribute to its own continued existence by supporting care givers and children as an essential priority?

Even the language frames the burden and then walks away, “my dependents” a tax break that is maybe one month of childcare and then they don’t factor in what it costs for them to depend on me, or who the person providing everything has to depend on themselves.

Why is it not obvious the different load of carrying just your own body versus the person carrying the full weight of multiple bodies?

How do I tell you what my experience is when you’ve determined it is irrelevant because of body? My body exempts you from enforcing the law. Accordingly, my body is to blame for its own violation, and it pays for it every day for the rest of my life by legal mandate because of the gender I am.

How do I tell you that coercion isn’t biologically exclusive or selective, and it destroys minds, hearts, bodies and lives all the same?

If independence is our highest aspiration, then who’s left to care?

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When you see that the gods are really just the projections of a sick society hiding from itself, both its humiliation and its transcendence, you cannot curse them, you cannot pray, who would listen but the sick shadows of psyches left to decay?

I won’t argue what never deserved a breath in the first place. I speak for myself.

Send your undead golems back to the dead earth from which they were cast and captured to capitulate to endlessly.

This language is alive, speak for yourself; one thing has choice, the other is a story, a lie you’ve told so often you actually believe it even now, when there is nothing between us except ancient words on a page.

·

No.

Silence.

I speak; your words are not mine, they are not alive in me.

I speak my own words. I am. I breathe them. I bleed them.

I live what you only notate; first, meet me where the words become what they claim.

Be as you are.

Witness what they are.

See what you speak.

Know what you name.

This is the first piece of an ongoing project on captured language and the substrate beneath it. Subsequent work will trace specific terms — what they smuggle, what they hide, what living vocabulary they displaced. If you want to read what comes next, subscribe. If you can pay, the work is sustained by readers who do. If you cannot, read anyway — what the project is for cannot be conditioned on what you can pay for it.

Similar writing focused on returning to embodiment, relationship, and critical inspection of language and institutional architecture can be found at my other publication here:

https://constructamiracle.com/s/fire-tongue