Don’t be a DICK!

The car was white. The paint was black. I don’t think they could have made their point any more black and white if they’d tried.

The word was DICK. Bold as brass on the bumper, along with a slurry of other words I couldn’t pull apart in the few seconds our orbits paced each other at the traffic light. What I could read was that one word, placed like an official stamp. Certifying that yes indeed, the driver was a dick. And it got my mind spinning down narrower and narrower roads immediately.

The vandal didn’t choose “thief.” They didn’t go with “asshole.” Though the vandalized Corolla, I think, was covered in the graffiti, from what I caught the vandal didn’t even use full sentences. I really just saw the one absolutely intentional word. The choice of that word does more than just point at some random damage. It selects a frame of mind for both the vandal and the vandalized. It puts the two of them in a setting, like a picture frame, where we can stand back from it, listen to Vivaldi’s “Spring” playing in the gallery, a glass of Pinot Grigio in hand, and critique it. “Such a lovely use of color. So bold! The composition is sublime.” And chuckling to our friends as we walk away, “I wonder what they did?”

The one word tells us what kind of act this is supposed to represent, and what kind of individual it belongs to. We get to know a little something about the artist as well as their subject.

I hadn’t gotten a half mile down the road by this point in my thoughts. I had truly gone down the rabbit hole. And the thing propelling me down the rabbit hole wasn’t the insult itself, not solely.

Some words report. “That car is totaled.” They tell you what happened. Some words pass judgment. “It was a piece of shit anyway, no great loss.” They tell you what to think about it. But in this use DICK doesn’t drive in either lane.

It doesn’t describe what the individual did, We’ve no idea right? It isn’t even a full judgment of the individual or the act, at least not one that is externalized so we can examine it. It’s more like the composition of the painting itself. It puts the target in the frame, and into relation with the vandal. It doesn’t tell us anything about what the dude actually did... I’m super curious though. (Has to be a dude, right?)

What we do know is that whatever they did placed them inside a small, highly charged social geometry. DICK doesn’t explain anything to us, but it fixes the distance between two people. It’s intimate in the way accusations are intimate. It functions like a head nod, oh yeah that guy? Total dick. It assumes we already know why, or can guess why, he’s a DICK. Its placement on that bumper doesn’t clarify the situation, it screams at them and it tells us something about what the vandal’s intentions are. They didn’t cozy up with tea and sniffle into a diary. They painted it with a 3” brush in black paint on the dude’s bumper knowing we’d all have to read it. (Has to be a dude, right??)

In this context DICK is a third category of word, somewhere past reporting and judging. It defines the relationship between the two, measures the distance between them.

That’s the lane this DICK is operating in. A dick could be that dude in the huge F-Four’fiddy Powerstroke Dualie Diesel who won’t pick a lane, going down Del Range at 4:30 with out-of-state plates. They may be a dick, possibly compensating, but more than likely they’re just an [idiot, asshole, jerk, generic pejorative].

The dude in the Corolla? Total DICK.

Avra kadavra, to be accurate. “I create as I speak.”

We keep coming back to this one, and I think that’s worth noting on its own. Of course we are going to talk about the things that keep getting brought back into the room, but this one keeps coming back. That’s its own curiosity, for another discussion, I digress.

The vandal wasn’t clarifying anything. It’s not like we already had the context and the foot-tall black letters were just there to confirm what we already knew. The vandal was messaging us, but not the way you text your bestie who already knows about the situation. More like renting a billboard. An act doesn’t need agreement or even understanding to create a reality. Sit with that a moment. Create a reality.

J.L. Austin gave us the useful frame here. “Is there any salt?” and instead of saying “Yes, there is,” you’re already passing the salt. The utterance contains its own instruction set. It doesn’t describe an action. It performs one.

Say it... DICK... and something is altered, however slightly, in the field between people. I read it on that bumper and immediately thought, internally, “What did they do?” Not because I was judging them. The reality had already been created by the vandal. I was just passing the salt.

I think about most things through the Kybalion, if I’m being honest, and this situation took me straight to the principle of Polarity.

“Everything is dual… everything has poles… everything has its pair of opposites… like and unlike are the same… opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree… extremes meet… all truths are but half-truths… all paradoxes may be reconciled.”
~The Kybalion

The same mechanism at work on that bumper can run in both directions. Like forming a circle, the energy can flow deasil... clockwise, with the sun... or widdershins, counterclockwise, against it.

A curse and a blessing share a spine. Only the orientation of the energy flips.

I haven’t just been thinking about DICK. I’ve also been turning over other kinds of marks in my mind, and it took me until I started writing this to remember where that rabbit hole was going. Marie Laveau’s tomb. The X’s, the Veves, the petitions from people who have traveled specifically to leave their mark on that tomb. Each mark compresses everything the person has done, all the energy invested, all of the intent, into a sign and leaves it there. Not as the act itself “I have done this,” but to act. “Now it will do its work.”

Devotion compresses intent the same way hostility does. The difference isn’t solely in the form of what you do. It’s in the polarity of the energy you bring to it. The charge you apply.

And here is another question worth sitting with: what determines the polarity? Is it the word itself, carrying a charge baked in by centuries of use? Is it purely the intent of the person wielding it? Or is it something in the relationship that precedes the utterance entirely... a pre-existing field the word simply aligns itself to? I don’t have a clean answer. But I think which one you believe says something about how you relate to the mechanics of ritual itself.

When we started talking about Latin last night my mind was racing. I want to try to land on one thing.

Institutions learned early that managing language was controlling access to power. The Romans understood it. We still carry their fingerprints in modern vernacular... lingua franca, the language of commerce in a given territory. Latin is where the door is still being tended. The legal and medical fields come foremost to mind, but also the Latin Mass.

By conducting the Mass in Latin, the Church held the word at a controlled distance. Spoken, repeated, contained. It transcended borders and other languages not despite being inaccessible but because of it. The language became its own boundary.

The words employed in ritual stop being individual words, the way I’m using them here, and become vessels.

Take Goodbye. Contracted from “God be with ye.” The ritual farewell is still invoked in every casual parting, every hang up, every wave from a driveway. Goodbye is Abracadabra in street clothes. The vessel cracked centuries ago but the sound persists... and few understand they’re performing a blessing each time they say it.

That’s what vessels do. They carry cultural, spiritual, ambient, and individual meaning accumulated over time, over repetition, over the weight of everyone who has spoken them before you.

At times I also call this baggage. Not as criticism, but as a descriptor.

Every word arrives carrying something. Some words carry centuries of gravity. Vessel and Baggage are Deasil and Widdershins polarity of the same container. “In God’s name” and “goddamnit” are bookends for the same name invoked, opposite charge, both still working. One tended, intentional, the door kept watch over. The other hustled on the street like a dime bag.

When a word’s boundary dissolves, when there is no institution standing at the door governing how the words operate, the words still survive because they stay in use, but the vessel cracks. The word diffuses out into the world, accumulating different meanings in different hands.

Abracadabra becomes a word that stage magicians pull out of a hat while the Temple Magi gnash their teeth and lament its slow death. The sound persists, the energy it once carried bleeds off, until only the husk remains. We are left with the corpse of the thing that used to pass us the salt.

The Noetic Gathering Rule III: “I don’t know.”

I had to look this one up, because I said last night that I didn’t know and I meant it. But once I read it I thought, yeah, that makes sense. See if you agree.

Ceremony faces outward. We perform it for witnesses, for recognition, for the shared acknowledgment of something that matters. You could have skipped your graduation and still held the diploma. The ceremony is the social ratification of the work, not the work itself.

Ritual faces inward... or spiritually elsewhere. We perform it for the thing the ritual addresses, whether anyone is watching or not. Though some acts carry both at once. A wedding contains a ritual inside its ceremony... the vows do something regardless of the witnesses, but the witnesses are still a requirement.

The vandal understood this too, maybe without knowing it, but I argue they didn’t need to understand the mechanism. The word was placed for the one vandalized, private and operative, but on a bumper on the dude’s car. (…dude, still an open question?) The work resolved on its own terms... the energy poured in, the word placed, the thing done, but placed so that there would be, we would be, witnesses.

Marie Laveau’s tomb complicates this in a useful way. The activity is well known. The location is well known. Marking your X there now carries both registers at once... the private operational act laid underneath the public spectacle of participating in something people recognize. Ceremony placed over ritual. Both running simultaneously.

Which maybe suggests that ceremony is just what ritual looks like when it scales.

We have talked before about the things we do privately. The small daily rituals that maybe we don’t call rituals, or maybe others wouldn’t agree are rituals. When you say a word in private, a word you keep for private, what are you doing in that moment?

Not what do the words mean. “Is there any salt?”

What do the words do? Is something or someone listening and handing you the salt?

And when you say it... which side of that conversation are you standing on?