Shove all of the patterns and symbols into my head, whatever this head is, so that they might mix and match and sort and simmer. Take these chapters – with their paragraphs and their sentences and their words and their letters and their strokes – all in. Ideas. Voices. Stories. Characters. Facts. Fictions. Paint, o my minds brush, the landscape these words demand in their conflicted synchronization.
That which we call science and pagan folk mythology and mathematical logic of an intellectual minority and old short stories and poorly edited blog posts and every other means of description form the alternative reality of our reality. We are at war. We are in a dance. Reality will not succumb. Reality will always demand this love/war.
Shout TRUTH! do peddlers of all these ideas. Truth is always a future away. Belief in that truth is always two futures and another book away.
The Truth Shall Set You Free. They once wrote. They once said. They once transcribed. They once prescribed. They never defined that truth. The ancient scribes of pagan turned Christian history.
They. Generations of idea burglars. You are one too! You thief of stories and ideas and biases.
But.
You will also give generously, gravely, gallantly every letter you steal as you inadvertently blather on your story of stories. In your email I’ll read a Twain idea. In an update out will come Buddha. In a #hashtag, Kurt Cobain. In that silly “Things Remembered” flask you’ll engrave a Steve Jobs quote. Sometimes credit will be given, when the creditor is known and adds credibility. Most times the debt goes unpaid and probably the originator will be all the more happy to not be associated with the missed context.
I read to never be myself. I read to be everyone else. I read for you. I read about you. I read because I am not you. I read because I have no ideas of my own.
Ideas only emerge. They emerge from the interaction of symbols exchanged between people. Exchange is story. Story is exchange.
Meaning isn’t in a thing, it’s beside a thing. Meaning is the exchange of story sold down the river as it shouts to the banks of the onlookers. What Is This?! They cry.
Pictures are symbols. Letters are symbols. Pictures are letters, letter are pictures. While there is always this war of ideas and the promise that words are dead and pictures won, the word birthed the picture, the picture birthed the word. The songbird and the larynx and the hand birthed them both. The mind them all.
Or wait.
The body in relation birthed the mind birthed the rest of it. I thought Darwin explained this all.
Or was it Wittgenstein.
Suit the word to the action, the action to the word. The bard of bards once might have said, written, drawn, acted. And so we do.
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