Unmatched

Words are incompatible with reality. That speech evolved to find a place in the natural environment, that language is somehow a natural occurrence, is one of life’s greatest mysteries.

Words are too structured, too strict, too ordered, too neat, too sanitised, to have a chance at accurately describing reality. They are doomed to approximate, destined to graze the surface, to sketch, to never fully grasp, in saecula saeculorum. Like a compass, they only point in the general direction, subject to magnetic variations.

The most messed-up syntax is no match for the messiness of existence. What a betrayal of nature it is to seize truth in words, to pretend at anything more than a shot in the dark. What a complete and utter impertinence to claim anything, to reduce the irreduceable, to wrap it morphologically into a syntactical bundle.

And yet, we can’t do otherwise. We’ve once allowed language to wash over us, and now the words are fixed to our skin like a second epidermis. Whatever we must feel, it has to go through words. Wherever our mind moves, it moves through words, and the words move it in return. Even our silence is made up of words, words that fail to emerge, words not quite there yet, non-committed, diffident. Aborted words, that’s all there is.

We don’t choose the words, the words choose us. And in doing so, we’re being undone, while silence is all we can speak of.