The painted veil of lost words

Carved words. Painted words. Smudged. Incrusted. Dusted. Tattoos on the skin of sacred calves. The calves of culture, the vellum of civilization. Dormant. Rolling. Turning.

All words are born lost, but only a handful get found in each generation. Language is not constructed, it is. The foundation of the world is a word. The language of radical communication. Words uttered but never used. Familiar but strange. Close yet so beyond reach. A stylus turning again and again the pin of immediacy in the paté of existence.

And on the screen, nothing new. Old words, old worlds, and the living shadow of Chinese whispers, dreading every noise in the deep undergrowth, signs lurking and closing in, the language of awe, misunderstood, intuited, cherished but sent out in the desert to parade naked and then take on its parched back the sins of the world. The noise aping sound, death aping life, and the fountain of old age flowing backwards moisterising every sheet of skin that the age has dried out.

We walk not knowing, not suspecting the sussuration coming from above and from below, the veil torn through which a whole world pours in like wine from a shattered bottle, the old skin of the new wine, the fluids of nature dropping like an avalanche over barren rock, and us in its path.