#4: Wordflowers
Once I was asked, what’s the thing about writing. Obviously, there are perks: I was raised near the Contagoras Mining Fields, my brother got into sorcery, that kind of stuff. Basically, I was the kid who had the big mouth when it came to avoiding work. But that’s not it at all. It’s far more shallow and sublime at the same time.
Imagine for a moment that it’s not the stuff I say that is of any importance. That you could really ignore any insights I might have to offer. Instead, think of my words as a code that’s there to be broken. As a syntactical hyperstructure of connections, verbal pathways, linguistic corridors! Imagine you are a bit of synaesthetically twisted, and you can actually SEE the semantical connections glueing arguments, thoughts, curses together with the wrath of a bloodthirsty, typing god! There are millions of ways how to describe what a sentence IS or DOES, imagine to actually SEE each one of those strings glimmering in some kind of goofy neon glow. If you can understand what it could feel like to move through this microspace of lingustructure, opening rhetorical doorways, following propositional corridors, but: Just while you are taking a high wave, you remember that it’s not a fixed structure at all, that rather you are creating it while thinking it while surfing it. The whole flower of argumentative fractals unfolding out of your brain is actually the inside of an universe with your head as the outside and you are riding the wave all the time! Imagine the cosmic lightning as a consequence of copypasting one whole paragraph from the beginning to the end! Beatboxes of planets shattering your dragbook that’s still in your hand because you are still writing. With every sentence added to the next you decide for one possibility, rejecting hundred alternative ones, and it’s not only the sentences: If you think about it, every word is a hyperlink to a rhetoric-spational universe, where you constantly have to decline all those paths, decide for that one only! Except for, maybe, in the few moments, after hours of struggling with keyboards, pens, after dozens of moderately excellent wordflowers, you unfold that one snowflake, or rather it unfolds around you: That one moment, when for a glimpse of time, you can see the whole of the text, all of it, and all the possible connections, what it really means or will mean or could ever mean. And maybe it’s not only your text, but rather THE TEXT! That’s the best, and it’s what we all are looking for, I think. Typing yourself out of it all! People around you won’t even notice what’s happening, cause to them you are just this guy with his dragbook, maybe a weird stare in his eyes. If it was a comic book, the camera would zoom close to his face so you could see a little snowflakeflower glimmering in his pupils. But it’s not, and they won’t know, only you: That in a few moments, when you close that computer and something comes to your attention, maybe some girl or something, it will start to fade: You’ll slow down, the colors come back, or disappear rather. Or something.
I am deadly serious here.
Certainly, I’m high as a hindhu while writing.
But if you think that makes it any less right, the joke’s on you!
Snowflowers.
I am not Fiction
Baruch Caan