Saturday, December 20, 2008

kitsch, personal and otherwise

I'm not wanting for words, but my open mouth suggests otherwise as I try to produce a sound that represents my thoughts, or my will, a sound that will project my desire and make it real, or at least known, and, naively I hope, make it true. But the electric storm of cranial activity never coalesces into a lighting bolt, so no there is no thunder to announce its creation, the connection made between heaven and earth, briefly, borne of passive forces, the illusion of a divine will, just static on a grander scale, and when the storm which is the mind is called upon to strike (like we imagine the heavenly father choosing his lightning bolts from a sheath and setting his mark with jagged golden arrow clutched between thumb and forefinger, eyes set upon his target, sure) it falters, and dissipates. Because first, our words are trapped in semantic towers, on the top floor, peering out over the landscape which steadily grows more miniature as the tower is built taller, further away from the earth, each stone between our words and the earth we walk upon (searching for words within our reach, finding all of them now in towers too tall to scale), each brick that sends our words further skyward is kitsch, which represent the multitude of meanings and connotations each word stands upon. As our words grow steadily upward, away from us, they also become more impossibly separated from our other words, which once mingled freely with each other, but now squint at each other from long distances, forgetting every day more details of the other words, what they were once like, and every day discovering more of the kitsch of the other words, finding similar bricks placed on their own tower, and the kitsch becomes more connected than the words, and now you can see how the trap is tripled, because our words are not only too far above us, but also beyond each other, and at the same time, connected by the very thing that keeps them separate from us, and from each other. Second, there is nothing, really, we have to do, but we cannot accept this, like other animals, so we playact our whole lives, each of us creating not only our own script, but also simultaneously contributing to the scripts of each other, and we are, of course, each the star of our own script. When we try to say something true, we can't, because the only truth is that there is nothing to do, which sounds like this: ______.

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