The pain and pleasure of
any sentence is in the reading/listening I do and the believing I do thereafter
regarding the projection I create of "a writer/speaker", which could
only be me...reading/hearing it that way I read and heard it.
The burden of being real is the patience it takes to read
slower, listen slower, to the sentences hanging around the island.
No one forces me to read or listen the
way I do. That kind of blameless interpreting pins all my hopes on me to simply
not react to my own imagination regarding what I read, hear, and believe about
where I decide it comes from, those sentences, and those utterances.
Can say "he said-she
said" all I want to. That does not make me less responsible for my
interpretation or assumption of authorship.
Can explode and yell and
scream and weep and moan and laugh and sigh at anything I hear or read. The
topic can be anything! Anything! There is no one else making it come to life.
There is no one else forcing me to take the sentences seriously, or see them
that way, or assume they are right or wrong or mean this or that.
That emotion comes from
that interpretation. It cannot come from any other place. Nothing forces me to
stay alive.
Not once have I met an
author separate from the sentences, separate from my interaction with the words
spoken or painted.
The name of
"whoever" wrote it just another thing I interpret and decide I like
or don't like, approve of or don't approve of.
"That’s a cool
name."
"That’s a dumb
name."
"That name means they
are from this and that means they think this because that what I know about
that spot on the map I am making up out of my interpretations, memories,
desires, etc..."
Are the reader, listener
and believer of whatever words I find arranged in whatever sentences travel by
me. I make me miserable or happy or free or bound by what I believe about the
sentences and by what I imagine about the author...the further sentences I add
to the name of whomever I interpret.
I am a builder.
I make up a world and in
that world I make someone else responsible for how I made it up; a child on the
floor yelling at Lagos to "Behave!"
The bizarre agony and
strange delight of being real is I cannot fault any name for how I feel about a
world, a reality, a universe, if at all those are words I can use wisely. I
doubt I can.
I cannot know if another
side exists where what I imagine to be the case, or what I build from the
cases I have previously built, is actually there separate from how I imagine
and build it;
An alphabet in a lookout
tower made of black boards and chalk and slow-melting lit fuses;
A wayward castaway on an
island made of amnesia.
--
"Who made these words
come to life?!"
love light and peace
ps/smoh
