the juxtaposition of disappointment with the happiness we have worked hard to find, leaves us morose and maybe a little bit melancholy: caught in the warm glow of reminiscense as well as the haunting chill of our pasts.
it was the unexpected phrase that caught my eye, yet it was the unspoken beauty which made sweet music to my ears.
feels familiar catching up (to him) like i've done it once before: like i've been catching up to him all my life. following in his footsteps and growing in his shadows...
it is like catching up, when you've read it once before, and you're not sure where to be, how far to have gone: caught in a literary catch-22 and there's no one to show you the way.
the phrase feels familiar, retracing our steps to places we have long wandered away from. what was once familiar is now quite forgotten, and what is now close to home is miles away from where we were born.
it becomes a grossly exaggerated level of knowledge, something from the mad professor's lair, something the cat dragged in.
where we expect misunderstanding we find instead an odd sense of understanding. we shake hands with everything gone misunderstood as if they are now our closest friends.
the misunderstanding and juxtaposition of meanings caused the young dictionary to lose confidence in who he was, and the words fell from his eyes like tears, with pronunciations spilled at his feet and definitions soaking his sleeves as he tried to wipe them all away.
stepping back to drag them all down, catching them by the ankles and pulling them down to the backwards world we find ourselves walking like a pack of zombies.
Remember the night when the text studied you, Your face asleep on the ink-stained pages, as through some sort of osmosis the facts and figures crept in through your pores and right in to your brain.
when they are not really the same meaning but just doppelgangers of our imagination.
into the snares of highly-refined text dove the brain-heavy professor as we sat silent in his audience, waiting on our toes ready to catch the nuggets of wisdom he dissected and threw towards us.
inherent in that distinction was his sudden death, yet for the life of us, we couldn't figure out the cause.
therefore, deeply assume he wrote words entirely foreign and impossible to quickly learn, know, and understand
words influenced tens of present tense thoughts with flashbacks to countless futures gone astray.
with success guaranteed quickly, we learn to rely on reading each of the manufacturer's warnings and guarantees carefully and completely.
the wordreader can be one step away, i hear her stopping at periods and sliding down commas.
in his sudden death was, therefore, a deep -- the best -- approach
the tie between the word and know became strenuous at best as we moved further into territory we never knew existed: the pages turning faster then we could blink.
a fascination with words and their entirely foreign and impossible meanings led me into an esoteric world full of brain-heavy guardians of day-old consciousness and long-gone karma.
a fascination forced to drop its subscription
it would be and all the ones around it as well, but where would that get us in a world of make-believe and pay-per-view TV?
to relate the absurdity of a story inherent in that distinction would require me to use words longer then I can remember and explain a humor I no longer care for.
where quickly we learn to rely on things we were never taught, but were quietly picked up by osmosis.
we end up misunderstanding half of what we say and forgetting all that we have listened to.
for words influenced tens of rereads, sentences forced hundreds of reprints, and the book caused the world to collapse in on itself.
In a shocking turn of events, just after finally grabbing hold of definitions and the meanings of everything and anything, the powers that be have voted to ban the meaning of life and everything held within it.
Welcome! Rest, a glimpse, and climb higher.
Technology and cable television has created a newer reader, one which doesn't need to turn pages, scan lines, or digest the roughage of words but instead, merely soaks in the knowledge with a VR headset and a myriad of bio- sensors.
one-step perspectives are called into question as we finally realize that in a 3-dimensional words, mums the word and nothing's in black & white.
quickly we learn misinformation from the Handbook to Life they hand us at birth and expect us to have memorized by puberty.
for words influenced tens of definitions, my punctuation sparked a stream of controversy, and my diction had the world on end.
Ignorance can be one step into the snares of know and understand yet still call the realm of shadows and silence, home.
I wake up each day with the reassurance that I have misunderstanding and disappointment to rely on.
all these words we inherit bury us in age-old ways we never stop to understand nor dare to prevent.
We slowly came to realize that understanding it can also be entirely foreign and impossible not just misunderstanding it.
assume he wrote words that are not really the same, merely oddly vague and familiar at the same time, and maybe we can call him genius.
and pictures beg to be examined, they get down on their knees and just plead. i just laugh and turn around and walk away, never looking once (nor turning back for a quick peak).
one begins to notice that understanding is deceptively false in that it's always shifting relative to one's position.
it can also drag them all down into the snares of perspective with lines speeding back to vanishing points and the horizon line is all I can ever see.
to lead readers to a higher sense of absurdity, he made the table of contents require its own glossary.
the question next to rely on is not "how much?" or "where?" or "why?" but "how come?".
to believe that there is a "reality" in the sense of understanding is too make life much more difficult than it is, or deserves to be.
does that assume he wrote words, or did he only doodle some pictures to be used as illustrations?
in our constant dealings with the backhanded dishonesty of others
we are discovering that trust can help itself
by giving up and saving itself the effort.
into the snares of everything falls myself and my humble companions.
it wasn't satisfied with being just itself in a new-and-improved sort of way, but would only be satisfied being all the ones around it as well.
even forced to drop our subscriptions, we don't skim over the essential tabloid nature of our existence.
to rely on reading definitions rests a glimpse of misunderstanding of what this whole game is about, making it even more essential that we find the rulebook to this thing we call life.
with all these words, we level knowledge, bulldozing centuries of slow achievement. in its place we build a glimmering city upon the hill wired with fiber-optics and featuring ten lanes in both direction.
knowledge of the phrase feels familiar, and i shiver at the dark, deep deja vu.
copyright © 1996 Matte Elsbernd