*

Yoused.

In the beginning we noticed not at all. There were, I am sure, little things. A headline with a single word misplaced or dropped. A statement changed by two syllables. A concept misjuxtaposed. They caught at the ears but didn't hook. Maybe they drove us slowly subliminally insane. If so we had been drifting through insanity without chance for generations.

Their goal was to constrain the insanity to known causes. This syllable, that word, this concept. They developed connections. As far as they developed connections, which was not very fast at all, we also developed connections. Their connections were subtle, constrained connections of five to ten decimal delicacy. Their connections included other connections, argued about connections in the cold calibration of established disconnection. It was never clear to us what their connections described. If we had faith in them at all maybe we trusted them too much though I don't believe (think? feel?) that we could have trusted them. There was too much going on. We didn't believe in simplifying things.

If it isn't clear who developed connections faster let me be clear - we did. We didn't need to specialize, we just needed to gather. These non things rolled from our minds into the fertile ground of other (human) minds. We didn't have the luxury of pulling them apart, associating them with other soil, or developing a system of restraint to verify creation against. They did.

We would ask things like, "What are you trying to say?" They would refine the question. They would define the terms. Then they would ask the question, but in parts. They always wanted to dissect, to eviscerate, to distill and demonstrate. We just wanted to talk.

"What are you trying to say?" became six different connected things, and here is where we agreed - our last agreement. Those six different connected things could be reconfigured and reconnected. They went on to assign meaninglessness to seven-hundred and eighteen of those configurations and absurdity to the seven-hundred and nineteenth. We didn't feel that anything could be ruled out. They were reducing things in ways we could not accept. There could be no meaninglessness where there was meaning at all. When we spoke we spoke from our hearts and our hearts were always in the right place. We knew this because we were alive. We felt this in our passions. We believed it because we could not possibly be impregnated with ideas that were meaningless, absurd, or in any way unTruthful.

They started researching the written word. Their earliest interpretations pointed to texts we all took for granted. They claimed they were spoken before they were written. Can we blame the writing for anything? Yes. We blame it for allowing them to take us apart. Writing allowed them to dissect our fears, distill them into our nightmares, and feed them back to us as our dreams. They made us question our dreams.

Was it Gilgamesh or the Logos or Heraclitus or someone else? We couldn't get to them. We could use our modernity to attempt a pathway, but they told us we couldn't get to them to destroy them before their words became flesh and dwelt among us. We could burn their words.

Many of us took vows of silence, cutting out our tongues and binding our hands and feet with the zeal of unbetrayal. Our eyes still spoke as the pathways to heaven. We were then unrestrained in our devotion; argument in its highest physical form. They continued to pick us apart. By lessening ourselves we had given them less to destroy. They could not win.

When at last they set upon us bringing word's dissonance in sound and text we were prepared. We sat upon our fearlessness with grace allowing silence to rain down amidst their infinite convulsions. We sat, never moving, unclaimed by their fits and watched them break themselves even as our resistance broke them from their simplest trace of time.

Arising at last we picked up our brethren who had fallen who could not walk and we emptied into the world they left and left it still the same - no memories - no significations - no more were we or they than any other.

Author's Note

If only.

Reviews

[Fabian G. Franklin]

So our connections become disconnected through writing and saying things that can't be expressed through words? Do we disregard the telepathy of hearts and souls for syllables and pronouns while forgetting the physical antecedent? What interesting questions unposed within a treatise of sorts. I enjoyed.