words
For a long while now, I used to believe I was allowing myself to fall along the wayside in terms of my obsession with documenting and archiving my life - and used to feel the lesser for it.
When I was younger, I suppose this personal eye I'd kept constantly trained on myself was my closest companion. Things I did and thoughts I thought would be translated into reams of words which I thought I managed to manipulate rather elegantly, and liked it. I was forming myself with my words. I became a construct of my language. And I liked it.
I was crafting my own personal narrative and redefining my experiences to fit the narrative, and I liked it.
The past five years or so have been particularly worrying to me as I have found myself strangely wordless, and was paranoid about this tightly wrapped package unravelling if I didn't keep up.
The words I tried for felt false; they felt like insistent flirtations that I wanted to be rid off. But I was afraid to be cut off from this world, this rich interior world I had invented for myself. A world built upon a decade of words. I took this to mean I had allowed myself to drift away from that core of intensity that I used to thrive on, and kept trying to bring myself back to it, and many times, it felt like swimming against the current. But I didn't want to leave, I didn't!
But I think I am finally beginning to understand that the grain of my life is moving me away from this construct of language, this obsessive, controlling desire to prepackage and define. It is only language, it is merely a vehicle for understanding, not to be confused with understanding itself. In fact, I have not lived in the world, I have merely lived in this language.
I remember clealy Sharan once telling me up there on the rooftop: "Pearlyn, to me you feel like an Ikea storage compartment. You think you've got everything filed away and compartmentalised neatly." I remember snorting at this comment, and shelving that under "Do Not Care". Yeah, I was on top of it all. I had it all under control. This Ikea storage compartment was language.
Words = intellect = constructed narrative = logical structure.
Life = life.
Language and my conscious mind have for too long been inextricably tied to each other. Maybe what my life now calls for is a mutation of the mind, evoking the unconscious, stripping experience of pre-definition, searching beyond keywords.
Silence was once deafening and treacherous. Now, I'm beginning to find there simply ain't no sound so sweet.
Deeper inside silence, I want to go. Until there's no difference left between the sacred and the profane.