The Writer is Mightier Than The Written

Start wondering about the power of words, and chances are that you shall never cease in this wondering. It might seem then that the whole world itself is one gigantic text onto which you are inscribing yourself; your words are your 'point of entry' into it. So that the 'I', the evanescent 'I' who is writing these words that you are now reading, is itself nothing more than a flickering shadow cast by these words, nothing more than just another word trapped in the words that it is trying to produce out of a sheer nothingness. As the Ancients used to say, it is one hell of a web that we are messed up in, and the 'whole point' is to extricate ourselves from it. Except in this case, such liberation is nowhere to be seen on the horizon : whichever direction you look into, there are just words, words, and more words.

And yet, there are some voices around, voices that tell us that some gaps, so to speak, have been found at the boundaries of this web of words. These remind us there are real human beings, beyond this tangle of words, beings of flesh and blood who cry, weep, mourn, grieve, and suffer, while we go on with our endless play of throwing words at one another. Those are the crevices where the 'I' can place itself and look outwards, and can say, 'The whole world is a text, and I am but an author.' What an insane thought! But if we humans cannot be allowed the bliss of liberation, we can at least console ourselves with our gift for irony. Irony, let us say, is for them who need it, and these are not just us, we the supreme spiders of our language webs, but also they, beyond this web, who have been reduced to absolute speechlessness by their suffering.