The Daily Dose

Today, I have a great urge to write The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words, but my purpose for writing, beyond wanting to write something to sustain, sooth and/or shake my faithful readers- most of which are spambots, though a convincing case could be made that they do not really read The Daily Dose and thus should not be counted as part of my readership, and yes, I know, I have mentioned this fact before; I’ll just warn you now, I am known to be obsessional, so I will probably say it again and again- my purpose in writing is uncertain. Today, I find my way word by word, which makes it appear to be a linear process. While the linear does play a role in how the words are laid down, how they line up, how you read and evaluate them, writing, my writing, seldom is straightforward.

Today, I want to share with y’all just how much I love words and their all kissing cousins- sentences, paragraphs, essays, stories, plays, songs, poems, novels, novellas, scripts, dialogues, monologues, banter, quips, jokes, puns, riddles, limericks, bawdry, schpiels, rants, sermons, speeches, etc and so forth. I love “take no prisoners” words; precision words that would shoot the cliche I just used on sight as they shear themselves of any padding to get to the point. I love overblown floozies that flop all over the page, spreading their legs wanton, crass invitation. I love serious, bookish, quiet words. I love silly, loud, common words. I love words that lay down an argument; that build a case letter by letter. I love words that sink their claws into the body of an idea, rending its flesh, snapping its spine, breaking its bones, so we can suck out the marrow. Despite the writers’ adage “show don’t tell,” I’ll gladly listen when words tell me something, though I also like it when they show me a good time.

I love spoken words. I love written words. I love the subtle and shifting differences between the spoken and the written. I love the ways that repetition and fillers amplify spoken words in interesting, necessary ways. I love the way that those same devices must be used sparingly when writing words, unless deliberately trying to mimic speech. My attempts at writing Southern Hyperbole (a specific rhetorical style that should, as far as I am concerned, have its own Wikipedia entry ) plays with the ornate, dramatic, tangential, digressive patterns of Southern speech, but it is not quite the same when written instead of spoken. There are differences. I love those differences.

I love the words unsaid, the ones on the tip of my tongue, the ones held in cheek in check. I love words stuttering and stumbling, unable to explain, inadequate to express. I love babbling words, never stopping streams that overflow every available channel, breaking dams, subverting lexaducts designed and dug to move all those water like words in an efficient and effortless streamline of meaning. I like trash heaps of words, junkyards of broken down scraps and parts and potentials. I love the wrong words at the wrong time. I love muddy words that track dirt all over a page, staining and constraining that page’s bright white possibilities.

You may wonder what the hell all this lexaphillia has to do with my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you. All these words about words are an extravagance; a kind of hedonism that in my role as your spiritual advisor I heartily recommend to you. Some religions advise moderation, suggest that you walk the middle path. I find I only walk the middle path on my way between one extreme or the other. I aim for it, but I always overshoot, and so my sojourns in the middle never last long because my momentum always carrying me past it. So I embrace my extremes, my extravagances- at least the ones that cause little harm to others. Lavishly, foolishly, earnestly, over-the-top-ly loving words is not a walk down the middle path, though it can be spiritual (though let me assure my faithful atheist followers that it doesn’t have to be).

Today, I wear my heart on my sleeve as an offering. My love of words pushes me to the edge of words, asks me to sacrifice no small amount of words as I attempt to find the words for my love of words. And because I can find no other satisfying way to summarize the ragtag bunch of words, I’ll let these last words have the last word.

Well, it has been a mighty long while since I even attempted to write an entry for The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words. I won’t go into all the reasons that I haven’t written- I’ll just say that not all of them were ones that would make you feel sorry for me, some of them would make you green with envy, though admittedly most of them would make you shake your head and tsk tsk. Instead, I will, sing it with me, “pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again.” I only have twenty minutes before I have to go do something involving being away from the computer, but I decided to mix my determination to write with an imminent deadline in order to reinvest myself in the goal of writing The Daily Dose everyday. How else can I save the whole wide world and little old you? Don’t answer that question; it is without a doubt rhetorical.

I am ashamed to admit that due to being in a public place while trying to write this damn Daily Dose I was interrupted too many times, often agreeably, don’t get me wrong, and so I did not finish within the allotted 20 minutes. Ah, well, the road to hell just got a brand new blacktop courtesy of my “Men at Work” intentions. And since then, new information and ideas that can somehow be threaded into this Daily Dose have come to my attention. This may or may not be a blessing. Everything does not happen for a reason, but we sure as hell can scrounge one up, if we try hard enough.

Please sing to the tune of that Simon & Garfunkle song. “Last night I read the strangest thing I ever read before. I read that Ludwig Wittgenstein was sad and sore.” I, per usual, am overstating things just a wee little bit, though Vitter-gitter was quite, quite sad. Now I can in no way profess to know much of anything about Wittgenstein, but I have become interested in his life and work through the writings of others. For those of you with an appreciation of theatrical and filmic scripts as well as what happens to ideas as they are filtered through a collaborative processes like making a film, I highly recommend Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, The Derek Jarman Film. Van Choojitarom, whose work is full of wonderfully witty words worthy of your investigation has studied Wittgenstein extensively and admitted to me that he was disappointed by the film. In his words, “Wittgenstein is ideally adapted as a silent movie, starring Buster Keaton: they had the same ethic.” Despite Mr. Choojitarom’s censure, I will forge ahead.

I only have nine minutes left, so I will not go into much, just give y’all a long quote to ponder. I like this particular quote because it is in both the original Eagleton script as well as the one re-worked by Jarman and Ken Butler. John Maynard Keynes is telling a story to Wittgenstein.

Let me tell you a little story. There once was a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. And when he’d finished his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon. So the clever young man looked around the world he had created, and decided to explore it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he had forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears. But as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They’re what make the world turn. He wanted to run and dance. And the words and things scattered upon this ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous, and the wise old man saw that that was the way things were. But something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he had come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.

This may not have spoken to all of y’all, but I’m sure it spoke to a few of you. And sometimes that is all The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words can be, a dish that will be tasted and savored by a select (not in the sense of elect or special, more in the sense of small number burdened with a particular set of taste receptors) few.

Of course, these days, I’m mainly being read by spambots. The part of me that dreams of electric sheep hopes that somehow, someway, these words might reach through their Zeros and Ones directives and free these programs from their boring, fruitless mission (fruitless because I moderate all comments) to convert my followers. Though perhaps the mission of spambots is much like the mission of a philosopher as understood by Wittgenstein as filtered through the art of Eagleton and Jarman. “The most important part of my philosophy hasn’t been written. I can’t write it. It can never be written.”