Words&Dirt

“I should be dead.

Why am I still here?

And as that question appears––concise, in order, properly accented––I see I’m holding onto the tray loaded with all those caps and bottles of black and purple ink.  Not only that but I’m already walking as fast as I can through the doorway.  The door is open though I did not open it.  I stub my toe.  I’m falling down the stairs, tripping over myself, hurling the tray in the air, the caps, the ink, all of it, floating now above me, as my hands, independent of anything I might have thought to suggest, reach up to protect my head.  Something hisses and slashes out at the back of my neck.  It doesn’t matter.  Down I go, head first, somersaulting down those eight pretty steep steps, a wild blur, leaving me to passively note the pain spots as they happen: shoulders, hip, elbows, even as I also, at the same time, remain dimly aware of so much ink coming down like a bad rain, splattering around me, everywhere, covering me, even the tray hitting me, though that doesn’t hurt, the caps scattering across the floor, and of course the accompanying racket, telling my boss, telling them all, whoever else was there–– What? not that it was over, it wasn’t, not yet.

The wind’s knocked out of me.  It’s not coming back.  Here’s where I die, I think.  And it’s true, I’m possessed by the premonition of what will be, what has to be, my inevitable asphyxiation.  At least that’s what they see, my boss and crew, as they come running to the back, called there by all that clatter & mess.  What they can’t see though is the omen seen in a fall, my fall, as I’m doused in black ink, my hands now completely covered, and see the floor is black, and––have you anticipated this or should I be more explicit?––jet on jet; for a blinding instant I have watched my hand vanish, in fact all of me has vanished, one hell of a disappearing act too, the already foreseen dissolution of the self, lost without contrast, slipping into oblivion, until mid-gasp I catch sight of my reflection in the back of the tray, the ghost in the way: seems I’m not gone, not quite.  My face has been splattered with purple, as have my arms, granting contrast, and thus defining me, marking me, and at least for the moment, preserving me.

Suddenly I can breathe and with each breath the terror rapidly dissipates.”

––House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, pg. 71-2

“Knowledge, then, can be dangerous because a rational mind may be compelled to use it in rational ways, allowing malevolent or careless speakers to commandeer our faculties against us.  This makes the expressive power of language a mixed blessing: it lets us learn what we want to know, but it also lets us learn what we don’t want to know.  Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound though which our innards are exposed to an infectious world.”

––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 425