Honored Guest

I did her no service for she is my most melancholy child. She is unable to give value to things and never surrenders herself to comforting distractions. Alternatives are meaningless to her. She is a hounded girl, desolate, a captive, seeking in silence some language that might serve her.

As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.

Tomorrow, she thought. She shouldn’t try to say anything at night. Words at night were feral things.

Once he used some of that time to tell me he was dyslexic and that the beauty of words meant nothing to him, nothing, though he appreciated and even enjoyed their meanings. I told him one of our dogs is epileptic and I had read that in the first moments of an epileptic attack some people felt such happiness that they would be willing to give up their life to keep it, and he said he doubted that a dog would want to give up its life for happiness.

Over centuries we appeared to evolve but our language didn’t. Words aren’t much more than a waste product now, space junk. We’re living post-literately. It’s all gleanings and tailings. It’s boring, it’s transitory, but a counterliterate future is at hand. It’s what’s coming. The only thing language does now is separate us from the animals. We require something that separates us from ourselves.