Madison Series 17 by Jim Bird
William Burroughs believed that language is a virus. He didn’t mean this figuratively. He believed that language literally is a virus that controls what we think. We are infected like your computer is prone to a Trojan Horse. It is inside us, actively forcing its will on our minds, preventing them from doing whatever they want. If I say black cat, you will not imagine a witch’s broom, a bowling ball, or a flaccid penis. But, now you have. This is why he would write words, cut them up and reorganize them.
This is an exercise. It is an exercise in using words in order not to be limited by them. I am coughing and sneezing them until I’m healed. I have nothing to say because if I do say anything, then I am controlling me, and in turn infecting you. And, I can’t do that to you, you simple tangerine, you leaf-filled balloon, you wetsuit dollhouse, you ripe and inflatable pistol. Your heart beats black pepper shaken on sparrows. Your body is not all those things you’ve been told: a canvas, a temple, a machine. It is a minefield of buried bombs you ignite every time you take a step on the fingerbones of someone else’s nonsense, every time you believe it when they point to your existence.
Another exercise is this: Once a leaf fell. It was yellow and you are the only one who saw it drop from the tree. “That is beautiful,” you said to yourself, “and I am the only one who witnessed it.” What you didn’t say to yourself is that it was beautiful because you saw it, because you named it leaf, because you accused it of being yellow, because you didn’t have the inclination to brand it marigold, saffron, jasmine, lemon, Mikado, maize or mustard. If you weren’t infected by the virus, what would you have thought about a yellow leaf falling from a tree? What would you have thought if you didn’t conjure your last love, your childhood mittens, a swimming pool, a detached sadness you step on then explodes in you, a map of your life where the continents are divided by your civil wars, a time when you did something just because it was expected of you or a promise you broke just because it confined you?
I would tell you what you would think if the leaf fell and if you weren’t infected, but I cannot. I am the one who just saw a yellow leaf fall to the ground, and I was moved to tell you, to make the experience yours as well as mine. I needed, from the wordthrone that seats the certainty of my existence, to ensure that its brief green life and its theatrical yellow death mean everything.
Buy the Crazy EP:
posted by holly, a nonsense sharp shooter.
5 Comments
Re: Burrows. Even before reading this, I thought he was right about that. I don’t know if other people have this experience, but for me, the experience of once having been bilingual made me realize how much language mediates our experience of the world. When I was living a lot of my life in Spanish, the head space with which I saw the world was so different. When I lost that language, it was like I lost a portal to a different world. It wasn’t a better or a worse world. It just wasn’t the one I live in now.
As to the rest of it, you and I once sort of spoke to each other in a language of quotations. Somewhere in those quotations, in that language, are the words to say why the rest of this confirms what I already know about how wise you are.
One can hardly ask for more than a good Femmes cover.
I remember the time of quotes, so to speak. And I knew you would understand this piece and I am sure it sounds to others…crazy.
I thought you’d like the song, too.
It’s such a great song. The original is almost too good to be a pop hit and then the Violent Femmes cover it? Come on.
And also, if it were in any way not clear before, now you know why I so adore people who can spin magic with words.
Oh, thank you, Dave. <3
and, just like that, she was back.
<3
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