The promise of words
Beautiful & binding, but are they any good?
Writing words, logical arguments. It is fun when I am constructing these elaborate structures, but is it useful? I can make them as elaborate as I want, but are they true?
This very village of words right here, growing in front of my eyes to be a metropolis, does this have any semblance to reality?
Words are beautiful. Each word is a frozen metaphor, spanning ages and languages. Each sentence takes these already extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily complex structures in abstract space that our minds can comprehend but our bodies can't, and then hooks some of their appendages to some those of the other words around.
Sentences are thus a linear rendition of an intricate sculpture in a very large dimensional space. The fact they are linear isn't a problem, really; books can transport us to realities that moving pictures just cannot. Maybe this linearity is why code has been the highest fidelity approach we've had for capturing the multi-faceted connectedness of what we're trying to communicate to a computer. Over time, code will perhaps be subjugated to natural language as computers gain the ability to talk. Or maybe not, since maybe code is not just linear like sentences, it has a fraction more dimension than that. Not quite 2 D, but say 1.3, like a poem.
But I digress.
Most people are unaware of the absolute monstrosity of the abstract kingdom of mathematics that has been constructed over thousands of years by a few tens of thousands of people disconnected in space and time. A castle of unimaginable proportions, with deep dungeons and intricate tapestry, all constructed in abstract space, without any solid ground underneath it, yet still standing solid, and growing on. A castle that does not exist in material space, but yet is the basis of the physical computer that I write these words on, and whose laws make possible the programming languages that animate the souls of those machines.
So yes, words can be useful. Words can be useful, that's why people talk.
But then why am I having this sinking feeling, as if I'm following the wrong trail in a deepening evening, as I go about constructing these elaborate, meaningless sculptures?
Is it because they bind me to some truth that I know, for sure, is contingent currently and ultimately false?
Or am I to realize that words don't have the power to bind me, and I can play in, and with, them regardless of the shadows they may cast to the people looking on?
Every word is a promise
That binds me down
Ever so little
Until I can't move under
The weight of all the tales
I've told
Every word
A promise
That holds me down
In a cage of my own making
Until I can't fly anymore
Yet I write |