The Complicity of Communication: The Death of Knowledge

Perhaps we talk what we “know” to death.  Is that in the definition “to know”?  To shrink, reduce, fit-to-one’s-size, assimilate?

Is communication inherent complicity?  The effort at taking a complex and messy, wholistic, excessive, leaky, mysterious and comprehensive lived-experience and rat-tat-tatting away at it with letters and sounds, symbols and utterances toward some acceptance, some convergence of ‘meaning’ necessarily equaling its crucifixion, its disappearance, its waste?  If we manage to twist and contort it to language have we wrung it of reality?  Making a different one?  A communicable one?  A humanly manageable one?

I know (for one) that when I seek to inscribe, assay, proclaim or declare “what happens” – as soon as some assent or understanding seems achieved I sense the evisceration of the expression.  Whether it’s descriptive, imaginative, poetic, academic or pragmatic…forcing it, wrenching it, seducing and eliciting it (sentencing it) into vocabulary, into dialogue, into verbiage…leaves me with a variant experience than the one I sought to transfer.

I mean this…we arrive at…this.  I feel, perceive, desire this…it comes out hackneyed and damaged.  Holy crap!…this occurred! – Can I just say?  Will you let me tell? – and then…what proceeds is an entirely different occasion…a wounded, striated, cut and assembled collage that never equals the issue.

Convergence.  Its own beautiful, extravagant phenomenon.  But not quite expression.  Not quite translation.  Not quite… Always saying more than I intended and less than I meant.  Always saying less than I intended and different from what I meant.  Language.  Open, flexible, ambiguous, gargantuan…and limited, boundaried, sensible, requiring…

I try, tried, keep trying.  And never.  Each utterance a signing off.  Each proclamation death-sentencing its sensation.  Each squeezing toward the dictionary, no matter how scrambled and undone, redone, invented, inverted, still wringing the beauty to beast.

I said I love you.  It came out conditioned.  Assented to.  Agreed.  & Compromised.

I said I want you.  Interpreted “if…”

I said I am… emitting particulars and contradictions.

I said I wish… conditioning demands.

I wanted to say.  To sing.  To whisper.

Vocabling calm and certain and saturation.

Sounding like need and fear and some small evil.

Echoing an anxious desperation.

There is this……..which verses that……and do not equal.

So I am alone

As are you

and then this

between

and same

and different

mix –

some third business –

contorted angle

wound and rendered

wrapped about

and wriggled

writhing

&

struggling

to be

near

what it

is

I love you.