On not finding the right words (series: notes to myself)
Words seem to be missing all the time. I guess it's me, unable to find them. But sometimes I suspect it's their fault. They are good at hiding, staying away even when I'm tired to chase them. Or they run away, everywhere, even when corralled judiciously, like scared sheep. I wish I had a tireless shepherd dog to help me.
Words are mismatched all the time. Like a jar full of nuts and bolts. Too tight, too big, too large, too small... and when they almost fit, forcing them will only strip them. So with gentle patience, as if you were not in a hurry, as if time were not an enemy of semantics, you must find the few that go together, the growling sound of the shooked jar echoing in your mind. Hoping that care and tenacity may deliver the occasional bingo.
Words slide all the time. Mischievous like slime you can collect but cannot catch. Misleadingly flexible, actually amorphous, generic words that cover anything, mean anything, say anything. Untrustworthy, sleeky, frictionless words that only increase the frustration to tack a thought, latch an idea, rivet a point with impeccable precision, unperfectible accuracy.
And so the shortcomings are too many, the imprecisions mount, the ambiguities slip in. The text looks like a poor shelter made of cardboard, odd bits pillaged from other sites, leftovers of other, more elegant projects. Unbalanced, uneven, unfixable.
Classics: sometimes, I read them to get some respite from writing. So that I do not have to see the mauled words I mismanaged to collect on my own. Like an amateur looking at a genius' work: not to emulate, not to compare, but to enjoy for a moment the chiselled perfection he is able to recognise but cannot achieve.
They are like a colour palette, full of nuances, they are the work of mathematics, one has to continuously figure out which method applies best and produces the right outcome… addition, subtraction, multiplication, differential and on and on and on and when luck strikes Integral. Their familiarity is kind and at the same time deceptive, they are both/and, affordance and constraint simultaneously. They capture thoughts clearly, but forgets and distort them too, all the time, because they are leading - never directionless and yet at their best even with no fixed destination - they philosophise, they are conceptual design, they were thoughts, genius' work of courageous patience providing emergence for the rest of us… commoners.
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