If there’s anything that such gritty social parables as Little Red Riding Hood have taught us, it’s be careful who you talk to. While these days loose lips may not sink many ships, there is still an inherent gamble with every open mouth, danger, like the rattle of a serpent, in that preparatory intake of breath. It is as though from that ludicrous black hole a whole universe of verbal slips, from the mere comedic to the deathly serious, yawns before us, a greased hole through which the secret churnings of dread and desire can slip out and never be stuffed back in. Every tried to clutch a handful of mis-spoken words, and dine hastily upon them? They dive through your fingers like baby eels, and land in squirming ebony mass at your feet. You can step over them, put watch carefully where you put your feet. Behind the fleshy curtains of our lips, innocuous in peach and blatant in red, (a safer strategy, perhaps, to let your lips do the talking) a stream of words swirl, pool into quiet deep lagoons, and gather darkly into storm clouds. Words flow like waters, slippery and treacherous tides, rife with black undercurrents, frozen on the air into venerable Freudian skating rinks. And we, poor fools, skate dizzily about, crashing over double entaunts, sliding into each other, our hands over our eyes and our fingers rammed into our ears, yelling into the dark sponge of space.
As treacherous as word are, we crave for other to hear them, we gleefully entered into the delusion that we only exist if someone is looking, as if the mere act of having an observer invests in our performance a richer meaning, a sense of gravitas. And maybe it does. It nurtures our vanity, bringing forth great ruby blooms, uncurling like a baby fist, so sure of it’s right to exist that it does not even raise the question. Words need echos, rooms to fill, walls to bounce of, just to make sure they’re real. Maybe it doubles in power every time it’s heard, brewing like a spell, a tempest of words tied together with intentions, fraying with wear, rewrapping, passing them on.
