Notes From the Psych Ward of the Soul Hospital

A story is a lie with a pulse.

Words are very important to me. Language remains the most incredible invention. Isn’t it awesome? We created a structure that we have come to collectively agree upon with those around us, and that structure utilizes symbols and noises so that one brain can send its contents to another brain. Words are like boats that carry ideas. I love words so much. I am infatuated with them. Both of those things were necessary to say because they are different. By using the word love, I am emphasizing my deep care for words, and the reverence that I feel towards them. Through infatuation, I am expressing a deeply curious and borderline obsessive fixation. Both the love and the infatuation I just described is directed towards words, but the usage of the word words as I just did is vague in itself. Words as boats that carry ideas, words as individual entities that represent a specific thing, words as sounds, words as closeness, words as distance, words as the vain of my being, as I have the urge to define each new word I write in hopes that you understand me. But that would take a very long time.

That is all to say, I love language. I think that is because words make me feel safer than things that are more abstract. I have a hard time trusting that which is abstract because I do not like being tricked. That which is abstract can trick me much more easily than words can because if I sense that a word is lying, I can–we can–use other words in an attempt to agree more specifically on definitions, and through definitions, we can assess whether the words are carrying lies or truths. That which is abstract, on the other hand, does not exist within these agreed upon structures. That which is abstract requires a leap of faith. 

Abstraction requires an other. The other is sexy, so abstraction is like fucking–no, it’s more like defilement. It’s rape. But that is not a value judgment. Rape, in this situation, doesn’t have negative connotations. Abstraction rapes definitions, in the same way that this definition of abstraction requires the abstraction of rape.

Sometimes you must take the leap of faith required to put your trust in something abstract. Sometimes it’s okay to be raped. It is also important to decide when not to take the leap of faith. If you always take a leap of faith then eventually the leap of faith will come to feel like a mere leap. It is also okay to realize you have been tricked–to have taken the leap of faith only to realize once on the other side of the pond that the abstraction was, in fact, lying. It is better to leap back than to, out of pride, lie to yourself. Sometimes rape is bad. 

Of course, words are also abstract–everything that involves an other is, on some level, abstract. But it is important not to take this idea so far that you give up, that you deem the delivery of the contents of one brain to another impossible and therefore a trivial pursuit. Possible and impossible are meaningless. The pursuit itself is what is relevant. I may even go as far as to say that this pursuit is where life happens. So words are necessarily abstract. At the same time, however, words and abstraction are rivals. Words were created to define abstractions which were then abstracted which were then defined with new words which were then abstracted which were then defined with new words–

Which brings us to art.