People flock like pigeons to terminology. They love the comforting identity of key words, of tribal signifiers, of consensual language. They start to hum, when the language gets thick, when the words get esoteric. Some people, anyway — are just sticky with words.

Some human beings present themselves not as sensitive bodies but as talking heads. When you listen to them the world is bled dry and only the skeletons remain. Listening to such talking heads your brain goes numb and gut becomes a fist. You might even be turned to stone by those oily snaky words which emanate from that medusa of language. You might become a stick figure statue with accessories, with trinkets, bright and shiny displays of jangling nothingness called words hanging around your neck.

When you read Dostoyevsky you have the opposite experience. The night become darker, the stars start to burn holes in your brain. You find yourself even more in the world, a world that has been transformed, into tidal blood and starlight. When you read Rimbaud, you feel a tidal shift, syllables become read and blue and green. When you read Blake the outlines are sharper, the colours have more density, you feel the presence of a whole cosmology of light. When you read Rilke you are swooned in almost unbearable brightness.

If the words are rooted in the lived world, they have density. If they are an argument for or against something, they are often shrill. I. An argument starts: X’s special terminology, against Y’s special terminology. Somebody gets offended, people get ‘unfriended’ and yet they have never touched each other on the arm. Enemies are cultivated, sometimes even wars start all because of senseless disembodied words, which start to hook the body and the mind, to populate it with phantoms.

People hate each other without ever noticing the eyes the eyes of the person, their special colour and heat. They haven’t yet smelled them, they haven’t observed the hands. They get only get the projection, the spectre, the words.

If words have a unique quality, particular to the individual, then listen. If they sound like they have been forged in the living fire, beg for more. If there is a kind of space and silence which surrounds the words, the words have purpose. The secret of words is in the silence which surrounds them: In what they conceal as much as what they reveal.

The mind is always making words. And if you look for the source of the words, they are not coming from you, but from without. They are the noise of other people mostly, sometimes ancestral voices, speaking in tongues through you. Your language is a multiverse of others — it is not your property. One reason to write is to still that dense wall of noise. One reason to write words, is to come to the end of words; to feel the gap at the end of a sentence.

Poetic language is a war dance. It is never mechanical. It tries to make words deadly daggers against conceit not arguments for against. The bushmen of Australia consider talking a disease — they were still connected to the cosmos and the heavenly spheres. They sang words, and made paths through singing — what could be more beautiful! Ambient machine noise has made it very hard to hear these singing spheres. And the way people talk and talk and talk continuously is a disease. If we don’t allow words to rest, the result is hysteria… always trying to name things. Because naming things reduces them and yet gives us a feeling of pseudo control.

I seek for a language that is subversive, not in the sense of causing shock, but diverting the mind from the mechanical. The perfect language, is the unmasking of language. I haven’t found it yet, so I keep writing, I keep trying to keep things volatile, rather than fixed; I avoid ’special’ vocabulary; but bow down to the hidden melody.

Last week the capital caps of my keyboard broke and so I stopped writing with capital letters for a time. It felt right to have one word blend into the other as in a medieval script — more melodic than syntactic.. Now I am back to capitals, for there is no return, just a glimpse of the primeval origin of words.

Language is a circle not a line. it just keeps going until… you fall off the circle.