Do You See Where the Problem Lies?
They want us to slow down and make sense. They want us to shuffle the cards and start dealing. Who are they? Who are we? Who’s the scoundrel handing out pronouns, and what happens when a pronoun collides with an antinoun?
When I was a kid I thought Mounds Bars were Nouns Bars. One stormy night, hungry for language, I devoured 36 Mounds Bars and vomited an armada of vocabulary.
Have you ever had that vision problem where whatever you’re looking at has parts of itself missing due to little white dots that keep popping up in front of your eyes, so that in order to get the full picture, your mind has to fill in the blank spots caused by the spots with conjecture based on previous experience? If you have, you know that such conjecture then becomes part of your composite experience, and the next time the white-dot phenomenon takes place, conjecture will be part of what you conjecture. Gradually, when this happens, everything you see will be conjecture. And you won’t know when you cross that line. You may have crossed it already. You may have crossed it years ago.
It’s happening to me as I write, except not with vision but with thought. And the question arises: What happens when your thought becomes conjecture?
Do you see where the problem lies?
Can you lend a hand?
