Piecemeal People, Secondhand Attributes

perceptible but unintelligible

“All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.” (Montaigne)

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Much of what I think and say comes from a fifty-cent bin, nothing but reduced and reused thoughts as fleeting as the stutter they erupt, muttering rubbish. If I’m lucky, if the wind is right and my pinky toe bent like so, I might conjure a shiny idea and have a winsome minute. Surfaces wear, though, and beneath every idea I grind to life is fool’s gold.

Attempting to be original immobilizes minds. Many writers let the endeavor tempt them despite its unattainability. The exertion activates a cognitive strain and jams a broom between the spokes of conceptualization. Creativity dies. We slip into empty spaces encased in hypnotic white walls and follow the blink and crawl of a murky cursor, envious of its action, paralyzed by the grotesque perfection of a pristine page, afraid to ruin its glaze. Fear arrives without a return address, another borrowed emotion obtained from nowhere else. The sources have eyes. Don’t look. Ignorance maintains the façade. 

A world exists where none of this matters, I think. Outside my mind, distractions influence me into believing all this shit is important when anybody with half a finger crammed inside a nostril can see how performative and nonsensical this whole newsletter business is. Every Note’s feed is a lunchroom table in a high-school cafeteria. We seek allies with a veneer similar to ours and accept their impersonations if they validate our bullshit or share our wares. Some take the game further and block anybody who seems incongruous with their imagined reality. They train algorithms to close their minds. 

Words demand readers, but this metric-driven circus makes some people shallow and loud. They want you to believe their words and ignore the signs. Repetition breeds familiarity, and familiarity wafts an air of truth. Yet everybody has more than one face, two phases, a dead dream beside a suppressed memory no different than your neighbor’s when held against a current of pain and viewed through shame’s mirror. 

So many people despise reading about others’ experiences. They see one “I” and move on. Yet Substack is full of often-read personal stories and pseudo-diaries, so much so that I question whether I want to be a part of it all, another brick in the wall. Worse, I fear I will or am living vicariously through everybody I see and meet, digitally and in person. 

If desire is mimetic, I am nobody and everyone, a compilation of secondhand adjectives and hollow nouns. Our motives incubate in an audience’s judgments. A leaf between thoughts and ink becomes a mesh screen between sanity and insanity. Words have meanings but lose value while on layaway. How many people want only to be seen as kind but feel burdened by the role? No need to be convincing. We barter judgments for judgments. Lies uphold sociability.  

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”¹

Maybe I’m not waving but surrendering, sucking on a mouthful of water, my pockets stuffed with narrativized judgments collected from the minds I’ve read. Maybe I’ll swim in circles, dream about a doorknob, and skirt the bowl until I sink. Or perhaps I’ll tread in this warm spot and reinvent my reflection.

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Paid subscriptions are still paused and will remain so for however long it takes me to figure out which way is up.

1. W. B. Yeats