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Voiceless I am consumed by words;

a mouth less vessel overflowing ever inward.

It is the starting that seems most to bring writing to a screeching halt. Ideas, concepts, dreams, all tend to

flow like water. Words have tendencies more in touch with tar. While I can hardly speak for others (an

act far too many find all too easily accomplished) I can with a fair degree of certitude speak for myself. I

do not like to write. I do not mind having written, and I adore having written well, but the actual act of

composition is one I all too readily abhor.

Writing is Thought, at its most vulnerable, abandoned, helpless on the page. Words are ideas at their

absolute smallest, a cosmic power trapped in a finite faltering frame. Endless potential reduced to an

infinitesimal aspect of mortal understanding. To give life to a single word you must put to death all else

the concept that gave it birth ever was or could have ever been. You must bind it like Prometheus and

leave it to be gutted by time and critic in never ending cycles, until it finds in some far flung future the

blessed peace of ignoble ignorance and is at last allowed to fade forgotten into the ever softening silence

of antiquity.

Even so it is one of the truly twisted tricks of reality that in order for these seemingly immortal aspects of

infinite meaning to hold any real measure of meaning they must be made mortal. They must become real.

In order for them to become anything they must first be stripped of nearly everything. In this way Tree

the ever eternal ideal that was at once all trees and all that trees could ever be, become a tree or the

tree, a place holder, an image. A single solitary instance nailed to a page by a pen, or hung in the

vanishing vapors of a sentence written in the air. A wonder wrought into a word, a sacrifice of

everything; to become, if only for an instance, something. Words whether spoken, or written, or carved in

stone, are little more than dead ideals, the bones of an image once thought infinite.

Yet there is hope, for words were not first wove to enslave the infinite but to free it. For even the most

endlessly expansive of ideas can only last as long as the mind that holds it. Here in lies the true treachery

of words, for words cheat death itself by dying, by lunging from the only thing that gives them life, the

mind, into that which can offer little more than a grave for the paltry few squiggles and scrapes that hold

the final finite remains of all they once were. The trick is that held within the Word is not just the death

of an idea or the bones of an ideal but the potential of resurrection so long as that word endures. All that

is needed is a mind to look upon it with understanding and the idea rises reborn, not just anew but new.

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Similar in shades to what it once was but forever shaped and shifted by the mind that brought it back to

life.

This is my real fear when it comes to laying down my thoughts in shrouds of ink. Not merely all that

must be lost when committing to a single syllable or sentence, though that is part, but all that may be

found that never was by a mind that knows too much of knowledge and too little of ignorance.

I hate writing, how could I not? When faced with the prospect of what you say never really being what

you said. In a mind, in an idea, an ideal, you can find that perfect balance of understanding and

ignorance. You can see forever even when you cannot see at all. All things are as you know them to be,

all is free to change in an instant or hold strong for eternity. There is a great freedom in this and an even

greater slavery. In the end we, you, I, must write, even if only on the inner paths of passing ears. We

must write in sound and symbol. We must make concrete and solid our innermost ethereal thoughts and

understanding. Because if we do not they can never be anymore than anything. To truly matter it is not

enough for a thing be possible, it must actually be. A chance is nothing until it is taken.