Instrumentality

What kind of thing is a word? It is a tool for conveying meaning?

Maybe it is like a spade: we can use it to dig a tunnel to escape from the solitary confinement of our solitude? We are all imprisoned in the Château d'If and need words to tunnel towards each other, like the Abbé Faria. Or perhaps it's a stone we use to tap out a tentative halting jailhouse Morse upon the plumbing that passes through our cell, infiltrating the isolation of others with our insistence that the apparent solipsism that besets them and causes them despair is in fact a fiction?

Or maybe it is a ticket for a train, taking us from some tense internal exile in some chill northern town in Siberia to a warm Black Sea resort and a tearful reunion with those who also always knew this thaw would come, this day where we reveal to each other the secrets we already knew about each other but were prevented from speaking by the kind of distances that describe the endless steppe, knowledge shared long before it is explicitly told in our cheerful comparison of heart-hoards?

Or perhaps it is a crowbar, a tool with which we extract the abstract from the objects in our hand, a tool which we use to prise and peel the red from the apple we eat so that we can describe the tint that glints and glows in the distant mists of blushing Betelgeuse and stains the sands of Mars?

Or is it a pick-axe, exposing the precious ores that glisten in the marrow of our meanings, splitting the seam of all our seemings?

Or a pen, chronicling the tautologies that taunt epistemologists from the misgivings of Meno to the ramblings of Rumsfeld? A tool with which we find a label for the world's unknown unknowns.

Or a bellows, fanning the embers that illuminate the mansions of the heart with breathy protestations of love, filling us with love's strange surreal surgery of warmth, reaching into our flesh, where we remain forever altered in each other during the intimacies we share when we fall silent at last?

Or perhaps it eludes our grasp, slipping through the net of benign cross purposes from which we weave our conversations, skipping with the unmoderated joy of a child over the hop-scotch of coincidences that occur when we imagine we understand each other. A living sound, created but not controlled, making each tongue chime with the turn of its heel as it dances out of reach.

And when we wonder why it avoids us, it laughs at the absurdity of our question.

Our world is what happens when the absence of purpose is witnessed by one intent on reason, one determined to see meaning whether it is there or not, binding time in knots of thought.

Knots that eventually unravel in ironic and depleted silence when we try to describe the impossible worlds where we can be together.