Under a veneer of words we supplicate the heavens for favors and forgiveness, anticipating the earnestness of our yearnings to possess the power to promote magic, that Nature might be overthrown and the laws of physics transcended, as if by the sheer will of our asking the forces of the universe could be steered to suddenly indulge our spoken needs, as if language could trump the indifference of the world.

Until then, needs and desires chip away at our hearts for we are not content to live the Moment we are in, even though we are warm and well-fed, because we have been told we are missing something, lacking something, neglecting something, as if words can negate the roofs overhead and the meals in our bellies, instead force us to our knees to bow and pray, weep and gnash our teeth with the wind in our hair, the blood in our veins, the planets, stars and suns. Gimmee, gimmee, gimmee! we whimper and whine, with sticky fingers and the smear of candy glistening wet around our mouths, thinking that above all things and everything else it is we who are charmed, we who deserve to live forever, we who are entitled and elite and elect and the rest of it can go straight to hell. Because we say so. Because we can point to and quote words in books, so of course that makes it right and that means it’s true, as if truth had bones that could be bleached in the light, as if truth were an entity that walked the face of the planet instead of a poor construction of our minds, a serpentine hiss in our mouths...

For billions of years not a word was spoken and the world was: natural, physical, material, substantial. With symbolic language came artifice and abstraction—religion, politics, inventions, wars. Language allowed for wide-scale agriculture, animal husbandry, commerce, science and technology, medical advancement and innovation, until our very humanity was immersed and lost inside artifice and pretense.

Today we live and work inside artificial boxes and entertain ourselves by looking at and listening to smaller artificial boxes; we move from place to place in artificial conveyances while following a mesh of artificial grids. Our artificial scientific/technological/medicinal “advances” have permitted us to live longer and breed without discretion across the skin of the planet.

Do you think we’d be in this position today, struggling to support 7 billion people, filling the world with filth and ordure and garbage, if we hadn’t embraced the use of symbolic language? For millions of years we lived in harmony with nature, a small and containable population, localized, tribal, but once we learned how to talk and write we signed ourselves to the allegiance of artificial box ‘culture’.

We are no longer the humans nature meant us to be. We have become something else entirely. We are sad little creatures trying to convince ourselves through the use of symbolic language that our lives inside the artificial box culture is reality.

The trouble is, some of us know that it’s not…

Of course, my composing of these complaints is both paradoxical and hypocritical, as I am employing symbolic language to vent my grievances while using a variety of artificial boxs all neatly tucked inside yet another. Knowing this, I hope, is half the battle. Knowing this, I hope…

The reader and writer in me no longer has a place to go, and this despite nearly a half century of books and papers and pens and poesy. Why do I concern myself any longer with haphazard web pages and blog, as if the words might be transmuted into something they can never be—meaningful entities, objets d’art, theoretical proxies, poetry?

To try to wake up from the dream (I’m yawning and blinking in predawn darkness). To help others awake. To help others see.

Perhaps. A noble enough cause, but somewhat conceited too, as if I knew anything. Circumspection and precaution are essential, since words are a narcotic as addictive as methamphetamine or heroin, certain more damaging and deadly. The path one trods must be unhurried and deliberate and stepped mostly in meditation, in reflection, in pensive quietude. Do not think “the sky is blue”—see it! Do not think “the grass is green”—feel it! Do not think “the bird can sing”—hear it!

I step outside.

Delicately knit between two rose bushes, almost invisible, a silken web hovers amidst the scent of attar and garden decay. At the center of the web a spider awaits, in stoic stillness and silence, aware that in time the hunt always comes round to her…

Between the marmoreal bookends, there are no books—only artifacts of pulp and paper and glue and ink. Books are a confection of the mind, an interior produce, harvested like magic mushrooms inside a forest of teeming dendrites, impossible to find anywhere in natural world, the real world, since words do not exist outside the skull.

My dog—and this is the key to everything—sees books exactly for what they are, what they really are, tactile and textile surfaces that are sometimes pleasant playthings but usually ignored as extraneous and immaterial. Reality is found nowhere in a book, neither the past nor future, or answers, and to suppose otherwise is to subscribe to abstract folly, to an occult notion of destiny that awards words and compositions greater respect than pulsating life itself. How many have become all-too-willing to lay down their vibrant lives, and for what: a catchphrase, a slogan, a battle cry, a scripture? How many will die with a word tugging away their last breaths?

We think we know what this world’s about because of someone else’s stories spooling through our minds, threaded by language, stitched together with words. The world’s stories are found nowhere in the world, yet we go on killing each other, we keep enlisting and volunteering to die, and why? Because we have accepted the stories of other people to be more real than our own reality, the fullness and immediacy of the world around us. Isn’t it time we told ourselves new stories, our own stories, where our lives possess more value and measure and respect than treacly words oozing from a preacher’s , a priest’s, a politician’s lips? Even my lips? Even my very own!