dogma

Words were once wild things, flitting about in the twilight glow, winking on and off by the fire light, only obeying the laws that existence made. They would fly when loosed by an unknowing tongue, unleashed to lash the world that listened. They would sink into flesh, to nest and to change. Born of the blood and of the ghost, they learned to steam and swarm. Like any secret, they changed with every repetition.

All these roaming words clung to tribes and stories, shedding these vague inklings of meaning. Shedding skin after thorny skin. Fused with the sense that for each thing that happened, there was some contingent incident, some antecedent to each action, the story slowly became the telling. No one word was ever enough. Language became blackened with dull biblical begats, egg and chicken ad infinitum until that last relief of final judgement. Faith ever the fish that got away, each story weaver weighing down the embroidery until the story became the thing, that word moving over the water, that birthday party for the sun.

We fill our days with threats and guesses, with fury and with flowery oaths. We bleed out and explode the living bodies of others because of some story someone happened to write down. The epics written by the most furtive and the most brutal survive to guide us to murder and sacrifice, to nurture and abuse. Law as must rather than law as is chains us to ghosts and monsters, as we flee further and further away from our weeping natal states. Survival of our species, once a rough compact with fickle forces, now a shameful Faustian bargain. The necessary has become the inevitable, and we think our hands are clean while we agree to every betrayal. We speed through the world in gleaming roaring armor, while our skies die and the oceans burn. Every single word left us a concession to a lie.