7/3: on word-chemistry/state change

I’m just trying to figure out something!! it has to do with writing as state change/language as movement between atmospheres and registers of density.

I write a word on a page, and its shape describes a relationship between the density of my body, the volume of my air, and the mass of my questions. Or: I write a word at the unknowable threshold where the time of my body meets the shape of its air. Or: I think we can just call language state change.

The cycle begins like this: before it is a shape, the word is a vaporous, particulate matter with absolutely no relationship to language. It’s just a high-speed gas sighing its momentum into my lungs, a rush-swell kissing the pace of my breath and heating up the temperature of my spirit, which is nothing other than the vibration of my body. For the word to sustain its gas pressure, it demands of my lungs an unrelenting passage between the unthought-atmosphere within my body and the thought-atmosphere without. Or rather: an ingeminated fold that moves, in the air, between the edge of pre-articulate interiority and articulated externality. Or rather: aerated translation.

Then, the word undergoes its first state change. Decelerates from a gas to liquid, from vaporous air to hydraulic expression. Hear it dripping out of the body, see it drenching the plane of discourse with glossolalic waters, also known as saliva, also known as rain. Less speed and more density. Less of a sigh and more of a surge. No significations yet, just a racing, logorrheic liquid which reaches softly for your mouth, and which endeavors towards the slow, dark ink with which we draw the edges of the world. This liquidification happens at the membranes, at the skin. I touch my skin and it becomes an open field of word-rivers and language-tributaries. I allow myself to be cut open innumerable times so that the waters of each word can spill over and gush out. I clear my throat through my skin.

Then another surface emerges—the page—and it engenders another state change. The word’s liquid lays its eyes on the page, moves towards it, and precipitates a solid. This is nothing other than the solid of my body, the renewal of my flesh, reconstituted as inked condensation. But the solid is not unmoving. But the solid breathes and its breath causes the air around the page to move and the air speeds up and it heads back into my body, where it fills my lungs, once again, with the question of another word.