Words make the most sense in my house. A journal of a man who left his city.
Let’s say for a second, that I live in a city-state. This city-state is going to be sacked (soon). In a way, we have already sacked ourselves. There is a lot of internal fighting within my city. You will probably not understand our fighting. Whoever translates this should not try to understand our structure of feeling. I live in a tight knit community of emotion; that is to say our words make sense to one another because of a free floating and unidentifiable structure that gives us ignoble clarity (but only to each other). Sure, I’m making words right now, but they will be largely imperceptible to you even if they are made to fit within your etymological framework.
Conquerors are at our door. They have been at our door for a long time— longer than I’ve been alive. Their presence has incited a revolution within my city. My people want to know more. Why has “our” God has forsaken “our” fortune to invaders. Defection has subsumed us because our encompassing ethos of anti-nominalism (the one thing that unites my people) has been abandoned. My city has no unifying language. We do not structure coherency around words. Instead, we rely on an invisible structure, which constitutes local cogency. To enjoy an invisible structure you have to forget that it is there. The invader’s presence has left us unable to believably ignore our unseeable unification. People have begun to point out the unification, which is just senseless. They want a unified military, a unified language, and be unified in concern for our preservation.
Panic has made unification-discourse sensical. I have heard many people (scared people) comment in passing that it wouldn’t hurt to hear out the concerns of those who favor unification. This would indicate discourse has been elevated to having a potential for sense. Colleagues who hate unificationist discourse call it wrong. Wrong! It is not wrong, it is nonsensical. That is the minute shift in my city’s ethos. What is ridiculous is now wrong, within the spectrum of reason. If someone answered a math equation by slapping their soup against the wall that would be more than wrong— it would be undeserving of acknowledgement.
I feel like this is what those who are scared are trying to do. How can the tens of small communities in my city and their intimate structures be sensibly unified? Words only seem to make sense in my house. Am I supposed to believe synthesizing these small communities into one large entity full of empty words will mean anything? The Roman’s are unified, and that unification is never enough— they will not stop until the earth and sky speak the same as they do… or can at least be structurally punished if they do not.
This is the impulse of a scared man— to know the names of things… all things. Have we no faith? And what is the church to do? They are already struggling to survive a drought on supplies needed for daily ritual strategically enacted by our invaders. How are they to fend off “knowledgeable” usurpers from equivocating their ideas with the unspeakable. How do you defend the untouchable when even words like indescribable are an affront to their ineffability? The answers to these questions are quite obvious. They must strictly distinguish what can be said and what cannot. They must fiercely fight for reason and ignore nonsense. The church must also be a resource for citizens to safely expend their desire for answers to life’s big questions. A clergyman must point to the wall and say, “There! The answer to life’s meaning is inscribed on this wall, and in this book too— but I must tell you of its significance first, you illiterate, selfish piece of shit.”
Alas, the church cannot do any of that. It is much too late. The nonsense of discourse has had no problem staging an onslaught on our sacred anti-nominalistic ethos— how men conduct themselves naturally without fear. Fear— I should note that there is little chance that word will survive translation. I am almost positive what you are reading that is in its place will be more than wrong… more than incorrect. But feel free to slap a name on it anyways.