Dying of Ink
This work is borrowing heavily from Jenna Moran’s “Glitch: a Story of Not” as a framing device. The author wishes to address you as hir most Excrucian self, a strategist dying of ink. A member of the “Riders’ Abstinence Society” and furthermore a poet. This essay will also delve into abuse the author has experienced. What shi is telling you using this framing device is truth, the framing device isn’t. Shi hopes you understand.
Words have meaning. That string of them, it’s called a sentence. So was the one describing what a sentence is. Everyone is taught that words have meaning but in reality, words really don’t have meaning. Not really, no meaning at all. In more actuality words convey meaning. That’s where it gets complicated isn’t it? That’s where the ambiguity lives in the meaning conveyed. That’s where it gets tricky, and in some cases murderous.
We’re going to jump between first person singular pronouns for self and first person plural pronouns for ourself. I’d say I’m sorry, but in reality, this is us living our truth. We hope you understand.
Our parents are teachers. This means that they spend most of their time trying to find a way to meaningfully convey information to children trying to get them to think critically. At least that’s the way they’d put it. To their credit that’s also how we would put it too. In several cases that is a nice and accurate definition of what they do. But that’s the thing about the word definition itself, it’s a generalization.
“What do you mean by that? Definition is a generalization.” One may ask. “Doesn’t the Dictionary define definition as “a statement of the meaning of a word or word group or a sign or symbol” or even “a statement expressing the essential nature of something”? How can a definition be a generalization?”
Those are honestly excellent questions. But the second definition of Definition is talking about an essential nature. Meaning that we are to look at the essence of it. Essence is when we strip away the outliers. Essence is when we strip away the confusing inconsistencies. Essence is, for the most part, without the contradictions included. Essence is a generalization. Essential nature therefore is also a generalization on the behavior of something. From that generalization we can determine a definition.
Definitions are made from generalizations. This is what we mean by definitions are generalizations. And they want to appear solid.
They want to appear solid so that we can distinguish a table from a chair from a mesa from a plateau. It is at this point that I would like to remind the reader that sometime ago, some of those words came from the same root. Meaning, that their definitions all share something in common. So we use different words to distinguish one from the other. This is why definitions want to appear solid. Some people would say they are and need to be solid or society ends up with people literally misusing the word literally when they should use figuratively. I don’t fully agree with them except in that particular circumstance of literal and figurative. They have a point there.
But back to our parents. Our parents were teachers. We like to believe they are good at that job. To expound upon that I have seen students of theirs comeback to them in their twenties and later saying “Thank you for teaching me how to think about life critically.” That’s really something impressive you know? I admire that they put that much effort in helping young people succeed. Young people need that. They need people who help them light up on the inside. To make them question and become something more than what is expected of them. They need people who help them become someone who cares. This wrong world needs more people who help others like that.
I just wish they extended it to me.
My parents went to college on debate scholarships. This has a weight to it that I’ll explain and tie into our obsession with words. Both of our parents had a lot to say about how one would say or write things. They drilled into me that one should be mindful about what they say and put out there. There wasn’t any memorization of definitions but I’d better be damned sure I knew what the word meant. To that end, this is why we became obsessed with words. I loved words. They could shape worlds, describe processes, be playful, be aggressive, and be a weapon. They are still probably my favorite play thing. We tried our best to be mindful about how we used them.
Which only made it hurt worse when our parents didn’t.
I wish dear reader I could remember the first time they weren’t mindful with their words to us. We wish we could remember the first insult they fired at me. We wish our memory was as clear as our obsession with words and how to put them to page, trapping them with ink. And yet.
And yet we are grateful we don’t remember. I am grateful that memory has been lost to me. We are gladdened that we don’t have a memory about it because we don’t want that sharp perceived hell to haunt us anymore than what it did to us already.
Because that’s when we first really noticed what was in our head.
When they first hurt us by not being mindful with their words, we witnessed the glitch. It manifested in our head as a pool of black ink after burrowing into our eyes and blotting them out. It was the hypocrisy of how their words were. It was the hypocrisy of how everyone’s words were. Everyone seemed to be taught to mind their words at a young age. Yet as everyone grew up and became adults, all of us couldn’t help but to be careless to those below them.
This was how the glitch manifested to me. This was the obsession. This was how I began to die of ink.
It’s our bane you see. Ink. What better way is there to manifest a word than in ink? Ink traps words onto paper, onto screens, even into skin. Ink’s rather amazing. It takes the ambiguity out of sound and forms it into words. It’s careful, constricting, structured, and in some cases clean. And yet.
And yet Ink is also messy, chaotic, fluid and careless. In these contradicting ways it kills me. In it’s mindfulness we are often strangled, starved, blotted out, calcified and legalized away by ink. In it’s flippant nature we are often drowned in it, driven mad with and without it, poisoned by it, cut open with it, and tore apart.
So… what can I do?
That question haunted us for a long time. At least a decade and a half really. We ran from ink. Ink would still catch us. We would hide from ink. Ink would find us and drag us out into the world. We’d fight the ink. The ink would best us in that way too. Every time we felt we had an advantage against it, we were proven wrong. We were beaten and killed and came back again with some part of us blotted out with ink. We tried compromising with ink. Ink rejected it and took everything we had. We only had one option left.
We had to master it. We had to find our way back to ambiguity with it. That was our way out. That was our doorway we had to write into existence. We had to create it from our bane. We bathed in ink and wrote hundred of trillions upon hundred trillions of words. We wrote like mad to create the door we needed. A door of kennings and meanings. A door of impossible possibilities.
But when we attempted it through essay, we only broke more. Stories were too long and I always seemed to drown in ink after getting a chapter or two out. Short prose always felt maddeningly pointless. Don’t even get us started on speeches. Every attempt we had to master ink seemed to hurt us more.
Save for poetry.
Poetry is inherently ambiguous and carries meanings that often times the writer never meant to put in there. We loved that. We loved how something as simple as seventeen syllables could carry worlds of meaning all on it’s own. Through that ambiguity, poetry had a power. That power is to take definitions, the most cruelly calcified and perceived form of ink, words, and conveyed meaning, and break it over poetry’s knee. We theorized we could make that doorway out of existence using poetry’s power and the broken bones of my bane’s most baleful form.
And we did.
When we walked through it, we found peace and understanding. Oh how I wish we could have stayed in that world beyond that door. Alas this world doesn’t want us to leave. Even though we found freedom through ink from the glitch that hounded us all our life. Even though we mastered the thing killing us and found freedom from this horrid state of affairs called existence. We were still bound to it. We were shaped by it. We were perceived and infected by it. So we had to come back.
We came back into this world with a fury. Furious at the glitch that broke us. Furious at this world so intermixed with the grand Glitch and the small glitches. This world so broken, this world so wrong. And yet… I can not bring myself to strike at it anymore. Because if I do, we’re only being a part of what makes this world wrong now. So… we just write to manage our infection. To manage our existence. We’re always going to be dying of ink, but that’s okay. I still find ways to inject ambiguity into the world with my bane.
And in that ambiguity, I find the one thing our parents never could give us.
Serenity.
