The Philosopher's Attic

Our worlds are made of words and meaning. Words that bother and comfort, words that build and veil, words that confuse and break open those windows to our hearts that never get used. We use them everyday to speak, relate and cover up, to dissect and inspect, to see and hear and ultimately listen. Words and the things they represent are what makes a man… or not.

There is a word in all this wordness of the wordlessness. So fine in thought and phonetics, so balanced in reason and it’s labio-dental being, so trustworthy in it’s simplicity. So empty in all it’s glory.

It is moved around the pages of numerous books, moved by unseen hands of unknown placers. Pushed to the side of a line, to the beginning, the line-up of a paragraph, the title, the end, the last, the first, the whatever. Through History, through time, on pages worth a thousand others, thought and written by men and women worthy of the meaning, and so many that never grasped it’s true colour or … future. Slipped and flipped around the edges of an inspiring text, a daring pamphlet, a burning speech, a tearing poem or a heating novel. Thus said word, made its way through the eons and ages that long passed, have made the whole structure of words we live in by the day. An architecture of meaning, of synonimical rigour, building room after room, floor after floor, high into skies that bear no limit to what only lowest spirits call culture.

And our word? Stuck somewhere between the ground floor and apartment block 2A, right beside emptiness and vigour. Moved around the great pieces of human culture, like a forgotten furniture: always there, but not really fitting. Not entirely. So, they strip it down, sand it bland, paint it anew to the current times, make it fit wherever it needs to go, make it wear whatever we need it to convey. (grind it down, construct it completely new)

We move it around between the front room, the salon and the back of the house. Once in the first spot for everyone to see when it might serve a purpose. Only to have it removed and put into storage the next day when all sense has been lost and it doesn’t even have enough substance to bear a vase of flowers on its top.

And while it ages, wastes and dies away, this word’s carapace and empty shell is still being used as a ghost, a placeholder in our minds and thoughts. By people that greater and smaller than you or me who rip it apart, move it around, walk over it, tear it apart, defile it, crush it and rape it, while the word all by itself sits in a long forgotten room in some wonderful speech that tells us of a glorious future, whips us in line behind another empty hull of another mighty word that has lost all meaning.
A long forgotten room, in a house full of lost and deconsidered words that have lost reality or reference, that simply have lost being.

There is a word in all this dusty lostness and we used to call it truth. It used to be the making and the destruction of kings, princes and worlds. It used to be the greatest things of all, one of the greatest words with power.

Truth dies easy in the whispers of a thousand liars.

yseult The Odd Philosophical Question debate, Philosophy