Do Not Read This Essay

Warning!

Be careful of what you read. As William Burroughs said: “Language is a virus.”

Perhaps you should not read this, because you may be infected by the coded words, which quietly reprogram your brain circuitry.

Do not read this. Especially because I don’t want to let you know how sad I am since my cat died last week. If you stop reading now, then my grief can stay private.

Beware of the language virus, and especially this lyric text. It is a hybrid essay. A monster. It works in fragments, with dream-logic. A viral code that slips past your defenses, and alters your consciousness.

Burroughs used the “cut-up” technique to generate texts that could not be civilized.

My apartment was “home” when it was the place my cats lived. Now that I am alone, the apartment is just a transitional space, an impersonal hotel suite. My old life has been cut-up.

Home was the purring vibrations of the sleeping cat in my lap. Home was a furred weight on my chest in the middle of the night. Now, the apartment is just a void space.

[Insert photo of cat's empty food bowl]

I have no home. I am a ghost haunting the empty apartment. Do not read this. Do not witness my haunting.

When I became interested in writing essays a few years ago, I picked up Brian Dillon’s book “Essayism.” I wanted his tips on literary style in the genre, but was caught off-guard in the middle of the book by this section:

“I was now deep in a depression such as I had not known for almost twenty years. Each day I sat at my desk in an office at the end of the garden and cried and tried to write – tried to write this book – and each day finally gave myself up to fantasies of suicide. …walk up the garden… and pick up a length of electrical extension lead from the shed on my way, with which to hang myself upstairs, through an open hatch to the loft.”

Dillon is “patient zero” for the virus: he mentions suicide in his confessional text, which I read a few years afterwards and became unexpectedly infected, and right now the word suicide is planted like a black flower in your mind too. [This is why you should have stopped reading two minutes ago.]

The noose of language tightens around us before we realize it; words penetrate like tattoo needles, a viral calligraphy under the skin.

In Dillon's case the transmission of the word-virus was unintentional. The comics author Grant Morrison has explored the dangers of weaponized language, its use as a Trojan Horse.

In Morrison’s sci-fi epic “The Invisibles” words are deliberately used by shadowy combatants to hijack people’s perception of reality.

Much of the plot concerns “Key 23,” a viral tool that allows language to directly modify someone else’s consciousness.

In other stories Morrison has directly referenced mourning their own beloved cat.

I will not share my cat’s name or photo – they are private memories. But I’ll show drawings of Morrison’s cat.

Zen says the virus is linguistic thinking itself, and therefore emphasizes meditation, sometimes with koans:

“When I look in the mirror I see my face. Where is the true self?”

A zen koan is a linguistic grenade, sabotage designed to trigger discontinuity in your inner monologue. The text evaporates like mist.

Maybe silence is the first step to quarantine the language virus. Let’s both stop reading a moment…

...

…

…

When my cat lived here the apartment was quiet, but the silence is different now, a vacuum.

And one cannot stay in quarantine forever. Language is inevitable for our species.

The ancient Greeks had a single word, “pharmakon,” that had two opposite meanings: both “poison” and “remedy.”

Plato wrote that the invention of writing was itself a double-edged pharmakon.

So perhaps the language virus can be isolated, and modified into a vaccine.

The careful ritual of writing this essay could serve as my inoculation, where the proper dosage is medicinal. It will be a counter-spell to break up the propaganda language polluting the airwaves.

I sit in a café, take a breath, and write a single sane sentence, and then another.

My cat remains in memory, in the silence of my chest. Home is not the walled structure of the apartment, but instead my daily meditation and writing practice.

[…Read this text as a benediction.]

I spoke to my cat every day. He didn't need words – he just gazed back at me.

My buddy.

* * * * * * * * *

__________________________________________

Thanks for reading this newsletter!

There are links at the bottom of the page: Like, Comment, and Share. Your responses attract new readers, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about the essays.