080918 Someone in some long winded article about a book about chinese typewriters said (i’ll paraphrase) written *speech* (emphasis mine) is a bridge between the visible and invisible worlds, predicated on the notion that what cannot take physical form cannot exist. Now that SOUNDS like it means something. It sounds reasonably profound. It sounds like it may even be descended from a long tradition of saying words in a certain order. But what DOES it mean? (What does “mean” mean? You see how this line of inquiry always turns into a funnel? A vortex? A spinning funicular storm system that threatens mobile homes and sheep and drives straws through barn boards? Where were you when I needed you, meaning, to shelter me from the killing coriolis of my own neocortex?) So, is the implication that the invisible world one without physical form? So then we’re building a bridge between something that can exist and something that can’t? How is that possible? Is it some kind of dubiously interpreted quantum-mechanical bridge between actuality and potentiality? Or something? How can you have a “thing” that nevertheless “can’t exist”? Are they asserting that written speech is an agent of creation? Is it that simple to be a God? Just write something down? But surely this is only being a pretend God... Surely you don’t mean to tell me that just by writing something down, I’ve created it. I’ve caused “existence” to happen. Because what if I wrote down, “drat retarded screw finch gob wobble”? What did I just cause to come into creation? Should I be worried? Is it going to come find me and bite my head off with its very emptiness, with the abomination of its utter absurdity? Does the previously invisible turned visible gain the faculty of existence if no-one reads what I wrote? WHAT ARE THE RULES HERE? Why did they say “written speech” (that phrase was not para) instead of “written language” or “written words” or “written thought”? What does “written speech” mean? Does it mean you recorded something you actually (think) you heard someone say? Does that make it somehow more capable of bestowing visibility on some invisible imagined thing? The fact that a monkey cupped his lips in a certain way and flexed her lungs in a certain way and tickled some (gross) *strings made of flesh* in a certain way so that when air escaped the monkey’s wobbling gob, a sound was emitted that then splashed against some other monkey’s ear, and the other monkey was like, oh yes, right, quite so, and went about painting some squiggles of some kind of pigment on a flattened dried sheet of—oh you get the idea. How does this make it somehow a bridge between two worlds—other than the two worlds that can be defined as two monkeys in physical proximity? Oh... well, I guess once it’s “written down” they don’t have to be in physical proximity anymore, so there’s that. That seems kind of significant somehow. So I can readily see how written speech could be said to bridge space and time, and it seems like the people who talk about invisible things are also quite frequently found talking about space-time... so maybe there’s some connection there. But then again, I’m not sure they’re talking about horny monkeys sending each other love letters when they’re scribbling theorums on the whiteboard about continuums and entanglement and dark matter and whatnot. But how would I know? The thing I know the most, the most reinforced concept I’ve learned about quantum physics is that I surely don’t understand it, and so I shouldn’t go around saying dumb poetic symbolic profound bullshit about stuff I don’t understand. Entanglement. Two monkeys being mystically linked across vast reaches of space and time. Romantic! I guess. Are the nits in their hair linked as well? Could anyone write down *their* speech? Or are they doomed to a perspective of invisibility and non-existence forever. If they then don’t exist, then how is the monkey able to pick them out of her friend’s hair and eat them, while they’re sitting together at a café having a latté and discussing the latest book in their book club? Or did the monkeys generously allow the nits to exist by *writing down speech* about them? A monkey writes down the word “nit” and another monkey reads it while nibbling on hummus and pita, and thus, the nit is hoovered up into the realm of every invisible notion that’s been granted the privilege of existing? Sounds, once again, very godlike. Very much like the monkeys are god because they have a pen or a brush or a typewriter or... does a computer count? Again, does it have to be literally speech that got transcoded (encoded?), or can it just be hypothetical speech? If I write something down in the silence of my own room—no, better yet, if I thump my stubby little fingers on this keyboard, causing tiny little switches to connect in a certain skittish pattern, in turn causing a cute little christmas-tree sequence of lights to light up on this big black expensive rectangle in front of my muzzle to light up—does that count? What if I pull the plug right now, and never save my “document”? Did I then produce any “written speech”? Did I build a momentary bridge, and did a bunch of little critters from the invisible world scurry over it, and are they now stranded here, unable or unwilling to fully form, stuck inchoate and crepuscular, purgatorial, because I thoughtlessly deleted their bridge, because I never gave it bricks, cables, towers, a framework—