The Word
This post was originally published through Patreon on May 29, 2018
Once, I was a writer. Still am, though now I keep my work to myself. In my youth I wasn’t so reticent. I submitted my stories all over, even got some published in prestigious magazines. I was on my way up, ready to storm the gates of the literary world.
Then the words stopped flowing.
The channel through which their magic once surged slowed to a trickle, and a thousand nascent worlds inside my head withered and died. Oh, how I mourned their untimely loss. I sat for hours in silence, trying to pick apart the dam that held the words back. But it was no use. They were gone, and they were never coming back.
Then a miracle: a missive from the gods.
One word.
It burst to life inside my head in the middle of the night like an atomic bomb, waking me from a dreamless sleep.
One word.
It filled my vision like the blinding glare of the noonday sun. It was so beautiful. I had to capture it; I had to contain it for future study. So I sat down at my desk, something I hadn’t done since the magic died, and I prepared to write.
Nothing happened.
The word was so vibrant, so full of life, yet my pen wouldn’t move, couldn’t. There seemed no way to express it in writing. How to record such transcendent beauty, such otherworldly clarity?
This was no natural language, I soon realized, but something more, something beyond symbols and sounds. I kept my interior gaze fixed upon its wondrous contours, and in the course of my examination, I became aware of more: an undercurrent, a river of words just as elemental as the first, throbbing beneath the surface of the world like an artery.
Pumping, flowing.
This was true language. Not the names assigned to things by creatures incapable of understanding the world any other way, but true names, the purest essence of all that ever existed and all that ever would.
I had to examine this other language more closely, had to divine its innermost secrets. So I turned inward, focused on its constant flow, churning now, like a river, pulsing, spouting…
Too close, the current pulled me in.
Flying.
Flailing.
Struggling to hold my head above the water.
Power crackled all around me, and I knew in that moment that if I didn’t pull back, if I let it draw me in much further, I would burn before the searing heat of realities too profound for any mortal mind to comprehend.
Pushing against the flow, I forced my way upriver. But the words had hold of me now, and they didn’t want to let go. The current grew faster, stronger. After a time, I could feel the gravity of another world in the distance, tugging at me from the other side of time.
For a moment, I actually wanted to go, wanted to let the words sweep me away. This was a journey, I thought, that all of us must take sooner or later, a truth the river spoke to me as it charged through the cosmos. But it wasn’t my time. There was more left for me to do in my mortal life, and I couldn’t yet move on.
So I pushed. I pushed and pushed and pushed. All the while, those words sang to me, cajoled me, urged me to follow after them.
I will, I promised. In the fullness of time, I will.
It seemed they understood because, at last, they offered me a way out. A light appeared in the distance, pointing the way home, and all I had to do was trudge against the current and follow after it.
The light grew.
Grew.
It enveloped me, reached down to pull me out, placed me back once more in—
My room. Once more, I was in my room. I was at my desk, pen still in hand, my notebook stretched before me, ready to receive my vision.
Those words were gone now, along with the one that had first revealed itself to me. But I could still feel that otherworldly current beneath me, thrumming, rumbling. The dam inside my head exploded, and a flash flood of new words surged through an opened mind. Only ordinary words this time—human words—yet I embraced them as a long lost love.
I could have found unrivaled success with words like these. I could have made a lot of money, built a towering career as a celebrity author. But it seemed profane to put them to such use, and at any rate, I was no longer interested in making a name for myself. All I wanted was to study that living, thriving river, and to ponder the journey that I promised I would make in the fullness of time.
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