WORDSEA – Ramtin Mesgari

December 24, 2021

My dustfilled soul is covered by Irish prose and the length of my desk is wrapped up in a turban of softsilk graze. A stack of books here, a stack over there, all covered in a lazy lining of dust and despair. I haven’t left this spot in a long time: days maybe, weeks even, sometimes minutes. It’s an odyssey in itself. I am my own ulysses: reading has devoured me, nothing of me remains but a body, but a body and a brain now incompatible with the world. Push me outside and I’ll melt into mud or moss or what have you: those things which make up the earth, that is: if anything remains of the earth, on the earth, here on the earth. But put a pen in my hand, put a pen in my hand and I’ll tell you all about the world at large: I’ll tell you about life and comedy and about all the world’s romances and tragedies; and if you were to ask me to sing, I’d sing to you then the praise of the sun and the sea. The sea, the sea, THALATA! the sea! And drunk on the words of my rapture, we’d sail together upon the winefilled sea, the sea, the sea, the endless sea of prose and poetry. But put me on the outside and I’ll melt into a murmuring mirror of selfformed delusions. But! But put a pen in my hand and—THALATA! THALATA! the winefilled sea. Only put a pen in my hand, only keep me inside: inside where life first began. Life began on the inside, one goes to the outside only to die. What might one even find in the outside that one cannot find out on the inside? Chicken coups, perhaps a pig sty? Towers leaning over the shadow of mankind’s mirth? I know not and care little to find out: the risk is too high, the effort much too great, to drown myself in dusty literature is truth’s real gate. He who wields the word wields the truth. So inside, I say, stay inside, where the sun doesn’t burn and the sea is red with wine. Yes, with wine.

You see, this wisdom of staying inside I learnt early into my earlier years. I learnt it from an old fool, from this man I had once met, this bookish little man who had taught me this big old thing; I’ll tell you the story. There was once this bookish little man, some old fool, or perhaps I read the whole thing in a book, I don’t know, but there was once this bookish little man who told me: “Words are man’s first and most grandiose invention; with language and wine he created the whole universe.” That’s what he’d said, not all of it though: I added in the bit about the wine, he hadn’t actually said all of that; he was a fool after all. Nevertheless, his words were words of truth, for with words man created a whole universe of truth: a whole universe, and then some wine! And to think I thought him a fool. And then some wine. But which came first, the word or the wine? First? The word. The word, of course. The word came first. And then, and what came then? Another word? Another word, words and more words, followed by another word. And then, what came then? Well then came the wine. Yes, it was only then that the wine came. “Let there be wine!” some wise man had said. “Let the oceans be filled with wine and let there be tortoises that roam the seas… or the lands. And turtles the other!” “Let there be oysters for the rich and shrimp for the poor!” Then later: “Let both the shrimp and the oysters be for the rich!” Then too: “Let my legacy live on in the spirit of Christ!” And just like that, the great wordwielding prowesses of Christ and Moses, of Thoth and Ra, were lost to the world; just like that men forgot that the power of prose and the wisdom of words were always theirs to wield; and just like that, men became mortals again: little oompalittleloompas. So what came first? The word and then the wine, yes? And then a myriad of other words and other varieties of wine. But they came only after we shaped the first sound into the first word, after the first nonsyllabic neanderthal birthed the great old mutts of the monosyllabic cult, and then: the polysyllabic polygolydillydaddies: word deities! And now: merely mortals again. But they came only after we shaped the first word into newer words, into longer words, better words: a cumulation of words, strung together, bead by bead, word by word, wordbead by wordbead, into something greater than the word, stronger than the lone word: the wordword. And we then wore these newwords, these wordbeads, wore them like sentences around our necks. We made too: wordshorts and wordshirts, and wordmen and wordwomen who wore these wordshirtsandshorts. First there was the word; and then what? The atom. First there was the word, then consciousness, then the atom. The atom: the underlying principle of the known universe; consciousness: the unknown universe; the word: all. The wordatom was formed out of the word word, the wordword. What is the word if not a word. All is word, all dissolves into word. Before the word? “Uh!” A sound, because words are sounds, soundwords. Before the sound? The word. Whatever came before the sound, before existence, before thought and words and consciousness can only be thought of in one word: word. The word precedes all. We are all words: allwords. Whatever precedes the word is itself a word, for thoughts are words, and we are all thoughts. We are not solipsists, we are wordists. With words, we respond to the world. In birth, we screech words; in the death, we weep words; in sex, we moan the wordword; and in our prayers, we hum the wordom, we hum the sacred word om, the sacredwordom, but to whom, to whom if not to the wordgod himself, if not for us? Remove the eyes, remove the ears, remove all of mankind’s arms and legs and he still has the word. Remove the word and he has nothing. With words we create, with words we fashion, with them we make, with them we manifest, we morph, we shape, we make, we are; with them can be. Would anything exist without the word, without language and letters, without the colonial prowess of the English empire, without the words and symbols of the synagogue, those images of the ancient Egyptians, perhaps even the wordart of the postmodern man? Would a direct link to the brain replace the word, the language? Are thoughts not words, are words not thoughts? Is our ego not itself a word? “Let there be wine!” The wise man said. Said. Said! Not thought, or imagined, or visualised; and yet, had Moses thought it—in fact, he did, he did think it—and yet, had Moses thought or visualised or imagined the blood of wine filling the blue waters of the Nile, he would have thought it still in terms of words: in terms of words and notions, nouns and verbs: blue, water, blood, wine, staff of my staff, god of my life, my sin, my soul… let us move on; fill the sea, pick a new word, a new world, from our old wordbowl. Bow instead, Moses king of the sea, to the queen of the underworld: to Isis: desirous, the illustrious; let us get rid of Moses the monotheist: wielder of the monoworld, Hemingway the monoword: wielder of the simple prose, and the moderns with their monothoughts: with thoughts that are neversought. Let us praise instead the polygods, and all syllables against all the odds, the many words and many phrases, the languages of all the oldpages. Let us instead live in words of truth, not those of the ecclesiastical existential sleuth. Leave that monomess behind: be a little more narcotic and a little less narcissistic. First there was the word, then consciousness, then the atom, and finally the ego. So let us be a little less egotistic, a little more wordistic. So let us use big words instead of big egos: let us chase instead the states of syllabolic rhapsody. Let circumlocution be the new religion; verbosity: the new ocean. Use the wordwords to describe those wordless seas. And let us do away with those others: those others, those who feel a little narcissistic, maybe overly egotistic, sometimes a little neurotic, othertimes super psychotic, those men who are myopic, and their children who are blind and despotic; let us do away with those nowords and be instead a little more wordistic, quixotic, not idiotic like those strangers who move around so robotic, sometimes manic, always a little parabolic; let us instead use some logic, let us not make everything so philosophic, let us be a little ironic, mostly harmonic, sometimes artistic, whatever it means to be geologic, let us read a little bit of macroeconomics, a bit of this and that, maybe postpsychopharmacologics? let us page through the writings of John Hick, and leave behind the violence in John Wick and make our addictions less chronic, demagogic, unmetabolic; let us read a bit more, think a bit more, do a little more, and stop being such metaphysical whores.

Isis is now the queen of the throne, and Ra has long outgrown those oldwords. The time to rediscover the prowess of the words, to wield the magic of the moan, and leave behind the monogroan, is now ours.

So sail with me upon the wordsea, see the world and sail the sea. Let this be our life, both yours and mine: a life, my life, in words and wine: my life and yours and the life of the duskfilled sea: a life of sailing adventures and wordstinging bees. Truth or untruth, all is the word, and if the word is all and we all are words, all my words then are words for all, in all aspects: words of all, for all, to all, from me. Expect then no style or structure, no constant or consistency, but the words of the wordking, and the only uniform… being words from me: that is, you. This isn’t a wordbook for anybody, but it’s a wordpage I wish all will read. For words connect us all, and if there is one word I can use to describe the contents of this here book, it is: honest, and deceptive, nonsensical and regressive: the things we need the most in this world of monowords: that is, the dillydallydeities of the nonsensical wordsea.