Letters

Letters are a million-year affair.

Letters are space. Letters are time. Letters are spirit and extension. Letters are consciousness.

That is why I constructed this here labyrinth, because I wished for nothing more than to be surrounded by letters. I wished to raise my consciousness and nurture it and fortify it until it became a castle, and the only way this can be done is using letters. The one who has letters, who grasps them and commands them, is the one who has the most control over himself, because letters are the beginning and end of everything.

They are prior even to language itself. Language is really nothing but the tool of letters, which are more primordial. Letters are, by themselves, without any form, but in order to be disclosed they have to take on a mediated form, that is what language is.

That is also why I say 'letters are a million-year affair' and not 'writing is a million-year affair'. For writing has to be done in a language. Writing letters is not as simple as it sounds, because it simply can't be done without language. But language is tied to the medium, and the medium decays and passes away with time, just as people and empires do. Hence it cannot be said to be a 'million-year' affair.

Also, 'writing' sounds like some thing English majors do to justify their poor life choices, like it's a kind of therapy. They write, actively, as though it were equivalent to a form of social activism. Ask them why they write, and they will tell you because they want to 'change the world' by 'expressing themselves'. I wish to do no such things, which is why I don't concern myself with 'writing'. I concern myself with letters. Certainly I create some of the letters, but that is not the main point. The main point, is being simply surrounded by them. Because that's all you need to increase your consciousness. Actually, that's not all of it, but it's one of the most important parts.

Taking in letters or putting them out, digesting them, or regurgitating them, singing them as a song, splicing and dicing them, chopping them up, and assembling them back together. Expanding them here and there. That is like growing a garden. That is what expands consciousness. That is what letters are about. 'Writing' is nothing but the dirt.

Nature is all about expansion and diversification. Lineages of organisms undergo processes whereby they branch off into a potentially endless number of derivative organisms, which in turn do the same thing. Letters are the same way, and so is consciousness, because as I said letters and consciousness are the same thing. So the task of the wielder of letters should be very clear: to lead his own branch of expansion and diversification. That is to be an agent of nature.

But this should not be mistaken as some blind trailblazing off of a thickly-wooded cliff. It must not be a plunge off of Pali lookout. Nor is it to be fixed and frozen by the mandates of what came before. Genuine, faithful and free change is only possible when there is an understanding of the fact that it could not be any other way. The path we take--wherever it leads--is not us 'creating' something new; it is a becoming of what always was already. Our path is fixed before us by something unchangeable within ourselves ourselves, something we choose to impose upon us of our own free will.

This is the paradox of letters and the dilemma of those who wish to wield them. The sole purpose of this hidden labyrinth is to explore and experience that paradox, not to solve it.