Syntax

I saw the filaments of a light bulb magnified through tiny holes drilled into a hollow gourd. They represented the binary language, the way we stack our words, what our syntax does for the way we build our worldviews. At first, I wanted to learn it -- trace each filament back to its point of origin, decode the cultural cipher of language; I wanted to understand how each one works, down to its most microscopic elements, the space inside a pause, the pounds of pressure per square inch of space between words.

And I tried. I stared and I studied, but I got lost in spirals of thought that are surely each a different rabbit-hole unto itself. There was a moment where I found myself satisfied to lay there, staring at the ceiling where the panned-out map of the human condition was projected before me -- unable to reel in the slack in my jaw in the face of such a perpetual picture. This kind of thought -- the collection of these states-of-mind I've written about before -- I've never been able to quantify it as well as I have just now.

Maybe I found the service road for my brain's rush-hour traffic, or the fuse box for my tripped circuit. Maybe I tripped into the maintenance driveway by mistake, the entrance to the underground tunnels. The duct system in my skyscraper.

Weird shit happens when you read a language theory book before taking a hippie trip.