It never occured to me till lately that words do have a life of their own. Now understand me, I'm not only talking here about the power of words, but of their having an intrinsic life of their own, and of their pernicious influence on you, the way they can work on you. I experienced that lately in the wee hours of the morning, finding myself wide awake with that word in my mind, and all the following:
Procrastination. My first encounter with the word dates back from my college years in France. What I do remember is my being unable to memorize the meaning of that word precisely, having to check it out each time I encountered it.
-Allo, Sigmund...- However my attention was drawn to the word as an object, as a chemical combination. What a terrible word.Think of it, there must be a diabolical element in the way the letters of the word are combined and arranged so as to attract attention: pro-cras-ti-na-tion. Forget about the meaning, look at it as a bare word, as it was then for me, utter it, chew it, -pro-cras-ti-na-tion- and you'll find as I then found, that it has something terrible in it, though I couldn't name what it was. My relationship with it got worse when I later discovered that the other reason why I had difficulty with it was that it related to something that was part of my behavior pattern. The demon was unleashed. Then I would remember the meaning, but the strange thing that happenned is that I avoided it whenever it appeared before me, like a child hesitating to open a closet door for fear of what he may find in that dark corner. Believe me, when you reach that point in your relationship with a word, you're in trouble. You can call your counsellor. -Allo Sigmund-. Which I haven't done, of course, not willing to open that closet. So whenever that word popped up in my head, I tried to get rid of it. I tried to smash it down, I tried to crush it with the tip of my shoe, as if it were a bug, I tried to turn my back to the door of the closet, leaning on it to make sure it wouldn't open. No way. That's how it ended up awakening me at 5 am, more present than ever, and that's how I ended up writing this. I don't know whether this is going to help me get rid of the beast, but I felt the urge to write about this experience. Beware of the magic power of words.
1 comment:
AHH,yes, I know that word well. "Crass" may be in the root of it, if not it should be. Ours is a "do-do" society, contemplation, thinking is a waste of time. My experience has been that sometimes putting stuff off is the smart thing to do. The problem is that we can never really know for sure. At any rate, I have a horrible case of PRO-crass. I feel better if I keep on top of stuff, but there is never an end to shit to do. I have to draw the line somewhere! Roberto.
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