Ghostly, Like Souls Without a Form

by Jacqueline Schoemaker

Pain itself – don’t get me started. More than anything, the pain of wanting to get it across, of wanting to reach out, to speak up, and never being able to do so anymore. Never being able to go home again. There’s been too much water under the bridge. The ceaseless versions, editions, translations, adaptations. The centuries that go by, the languages they keep inventing. And then that happy shuffling of words. Just for the sake of the look of them on the page. The man didn’t even have the decency to keep the word ‘pain’ together. He amputated ‘pain’. That’s how it started. He didn’t want to get distracted by meaning. Imagine.

No, I’ll never be able to go home again. I’m living an endless life, but never the one I wanted for myself. A well-defined life. A wholesome, simple life. That’s all I ever asked for. If they’d just gotten tired of what I said, and had left it to rest in the bosom of history. I could have had a decent death, at least. I would have made my peace. But no. I’m shaken over and over again. Don’t know who I’m calling ‘me’ anymore. Some say that I shouldn’t fuss over it. That I wasn’t exactly the Oracle of Delphi, that I had my day and that I should consider it an honor to be kept in circulation, even if maimed. But that’s not the point. There is no point anymore.

The centuries that go by. The satire, the derivatives, the alterations, the fashion. The hipsters and their beloved dummy text. They’re proud of it too, you know. Of not even knowing what it is they’re duplicating and spreading. And boy how they duplicate and spread. I never caught one actually reading anything. They’re doing it just for the sake of the look of it. They’d even go so far as to invent some nonsensical thing for the sole purpose of looking at it. I imagine there’s a whole brand of trendy schools out there devoted to the creation of nonsensical text. Seriously, they’re fine with anything, as long as it keeps them from getting distracted by meaning.