Went to hear Jane Bennet last night as part of OOOfestIII. She spoke on “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter”—what do hoarders have to teach us about things and stuff? But she also talked, perhaps inevitably, about talking OOOtalk.
I know the feeling.
You can try to construct your statement using socially approved locutions. In fact, you must! try to do so. That’s where you start.
And it fails. Inevitably. You keep piling on the sentences, the structure gets ever more baroque. It topples and, like the Tower of Babel, does so without ever having achieved its object.
So you start over with crazy talk. You know, Julie Andrews (cue the orchestra): “The hills are alive, with talking objects . . . “ Things are alive, they’ve got spirits, they call to us. But no, it’s not like that. We’re not talking about emanations from another world, little ghostly whisperers.. But they are alive. In some way. Metaphor perhaps, but not mere metaphor. Metaphor as reach, grasp, and march into the swamps of a new land.
To boldly go where no man has gone before to infinity and beyond.
It’s one thing to coin a term of art or two. But to wrestle with a whole new way of speaking?
The game’s afoot.
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