Between the marmoreal bookends, there are no books—only artifacts of pulp and paper and glue and ink. Books are a confection of the mind, an interior produce, harvested like magic mushrooms inside a forest of teeming dendrites, impossible to find anywhere in natural world, the real world, since words do not exist outside the skull.
My dog—and this is the key to everything—sees books exactly for what they are, what they really are, tactile and textile surfaces that are sometimes pleasant playthings but usually ignored as extraneous and immaterial. Reality is found nowhere in a book, neither the past nor future, or answers, and to suppose otherwise is to subscribe to abstract folly, to an occult notion of destiny that awards words and compositions greater respect than pulsating life itself. How many have become all-too-willing to lay down their vibrant lives, and for what: a catchphrase, a slogan, a battle cry, a scripture? How many will die with a word tugging away their last breaths?
We think we know what this world’s about because of someone else’s stories spooling through our minds, threaded by language, stitched together with words. The world’s stories are found nowhere in the world, yet we go on killing each other, keep volunteering to die, because we have accepted the stories to be more real than reality itself. Isn’t it time we told ourselves new stories, our own stories, where our lives possess more value and measure and respect than treacly words oozing from a preacher’s , a priest’s, a politician’s lips?
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