This is part two of a four-part spoken-word story by Paul Morley. I was looking for a transcription of it on the internet but couldn’t find one, so I made one.
A word could be silent.
A word could make a noise, like a ghost.
There it is. There it isn’t.
It’s true! It’s the truth!
It’s all made up, it’s a lie.
You believe it, you don’t believe it–
It exists, it does not exist.
To write the perfect sentence,
you need to understand how these noisy, speechless ghosts haunt the mind and pollute reality, making it what it is:
Tremendous trouble–a crazy hash.
A mass of illusions and transparent surfaces… and provisional certainties,
And exploded schemes
and cagey personalities
and monstrous visions,
and idle talk
and exotic disintegrations
and charming things
And sleazy genius
and social conjunctions
and obscene gestures,
and helpless love,
and implausible incidents
and sinister ambiguities
and shattered windows
and extended anecdotes,
and nonplussed vulgarities,
and subtle enslavements,
and strong opinions
and absurd remarks in newspaper scandals,
and giddy menace,
and grand, booming nonsense
and mad, gloomy farce
and indescribable events.
It might begin like this:
“What do you want? Stop where you are, you’re positively dripping.”
When the room is silent,
the daylight almost gone,
the rain it never stops.
It’s the devils rain.
And I shall go on talking in a low voice,
while the sea sounds in the distance
and overhead, the great black flood of wind
polishes the bright stars.
A word brings with it all of time,
and all the times it’s been used,
and all the times it will be used.
A word is alive,
no matter how many times it’s been used,
no matter how mundanely
or roughly
or sublimely.
At the end of a journey,
at the onset of violence,
for no good reason.
Just to pass the day, to ask the way, to ask for nothing,
in particular.
To answer questions,
To say hello.
To say goodbye.
To remember things.
To forget things.
To get on your nerves,
to choose something from the shelf,
to make arrangements to meet,
to solve various mysteries,
to compose monthly reports on nothing
in particular.
To begin, perhaps,
a campaign to retake the universe.
Because words are all we have,
use words to say:
“Never, but dream the days and nights made of dreams of other nights’ better days.”
Never, but dream the days and nights made of dreams of other nights’ better days.
Language is made up of millions of clamorous, closed mouthed ghosts–
as inhuman as glass.
Reflecting each other,
shadowing each other.
Getting to know each other,
avoiding each other,
and never knowing where they came from,
setting off for an unknown destination–
and so it goes.
oddendum 