prompt: star, title: arts & silences in misc. flash fiction

The word is not the thing, of course, Korzybski, but the hope is that the word can at least gesture toward it. We use our words like B.B. pellets at a carnival shooting range, where one could never hope to obliterate every bit of red inside the target by attacking from the middle with the amount of ammo provided, yet if we instead carve a circle complete ‘round the crimson blot, we may yet still go home with that hella-boss Led Zeppelin frosted mirror. This is why I prattle on in tortured circles when I don’t watch myself closely, I want to blast what I’m describing with a dense series of regressions into granular description until I believe I’ve said all my peace exactly. The flipside to that, though, is rambling until no one cares what you’re saying, a sin I am guilty of with great frequency. Maybe even here. That’s why I have come to love flash fiction, it forces me to cleave away anxious delineation and just say it. Even then, however, the struggle with meaning persists.

When I write out the word “cat” we have a rough and basic shared idea of what I mean, yet the specifics that will come to our minds at initial reflex vary wildly. We’ll share the generic vague meaning of “cat” but when I say it, I can’t help but picture my first definition of cat, one of my family’s cats when I was a young child, Lily, a gray-and-white tiger-striped Maine Raccooncat of soulful eyes and plaintive howl.

We can agree to the generalized directions of our gestures but never truly know the bullseyes of the other ones’ hearts. As if the physics of Heisenberg and Schrodinger at once, knowing for the current location or future motion of someone else’s meaning but never both at once, never quite able to peer into the box of another soul’s mind to know the full status of the cat trapped therein. Another’s meaning always altered by unconscious observational focus carried within ourselves.

These tiniest truths that command the infinitesimal forces binding our very atoms up from mere quarks, just as well as they allow the mammoth-scale incandescent throb of any ancient star in the endless night-sky, they are the same quantum-uncertain mechanics that rule of the interplay of meanings in word. Always just-nearly-knowing each other, never-quite-fully communicated, always swirling and squirreling and burning out the firmament of an eternally slightly-unsettled reality. Uncertain, occluded, mysterious, miraculous, like the odds of a rigged carnival game or the strange wisdom of a gnomic striped housecat. This is why I ramble so much, because over my life, I’ve learned two truths: that words are all that I have and that words can never be quite enough, the truth of either never negating the other, both equally terribly beautifully true.

I’ll always be unable to perfectly sing you the fullest true song of my soul but, in my logorrhea, nevertheless I endeavor to get us goddamned close together.