InterNaPwoWriMo 11: The Kama Sutra of Words

The Geek Kama Sutra from here.

 

Last year, I wrote a little paean to pwoermds, or a poem to pwoaearnds for Geof Huth. It's posted here, and includes a few pwoermds.

This got me to thinking about this amazingly flexible and adaptable piece of conceptual technology, the word. After all, what is International Pwoermd Writing Month but a celebration of the word itself and all its many possibilities. The International Pwoermd Dictionary is but our brains, always just a few minutes in the future.

The Kama Sutra of Words

When there’s too much of everything, the word divides. Not sausages in a long chain of undifferentiated meat, but clusters like galaxies, the bright edges decided by our naming. What star at the border is too far from the others to belong? A gravitational longing. An ewt. A newt. 

There’s a rush of movement, time within matter, and we make these quanta of speech, of thought, a world of constellations, of topography, a taxonomy of being, of seeing.

A Kama Sutra of syllables, of tongues, vowel sounds, fricatives, plosives, and the consonantal others. A perceptual Kama Sutra, an understanding that we have understanding. Words reconfiguring and suggesting like clouds, traffic. stories, skin, or humans.

A collision and entanglement, a joy, a heavy naming, an anvil on the tongue or hypothalamus. Words, the giddy or mortal body of thought, or thought the translucent ghost of the word, its trickster fingers poking into the bowling ball of the brain, words endlessly knocked down and reset at the end of the long gutter of meaning.