Wordgasm is a portmanteau of "words" and "orgasm", an outburst of words with the same euphoric effect of squirting your DNA. Nihil sub sole novum, the Ecclesiastes say; there is nothing new under the sun. It is only but words that grant the world a whole new spectrum of perception. And the point is? I have no idea.
She lives and works from her laptop on a little paradise island in the Philippines. She's a writer, graphic artist, and mountaineer. During rainy days she loves to sleep and oversleep and dream and daydream and then write. More »
 
Tuesday, 15 May 2007

Man simultaneously lives in two worlds: that of the concrete and the abstract, the physical and the mental, the empirical and the ideal, the signifier and the signified, the world of matter versus that of consciousness. His mind--his ability to process words, ideas, concepts, and abstractions--is the sole distinction that defines him as human that without it, there would be no art, no culture, no literature, no law, no philosophy, and such antecedents of civilization. To put, man should be an animal.

The world of symbols greatly rely on words alone, that without words there wouldn't be history, no Bible to base his beliefs from, no culture, no society; man (the generic sense of the word) would just be a collective pack of mindless, witless, inane zombies floating in the ether. But this is not the case. Instead, man uses words to make sense of the world and weave meaning out of his social existence. One of them, in the form of Blogging.

Blogging takes man one step higher than himself onto a virtual plane loftier than the material world. Man weaves himself a world based on the binary numerical system which eventually turns into bits of pixelated fonts. He creates these things and considers the cyberspace his world that he himself--like God--created. There's nothing more satisfying than creating a universe that revolves around himself, a world that praises him, that adores him, that worships him, that reflects him as a whole. The texts he creates consists of letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and symbols--each of them belonging to a certain group of color and font-family and font-size and font-weight. Some have decorations--underline, strike-through, subscript, superscript. Each is unique and each of the texts regard themselves as individuals, portraying a concept of something they think reflects those beyond the confines of their virtual world. They believe these things really exist, and that their reflections are a part of the lofty things that their creator makes in the world other than their own.

Man, the creator, makes a little god of himself in an artificial world that's arbitrary and fictional. He transcribes his experiences, memories, creativity, et cetera into words. He has an insatiable urge to produce and create, to provide a synthetic replica of himself so he can read them all together and understand who he really is.

The texts--letters, numbers, symbols, etc.--know they must realize who they are and who their families are so they may know their meaning, and thus, their position in the construction of words, of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, articles--taking these learning processes one step at a time. They must accept wherever they were born, and who among other texts they belong to, to knit themselves a family called a word, who in turn bonds with other families to create a village called a sentence, which then unites with other sentences to build a city called a paragraph, which then affiliates with other paragraphs to create a country called an article. All them articles reside in a planet called a blog, defined by name called a URL, which in turn is but one of the billions of planets in the universe of the internet.

The texts learn more about themselves by simply decrypting who they are and what their roles are in the society. By and by they came to enlighten themselves by studying the community they belong to. Some texts evolve into scientists, some into linguists, others into politicians, others into physicists, others into philosophers, et cetera. They all know how to understand themselves and their world by simply integrating all the signs and textual symbols of each individual and interpreting them as a whole. Some of the texts believe in fate, that their meaning is already written in the blueprint of their palms, that all they have to do is listen to their destinies, to understand who they are, to follow their instincts, so that they may attune themselves with the flow of all things. Then there are those other texts who believe they create their own meaning. They have the illusion that their discoveries about themselves and the society are their discovery. They believe they have freewill, that they have control over their lives, that they give meaning to themselves without assessing the true vocation imprinted in their destiny. But then they don't believe in destiny; they don't believe in determinism. In fact, a portion of them do not even believe that they were conceived by a being that is not a text. They believe they exist for the mere purpose that they're alive, that they can see themselves in front of the mirror, and that others can see them. They exist for themselves, and that would be enough reason to give meaning for their existence. Still, there are those textual philosophers who think that the world they live in is an illusion, that they are not real, that they must be spiritually awakened to the metareality outside the confines of their universe, of the internet. These textual philosophers believe that reality is found only after obliterating all pixelated texts and words and other signs that produce arbitrary meanings. They contend that any personal belief founded on texts alone has no basis in the reality outside the internet and is therefore artificial.

Man thinks that his world, both the physical and the virtual, and everything in it is born with him and dies with him. He believes that perception precedes existence, that to be is to be perceived. That a jam is not really sweet; it only produces a sensation of sweetness on his tongue. That the sky is not really blue; it only produces a sense of blueness on his eyes. That objects will only exist when he is looking at them, and when there is no one there to see them, they vanish. All things are but a mental construct of his mind, that he creates these two worlds, the empirical and the virtual, based on mere electrical impulses in his brain. That is his world and he is its center. Now what is he going to do with it?

While the creator is muddling over his own existence, some of the textual philosophers have been illuminated and have been awakened into the reality beyond the binary constructs of the internet. They realize who their creator is, that he exists, that he is nothing but a lowlife in the mental construct of his own. The texts believe that the "god" they hail and praise is but one of the billions of gods in a planet called the Earth, whirling on a disc called a Galaxy, which is but one of the billions of galaxies in the universe. The textual philosophers realize that their creator is a reflection of their selves, that they are a projection of their creator, that without them, there would be nothing to make him a "god". They argue that their god is a god for the mere fact that he is the creator of his own world, that his creations resemble his mind in one way or another, that without his creations, there would be nothing else to define himself. The texts realize that without them, their god wouldn't exist, and without their god, they wouldn't exist.

Word did you say?



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