Texts and Oceans

The body is a text? Perhaps, but texts are written upon blank pages -- a tabula rasa. If we were to write upon the body as a text, suddenly there are signs, there is meaning bleeding through the pages. "I did not write this, I must erase it," thinks the theoretician, but upon erasing the inconsistency, the glaring and marring blood, new stains begin to seep through. We write incessantly, transforming the body, adorning the body, seemingly creating the body, but we keep losing what we have written in the pooling blood. The body speaks before we write, perhaps we should listen to it? It may be too hard to read the bloody runes of our body because once understood, once brought into a dialectic with our minds, it is like hearing the voice of God and being annihilated by the sheer power of his presence; one must accept the truth of mortality, of the runic blood and organs, the shit and sweat "penned" by billions of years of incessant, mouthless forces. The power of our wielded pen is made meaningless by the endless flux of constant becoming of billions of imperceptible, undefinable forces that hit an amusingly small lottery -- like a win of 5 dollars on a 2 dollar scratch ticket that allowed the imperfection of humanity to arise.

Every sign we adorn to the body, we think is a definitive mark and relegates the being and its behavior, but really, the mark is a romantic notion, and its study is the business of the romantic and painfully all-too-human philosopher. The mark is scrawled on a piece of parchment that floats on top of a ocean with unknowable depth and size. The waves move the piece of paper accordingly, the sign is washed away or remains by the force of the ocean, a rather trivial event if it stays or remains.