Death to Meaning!
The spelling bee winner beams after they spell out an obscure duck on TV. Cut to the judges. Smugly they slap the kid on the back. People are satisfied, though not in rapture. The Ivy League accepts the winner, who occupies one of the positions for people expected to keep an even keel. The minor nobility wins new blood.
Only a simpleton would ask why do a lot to remember spellings? No one would bother to build a computer to win a spelling bee. Physically, the contestants make no impression. The game is just memorization and the scrupulous reproduction of inherited rules while a huge audience scrutinizes. Those who can reproduce predetermined standards under greatest pressure win. The organizers of the bee, terrified of the tower of Babel, corral a raging torrent of weird spellings flowing out of the high country into a concrete aqueduct barreling towards the suburbs.
Ergo, good spelling is inexcusable. Hail satan.
As a matter of principle, one must misspell everything. One must pummel spelling bee masters and spell check programs with misspelled words and grammatical mistakes. Spelling judges must be made to squirm under blow after blow of misspelled, non-standard words, so that every one of our written communications sounds like a medieval poem. They must be made to suffer made-up words shot through with nonsense. We must bomb their armada of sanctioned orthography.
But one must not stop at misspelling in order to survive. If the spelling bee rules one circle of hell, deep below that circle live those demons pitchforking the garden of meaning. Even worse than proper spelling is meaning, codified in dictionaries. One must cast off the dictionary mongers and speak only nonsense, like a coked-up musician scatting over a bebop tune.
Nonsense is queen. She reins nonchalantly from a mountain fortress, wearing a cravat and puffing her pipe on a chaise longue with her belly hanging out under many thick gold chains. She acts like some louche Victorian roué. She is deeply disagreeable. She is disgusting. Nonsense is aggressively and exaggeratedly idiosyncratic. She is particular, clannish, and impossible to deal with. She throws up roadblocks to communication everywhere and offers no rationale for doing so. The most mild and reasonable proposals she rejects brutally and reflexively, wordlessly, without discussion, sometimes terrifying miserable Meaners. Nonsense speaks in an unintelligible patois. Commerce grinds to a halt, mired in a funky stew of nonsense’s superstitions, prejudices, ancient fears, hatred, and pride.
When she comes upon some rude meaningful word toiling in the meaning mines, she feels a noble obligation to bequeath on the crude word some small gift of ambiguity and silliness. Down in the mud, the utility word lives a bleak, uninspired life, dragging its meaning between people like a mule. Forced to be authentic, it wears a pair of chunky wooden shoes that go cloppity-clop whenever it goes anywhere, and it lives in a converted chicken coop. Homely and good-natured, it reads “Chop Wood, Carry Water” and tries to wax poetic about the joys of a meaningful life, but its literal poems clunk worse than its shoes. Eventually it gives up on writing and settles for just complaining.
Sensible words get together for a pint after their long day, slapping each other on the backs. Everyone is spelled right. What a bunch of dunces. The idiotic articles and prepositions are covered head to toe in machine oil. They get so drunk that they end up forgetting to signify anything, and they pass out in the gutter, talking to themselves. Asleep and incoherent, they become temporary royalty.
Meaners want everything to mean the thing it means. “What’s the point?” they wonder, missing the point of pointlessness. A hard-headed journalist chomps their cigar and joneses to put a few tough questions to nonsense. The cigar is so chomped that it begins to disintegrate. Nonsense must explain itself. What makes her so great? No one can get through by phone though. The journalist heads to the castle in person, but gets lost in the maze of corridors and rooms oppressively cluttered with porcelain tchotchkes and Oriental maximalist decorations that Nonsense hordes like some old bag lady while trying to make their way up to Nonsense’s chambers. Before long the journalist is sweating heavily. None of the windows are transparent. They are all intricate stained glass that represent rich and evocative scenes of bloodshed and passion. The floor plan makes no sense. The air, thick with sandalwood and frangipani, asphyxiates. The journalist wanders, hopelessly lost, eventually losing also their mind, and ending up in an asylum doing outsider art and organizing a Russian nihilist reading group.
Meanwhile, the Meaners' tiresome meaning saps at the soul. “Imagine what things would be like if everyone just decided to mean whatever they wanted,” they nag as they straighten out the edges of a stack of papers. The meaningful word stews in resentment. “I didn’t set off in life to mean argle-bargle” it thinks. But the nonsense word simply cannot be reached.
The hand-wringing meaners promote the garish glare of clarity and transparency. Their massive searchlights set off migraines at a range of four miles. They won’t rest until they’ve interpreted. But the finest words are full of ambivalence. The most important statements are inscrutable. The best people are impossible to pin down under the grubby thumb of some crass perspective. The most significant messages are delivered silently, perhaps by the penetrating stare of a pair of disembodied eyes. The most literary word is an inchoate scream.
Meaners have “ideas,” and insist upon expounding upon them in conversation or even trying to express them by typing them down, dribbling meanings all over the place like a toddler with an ice cream cone. Their screams are part of a therapeutic practice. They are even poorer than the artist who leads their audience by the hand to a predetermined interpretation. Far superior is the fart, the grunt, the grumble of the stomach, the mutter of annoyance, the halfhearted mumble, the angry doggerel of the old stenchcore traveler.
Anyway, as I was saying, Mass should be switched back to Latin so that attendees can bathe in an atmosphere of sinister-sounding incantations, redolent of fear and awe, without the interference of ideas. Even superior to a dead language, though, is the meaningless prattle of the Pentecostal in an ecstatic fit. The social scientist dutifully writes down all the words spewing out of the Pentacostal’s mouth as part of their study, trying to ruin their meaninglessness.
Superior yet, music stomps the meaning word into pulp. Music transfixes, swells and transports the mind and body until it becomes a quivering, orgiastic mess. Sweating, grinding hordes elbow one another in the mosh pit. Blasting horns and crashing rhythms physically dominate. The great, meaningless word-noise lifts up that interpreter like a masked wrestler and body slams them. The world of the Deed, pounding out its sword on a redhot crucible before riding out to the field of battle all puffed up, bellowing arbitrary assertions, before galloping valiantly towards the enemy like the famously psychotic hidalgo.
The great word becomes nothing more than its air pressure vibration, or the ominous vibes that its visual design emanates, or the twist of the lips of the mouth of the speaker. So loud that it blows out windows, it forces its victims to immediately poop. Beyond the realm of the mortal scream, this amplified brown noise wins today’s Nobel Prize for Literature. A great hammer of nonsense falls down and blasts those stuck in its path like an incoming comet, scorching dinosaurs into skeleton-shaped shadows.
The word of god is misspelled and meaningless and divine. Paradise is an asylum full of ornery literary critics who have finally given away everything, hit the road and started penning nonsense poems that can’t be asked to have any authority. Eventually they toss even these poems on the bonfire and dance around, doing contact improvisation, babbling Pentacostley and screaming like angry tigers...