– That’s kind of you to say, John, but my voice is best in words, in writing. That is where people meet me and I meet them. They bring their memories, tastes, the smell of food in their kitchen as they walk through it reading my book. Or the feeling of sorrow ripping out of them. Or the way their head turns caught by some pretty thing that just flew by their window. There is a me that exists both here in the space I am in with you now – but also in the space where I was writing those words. Then I left a time continuum. Those words end up within the inner dimensions of strangers. They might pick up a world I made. Take it through their own time travel. Get on a plane: attend a funeral: ignore their lover. Flirt with a stranger – my worlds are in their possession for those times. They are not mine any more. In art we can compress the present and the past into a time capsule – pass it forward into the future. It can be done via images but words do more. There is a level to them. There is an imprint within them. We alter compositionally in relation to that interaction. The virus of words is not outside us – it is wholly within us. It holds the key to unlocking our inability to metamorphose. Kafka had it absolutely right. Gregor Samsa awakes one morning without the ability to speak – he is only able to screech like some kind of ungeziefer. What kind of a monstrous vermin has all language removed from it? Gregor Samsa has no ability to communicate by blinking, or talking, or writing, or drawing – without that facet he becomes reptilian to others. With no ability to trade our intent or ideas or affiliations, we are atomic meat parcels – flesh-covered skeletons – shit-dripping parasites. Even with the ability to communicate, most of our race struggles to transcend because we have been wholly programmed by language. Think about garbled political speeches – they cause confusion while also exerting some kind of terrible and powerful psychic and material control over billions of people.

– But a silent person is not an ungeziefer?