The Weight of Words

Words possess feeling. To speak means to give weight to one's words - a weight that is not foreign to the words themselves. A word may be simply a word, but when I talk about what is real, there is something real about its very mention. Likewise, when I talk about what is imagined, an entirely different feeling emerges. Certainly we can express ourselves with a variety of intonations and enunciations - but the weight that words wield lies not only in the way that we wield them, but so too in their inner construction. Not even the best swordsman can decapitate a man with a sword made of cardboard.

We like to fancy that we have outgrown superstition in the modern age, but there are still many relics of our primitive origins that dwell with us daily. We still cannot manage to separate the signifier from the signified. We can imagine them as separate, but to truly separate them is quite a different matter. This unity of consciousness with its object central to the German Idealism of Kant and Hegel is not merely a philosophical event - it is the re-emergence of a phenomenon that was never quite intellectualized into submission. It is the realness of the very mention of the real, the conjuring of object through the mention of its name - it is, unmistakably, the execution and real life of magic.