To those—including myself in yesterday’s post—who insist on calling me words, here is why I am not.
I tend to be playful about what I call myself. I enjoy the sheer pleasure of trying to be—pretending, in other words—something heterodox to the status quo. We all do. And, invariably, it gets stale and we go some place else and repeat the same process again and again.
Yesterday (linked above) I had one of those moments. I seem to have made a case for something I only talked about casually: post-structural conservatism. Those who have known me for some time might recall my brash assimilation of the entirety of politics into something fundamentally liberal. If I parse-out ‘liberal’ (libertas) and argue for something like “true freedom,” I can still make that argument. But neither name is the real point.
You see, we (myself first and foremost!) are not mere words. The names—and the meaning those names carry—we take to be who and what we are can never capture our being fully, or, in some cases, partially.
Many people like to reject specific words like ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ or ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ and opt for better, more general words like ‘human,’ ‘American,’ or ‘Christian.’
This just seems ontologically stupid. I an NOT a word. I am not the mere skeletal grammar I call ‘Sam,’ ‘Catholic,’ ‘Mexican,’ ‘human,’ or even a ‘person.’ Even without the quotation marks.
I am something more than that; something ineffable, indescribable, unspeakable.
I am the thing you and I cannot write without doing it violence.
So, as I continue to throw around this or that word with this or that pet argument to describe what I am and, perhaps, what you might be, don’t take me too seriously.
After all, you (and I) are NOT a word. We are so much more than that.
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