The Importance of a Speech Center

How important are your brain and vocal folds? Do you consider them ordinary tools? Do you treat every human utterance with reverence or acknowledging grunts? Are sound and writing significant?

For years, I treated books like delicate artwork, trying not to bend the pages, crease the binding and definitely not lining the margins with handwritten notes. Every book was a treasure to me (and still is) but now I feel free to write comments when they come to me, for use later on in understanding my interpretation of the work at a certain age and how the zeitgeist influenced me.

My life is my one and only life here and now. It is no less or more important than any other life. Every word I utter, every thought I make, every symbol I scratch make me who I am and who I will be looking back at who I was and will be.

My life is life as I know life, the conversion of matter into deliberate outputs of energy. When my life here is over, I will have no deliberations to make. My component parts will be liberated. I will be free in a completely new sense, my cells decomposing into free radicals of another sort. Molecules. Atoms. Alive in another deliberating life (or lives, really).

I have never existed. I've only been told I exist. The fact is we exist. We mold the mesh network that holds us together in what we tell each other is a species on what we tell each other is a planet.

Life is a mystery to me. I know what I've been told is supposed to be life and why I'm here but the fact remains I know nothing. I do not even know I exist. I see I exist through the response of the environment around me, including this unit I call myself the body.

Have you ever held a cloud in your hands? We are clouds. We are somewhat fixed in our shapes by the exterior protection we call skin wrapped about a skeletal form but we can exist in many forms and shapes, with and without appendages or other body parts.

To know I do not exist is a fallacy just like saying I exist without knowing why. In other words, I am using words, these symbols, to represent what I observe wordlessly, my thoughts organized around sounds set in sequential order, supported by my eyes and the artificial concept of time.

To exist and not exist at the same time has taken me on an interesting journey. There is me, the person with a socially-established identity, and not-me, the happenchance meeting of chemicals bouncing across the surface of a large mass slowly cooling down internally while spinning like a top around a hotter mass.

To understand both conditions means admitting understanding neither. Separating and connecting. Spreading and collecting.

Life is not sacred and life is not secular. Life is sacred and life is secular. Either. Both. Members of what we call our species will act with driven passion to firmly establish the existence of ourselves both sacredly and secularly. Loving. Killing. Reproducing. Cloning.

I do not control perception. I do not control reality. I, or it, lives. That's all I can and will do. Words and sounds exist without me. I emit and omit words and sounds that others emit and omit. My goal is not to be original because I have plenty of words and languages and sounds to repeat infinitely without repeating myself. My goal is to give what I see as similar representations of myself - my species - the opportunity to keep reproducing itself regardless of the words and sounds it reuses or invents, without me around eventually, my words and sounds lost in the noise of life in no time flat.

I am more important than anyone or anything, because without me I am not me. With me I am me and not me, but I will always not be me without me. I am me because of you so you are more important than anyone or anything, too. But am I not me because of you or not me not because of you? Perhaps not me because of not you? Thus, are you not you because of not me or not because of me?

Sounds and thoughts. Sacred and ridiculous, ludicrous and sublime. Sometimes good enough is enough good to suffice.