Dear word, I love seeing you and saying you and marking you and playing with you and twisting you and garbling you. But I do not like marshalling you, I do not like putting you to service. I like pressing you, pressing against you, but not press ganging you.
Dear word, I am terrible at writing, by which I must mean: press ganging you into organized meaning. But I dislike meaning (the verb, not the noun). I like becoming-meaning, I like opening-for-meaning, I like meaning as something received, rather than something given. I trust planning-to-write more than having-written; the former feels like engagement, the latter, oblivion.
Dear word, I am in a bind, for there are things I want to do that require doing things to you that neither of us will enjoy. I seem to need to bind the word in order to get the word out.
Dear word, I am bound to move from word play to word work. Dear word, I am setting up this space—this space which I have tried and failed to set up before, which I have always halted or haltered—as a space to practice compromise between word work and word play. As a space to explore and fail, to write wrong. As a space between word worlds. As an overly public, overly worlded space for wordsmithing for worldsmithing. As a practice imperfect.
Dear word, I am sorry for all this. Dear word, do not run away from me, not too much, deer word.
Let us play.
Haggadah deer and Haggadah dog. Carmen figuratum, Haggadah for Passover (the ‘Ashkenazi Haggadah’), Germany ca. 1460 (BL, Additional 14762, fol. 14r). Via.