Performatively showing off being in a relaxed state.
I don’t tend to go on about it, but it won’t have passed you by that many writers of conventional dictionaries and encyclopaedias are not like you or me. They spend their days flush in their ivory towers, or at least in their hotel rooms paid for by Big Egg, living a life of luxury. Their beds are made of goose feather - not just their duvets, which are stuffed with the softest feathers from a different bird, you won’t have heard of the bird, they don’t give it a name so you can’t search for it - I mean, the entire bed. The frame, the mattress, everything - is made from the feathers of geese. Their alarm clocks are marked by more hours in the day than you or I know about, and gently rouse you with songs that composers, kept secret throughout history, made with the instruction to play ‘ppppppp’ and sung, or at least hummed, by a choir of actual angels (significantly better at singing than children). Their fridges are laden with goods, snacks and juices from fruits we have never been partial to; nourishment that can repair the soul, revitalise the skin and evacuate the mind of any anxiety, threat or fear.
But that is the point isn’t it? If you can’t name something, you can’t have it. If someone doesn’t define it, it cannot be shared. We only consume what is packaged for us. Before we knew about oxygen, sure we could breath, but we did not know what it is we were doing, didn’t care why it happened. We just knew to do it. We obeyed. Because then, what we knew was only what had been defined already by someone before us.
Those who stand at the gate of our language keep us from the gardens of our minds.
These fiends in the heavens or wherever they abide, swan around without a care or grace. Whenever they deign it time, they reach over and pluck a word from the cloud, place it in a golden cup and shake it up and down until it reveals itself to them. Yes it does take a certain expertise to translate cloud words into english, and yes, the exact science of wordology is more akin to an expertise in magic and astrology than a good and honest day’s smything. But it is not the remit of the few to dictate what you or I believe or can know or can feel, or can breath.
I’m surprised they can see the world through their cucumber green lenses. It is no wonder then that they get their words so wrong. When you or I say a word, we mean it, and not intimately what that word means, no need for some oxbridge wrangled boffin in a hand-tailored Louis Armstrong suit to pluck thread by thread one letter at at time before the feeling of a word emerges. Blood, sweat and tears flow out of our mouths and onto our pages or on our screens.
But we are weak, where they have strength without end. Flazzying is something only we, us men of boot and cloth and dirt and steel and time and truth and chalk and cheese, can - neigh must - do. We take on a mantle that is not relaxed, because we can’t ever truly have that feeling. You can’t spell relax without lax. They have not released that sensation to us, only presented us with a pale imitation of that. Our anxieties remain, even our fear of relaxing too much, we do not permit ourselves to have that. Instead, we can only give off the pretence of being relaxed. The Flazzle. A signal to others that “I am having a relaxed time” or else the image that “isn’t this relaxing”. That’s why our regimes and routines of relaxation are so coded with white fluffy towels, golden bottles to pamper us, vegetables covering our eyes - when we as a species “relax” we look alien. Flazzying is all we can do to appease others that we are fine and know our limitations.
Remember, they live behind the curtain. This page is only a glimpse.
