Friends

We sat around the table talking warmly. I was crossfaded. Too much to drink and smoke. I was sinking into myself, losing grip on language and understanding but unafraid. I sat and listened, fancying that our conversations hung somewhere in the air, quivering like jello, dimly comprehended. The group had bifurcated  with two conversations circulating on two separate circuits.

It made me think of something else I wrote on my cellphone maybe half a year ago:

 Stoned. Words pouring out like water, whose watery meaning disperses and drifts apart in the social space as the intoxicated others struggle to understand, drawing connections across the widening gulfs, until suddenly, there descends an oceanic silence as the meaning fades from short memory.
The challenge of expressing such a sensation lies in producing a linear, intelligible set of symbols from a multidimensional axis of meaning.

At such times, it is less the precise exchange of symbols of communication and their correct apprehension and more the simple sensations of sound and vision: exchanging smiles, listening to each others' laughs, harmonizing some inner abstract chain of thought, with the language not entirely lined up but sufficient for comprehension, and overall feeling the simple animal sensation of companionship. The language at this point functions as a sort of ancillary noise. Background noise that is not entirely irrelevant, just less prevalent than it usually is.

The experience makes me think of clicking on a wah pedal and leaving it up. The signal becomes a bass-rich blur, with the lower frequencies, the movements brought to the forefront. Sometimes the valve is opened. The fine-grain textures come rushing back only temporarily, and then the valve closes again. Just enough information is captured to continue following those blurry movements.

It is not a state of affairs I'm entirely opposed to, considering the dire context. The language has been colonized by our perverse mainstream social relations and so we must shut it off from time to time. But it is a temporary healing mechanism. It is a state of affairs that should be overcome.