MANIFESTE: POSSESSING THE WORDS

He had two hundred and four words in his vocabulary, and invested judiciously in them, repeating them at every opportunity with slight changes of emphasis. They could be the writing on the wall or mysteriously incorporated into musak, or the words put into people’s mouths when left speechless.

All the world got used to his words popping up, and without being aware of it found they had them off by heart, and so, through intimate knowledge and subliminal innocence, his vocabulary became common parlance, populations were possessed by his words, his words possessed them.

It was how people spoke. Each of the two hundred plus had its echo. Combinations of them were fitting for births, love-making and death. His words disappeared into the culture, and with time were abused as captions for visual communication, debased into jingles for musical consumption, twisted by word merchants who questioned their value while using them.

His vocabulary lost its meaning. But there was a generation of children who grew up with the two hundred plus who were inspired by reaction to recreate them as they were, in their pure form. They searched him out in his word-hole for a word. ‘I’d like you to read my poems’, they said. And he read them, and said, ‘These are my words. I will sue you if you publish them’. So they killed him and he became one of the immortals.