From Word To Word

I am at a loss for words, in a manner of speaking.

I am the program director at a children’s summer camp this week, so I am away from my reading and my writing, though I can steal moments, like this present one, in the crevices of my days.  There are many with whom I can speak, certainly, old friends, and we do speak, in the language of friendships and reminiscences, and I am pleasantly immersed in this many-sided conversation, this ongoing and interrupted and continued conversation, but these are a different sort of words than the ones that I use from day to day.  They are words that have little or nothing to do with a textuality, with the textual words that make up so much of my life, with the textuality that comes to inform so much of what I say and do.  These words that I find myself speaking here are oral, not purely, certainly, since such a world no longer exists, not for us, not for me, but they are oral even so, more oral than textual, surely, and I find myself, at times, lost in them.  There is no illusion of a certain path through them.  They put me in my place, but it is a place that is no longer what I believed it to be.  These words, this speaking, empties me and returns me to myself.  Perhaps they even save me from myself, for a moment.