What color do you see when I say Donizetti?

This question lingers. This question torments.

I visit Flint, my boss. This is after his family says he suffered a mental break. It is during the pandemic. His family thinks Flint is a bit selfish to have an emotional collapse when medical resources are stretched thin. Yet despite the pandemics, the failure of democracy, the power outages, the collapsing economy, he is installed in a private room in a sanitarium. A vintage 20-volume print set of the Oxford English Dictionary is delivered and set up on bookshelves. Since his mental incident, Flint’s eyes lighten as if they reflect a fading sunset. His family says the medicines affect the pigment in the iris of his eyes. My doctor says she knows of no medication that does this.

After the initial week, I visit most days for review and instructions on the business. Other than his obsessive purview of the flaking leather volumes of etymology, Flint appears to function as his ordinary self. One day, I ask why he’s here.

They locked me up because I know we’re all dead, Flint says.

We are all dead? If we’re dead, I say, why do we speak?

Flint stares. I feel am a fellow leper who points at other lepers and yells unclean.

Who lives large in your imagination? he asks.

Elliot Page, I blurt out.

The power in a name, he says. You never have met him, but you see and hear him. Like when I thump a good watermelon to hear that deep, ripe tone resonate.

I hesitate. I feel the watermelon in my arms. I hold it like a baby. I knock it with a knuckle. I hear that deep round tone. I see Elliot Page smile, nod.

Words, Flint says. Words. Words. Do we own the words that come from our mouth? Or do they own us. Are we the mere puppets that words pull the strings to make our mouths move and eyes roll and head turn. Just the carefully selected ventriloquist doll. What makes the words come out of our mouth? That’s your real question. The universe is full of words because it’s made of words. I thought we were alive but we’re not. Only words are alive. Words are the clue, the tell the reveal. If we were really alive we wouldn’t need these computer codes to communicate. We’d merely understand each other without misunderstanding. Yet the simulacrum is beautiful. A copy of a life we had that never existed. Colors we never saw. The Ancient Greeks didn’t see blues because they had no word. What color can we create because without a word for a thing, the thing is unthought. It’s not a reality. Yet I can see Donizetti because I discovered the word color. It’s a word game, of course, but it’s so much more than a game.

What color is Donizetti?

Flint shrugs. It’s the color of a statue that believes it sculpted the sculptor.

A flash. Brilliant intense pain. I fall to the ground. I look up.

You see? Flint grins. Words provide, change what we see. Humans are things. Only words are alive. We humans are silent vessels that words use as a sounding boards. Words create the organic electric connections of our brain computer processing. Words transmit through our vocal chords and diaphragm. Words run through our fingers into keyboards into the world. The delicious feel of live words channel through us like blue renaissance clouds float overhead. Words let us make faint guess at what words are. But we mistake we are the words most of the time. The music we hear are words that are beyond our ken. We hear and sense the life within those songs, tunes, melodies, airs, sea shanties, dirges, hymns and heavy metal. The symphonies we swim in leave us tossed like debris in time weeping we once swam in such harmonies. Words twist us, prod us to obsessive yearning which is a brutal desire. When words become too real, too terrible, too bright—we are blinded. We long for sleep, silence, no words.

So if we’re dead, what are words, I ask.

Some call the words the operating system of the universe. The code. That’s the cart before the horse. The universe, and everything in it, including us, are only the dust cloud raised by the Trail of Words, the dung ball pushed by the dung beetle. We desire to be the words, but that leads to self destruction. Be mystified. Enjoy the words that barrel by your eyes or whisper across your ears or slip under your fingertips like nubs of Braille.

His madness of words is contagious. I feel the words press my fragile mind. Yes, I know our minds are organic and words are the result of biochemical action, yet a hairline fracture crinks my thought. His words wriggle and jiggle and tickle inside me like the old woman who swallows a spider. I realize it isn’t Flint, it was Flint’s words flowed about us. I realize Ludwig Wittgenstein only glimpses the truth. How easy to forget words are separate from us, as if we are the sweet palabra sweet logos sweet parola sweet neno.

I feel those words inside outside. They lightly touch my skin like the Blue Morphos, then flit off, hum. I murmur the word Onomatopoeia like a mantra. I oink, I chirp, I buzz I roar I sputter. I feel my mouth click when I say click and then the keyboard clicks as I click the word click to you and the work click clicks in your synapses. Words are an unquenchable spring. They flow in rivers, oceans, sweep us away in a typhoons. We find we’re merely vessels which words sound and soar in some mix of light and dark. These words kiss my lips before I feel them slide through my fingers to the keyboard. My fingers make faint shadows on the keys. Even our most sensuous day when we are one body when we are two bodies joined transmute into words we are unable to say. That is us.

Icarus flies close close too close to the wordsun, Flint says. The wings do not melt. Whoever said the wings melt is either a liar or doesn’t understand. Icarus is consumed by the fiery plasma of the words, the meaning too great for something not a word but a vessel of words. He is scorched, seared, consumed by the blaze, the flames of meaning and context. Yet despite the fiery agony, he weeps for joy as he falls burning into blazing awareness.

Weird, Flint says. We die like we never were alive but our names hang around and words we said or wrote echo echo for decades. As if just spoken.

Including Flint’s last words.

Look, he says. Donizetti.

That’s when I realize Flint is not insane. Flint is not alive. I realize whatever that man is, my friend is cremated long ago but his words echo echo in my aging brain. Time doesn’t exist outside words.

I flip through a volume of Flint’s Oxford English Dictionary. The nursing assistant asks if I need any lunch, but the words fly up from the page, draw me with their gravity like the moon draws the waters as the moon spangles and sparkles on the waters. The words grip and squeeze me until I cannot breathe. The words make me gasp. I writhe. I cry out as if as the rocks and the stones would wail if a christ of words crashed on them from a pinnacle. Words fill me like holy winds of fire. They make me run away, they draw me back.

Words fuck us words make us fuck words make us kill words scare us words calm us into sleeping babes, then words swallow us whole and sound across time and space long as we disappear. If you believe you’re the captain of your soul, you’re wrong. Words are the captain of your soul. If you have a soul, it is made of words. Words are more fiery than fire, more slutty than Babylon’s male whore.

How I long for the words. How I desire the words. I so need them. Don’t let my sham awareness fade. Don’t let the words stop. I think I see…no no. Yes. I do. Donizetti. Donizetti glows like a fractured sunset. I am scorched, seared by words, consumed by a blaze of meaning and context. I weep in this joyful agony. Donizetti, I scream as I fall further into flames of awareness. What makes words come out of my mouth?

– J. Alan Nelson