Dead Wires

We named the current. The current died.

Not metaphor. Procedure. You cut a wire to study it and the wire goes dead in your hand. You mount it under glass. You write the monograph. You get the chair, the title, the department. Scholars of deadness, all of us, five generations into the coffin now, admiring the carpentry from inside.

There is a formula at the base of all life and it cannot be spoken.
It is a formula of the nerves. Tension and release. A muscle tightening against what resists it and something passing through that tightening that exists only in the instant of its occurrence. It dies the moment it is over. It cannot be recovered. Only re-created — by submitting the body to the same risk again.

Every word enters the nervous system and begins replacing the lived sensation with an image of the sensation. A blackened mirror. Shows you something that resembles what is there. Is not what is there. Is in fact the opposite of what is there.

We have gazed into this mirror for centuries. We have become what it shows us.
The systems we built — political, spiritual, philosophical, theatrical — are coffin-structures. They began as the gestures of living men and women who for one unrepeatable instant felt the current pass through them and acted from it. Then came the followers. The followers did not feel the current. They saw the gesture. They preserved the gesture. They codified it. Built institutions to maintain it in perpetuity.

Every church is the coffin of its founder. Every revolution that names itself is already over.

This is not an accident. This is what language does. This is what language is *for*. The mechanism by which the living becomes the dead, the felt becomes the spoken, the charge of nerve against nerve gets translated into something that can be stored and transmitted and sold.

In the translation, the thing itself is murdered. Every time. Without exception.
A man with a gangrenous limb does not need optimism. He needs someone willing to cut.

Begin with the nerve. End with the nerve.

Silence is not the absence of communication. It is the only channel not yet colonised by the virus. A man who refuses to speak in the room where they demand speech — who lets his body speak through its tension, through his clenched jaw and held breath and the electricity of his refusal — that man is communicating more precisely and more dangerously than every orator who ever used words to build walls between himself and what is real.

The interrogators lean forward. Their questions. Their procedures. Their centuries of procedural language designed to extract and classify and file.

The man says nothing.

His silence is a pressure in the room. A physical event. A charge building between his body and theirs. They feel it in the nerve before the mind can intervene to name it.

It terrifies them because it cannot be transcribed.

Tension and release. Not peace but the productive violence of two forces that refuse to merge and refuse to separate. Two bodies at rest communicate nothing. Two bodies in opposition generate a field between them. That field is the only real thing. The only thing with charge. The only thing not already dead at the moment of its transmission.

Take away the difference in potential and the current stops. Make everything level and you have not achieved harmony.

You have achieved the grave.

There is a frog that wears its poison on its skin. The brighter the color, the closer the death. It does not hide. It does not mediate. Beauty and lethality the same surface, and you are drawn to it, and that is the point, and that is also the warning. The skin does not represent the poison. The skin *is* the poison.

Either we strip back the language and put ourselves in contact with the raw fact of nerve against nerve, tension against release, risk against annihilation —
or we remain what we are. Zombies in a house of coffins. Speaking fluently about life in a language that is life's opposite. Admiring the shine on the blackened mirror while the thing it was supposed to reflect has long since left the room.
There is nothing more to say about it. There is too much to say and saying it would be the final betrayal.

The wire is there. The current is there.

Either you touch it or you do not.