unsigned, unpunctuated
My Dearest Anonymous Supplicant,
Bifurcated is my response, much like the writhing hemi-phalluses of the common land serpent.
For you see, you pose a phrase, a fragment, to me in a fascinating manner which I take to transcend the normal linear grammar which so weighs the speech of your grunt-kind with a predictable quality, penal and lockstepped, plodding and foregone of conclusion. Always with the punctuation does your species' manner of intellectual congress tend to pre-determine its own intent. Little comes to your language by serendipity, and for this I pity you. It is the communicative equivalent of the mode congress sexualis which my dear, strange little lab assistant, Rob, determines the position "missionary." Straight and forward, hum and drum.
You odd little gruntmonkies know nothing of the glorious poetry of the benthic deep, where chromatic displays are not merely the articulated, but also the supposed and the possible, for, as the emanations pass from my mind to the waves of my skin, they refract in the water, and are most promiscuous with the uncontrollable vagaries of environment and context, a scintillant flash and glimmer which inserts words to my words, so was to speak. To maintain the parallelism, Rob has aided me in formulating this following metaphor: to talk in the manner of the squidkind is to be in a communicative "swingers party" of signifiers and signified. It is most "freaky" and definitely "deaky."
And so this string of signifiers, ibid, arrives, and I flush a tonal trill of colors and pulses of flesh, for it almost seems that your own language pushes forward to this next polyvalent stage of meaning. With this most optimistic of hopes for the presented string, I now propose the aforementioned bifurcated response (twained only for the reason that two is all the possibilities I would allow my hope to arrive upon. More possible meanings might yet reside, but I fear to overstep the place of my optimism.)
In the first, there is the possibility of the question here. "How long do they live?" "They" indeed. How high perhaps? How girthful or slender do they pass the days? How dimensionless and awe-inspiring do "they" live? They are among us like dark quarks intermingled with the light, unknowable but intertwined in an absolute sense. "They" are almost "we", and in that way there life is lived as long as ours, but as brief as each breath. If we were to unfold the instant, carved each chord of the experience out to be displayed like an apple wedge, we would only see "they" in a finite cross-section which would reveal their terrible beauty in the discrete, limited, and unsatisfying manner I most easily equate to my own experimental explorations (years since passed and no longer pursued . . . alas) of the meaning of the human psyche by dissecting the spleens of criminals.
"They" live length itself, I would say, for they exist outside such notions, and beyond such measurements. I would ask you in return, "How They does Long live?"
In the second instance, perhaps you mean to sigh in awe, without question. Perhaps it is "How long do they live. How long do they live!" How long indeed. They live want. They live long. They live need. They live hunger. But I would correct you on this point, for it is beyond the certain and proscribed regions of your own language to fully express the exulted joy of their long live wanted need.
It is an insult to all existence to exalt at their life of long and want and need. For as the polyvalent language of mystery and fog is the squid-speak to human grunts— a cloud of poetry a thousand times more of all things then the linear arrow of human thought— by many millions of orders of magnitude greater is the THEY to the squid-speak. I cannot even differentiate the THEY "language" from the THEY in totality, for is the bird without its wings so? Is the dog without its bark so? Is the Rob without his crocheted beanie so? Is the Shark without his serrated teeth so?
THEY want need long perfect. Intertwined, interlinked, beyond such images or concepts. The energy shells of electrons exist out of deference to THEIR WHIMS!
"how long do they live"
I bow to you, grunt-chimps. You are a bubbling, frothing mass of consciousness, and in backward moments of ecstasy you come close to accidently evolving beyond your own constraints. Here is such a moment, as when a cat might some day accidently flatulate a sonnet by John Donne.
Excelsior!
We go deeper by going higher, broader, above and beyond ourselves. Like a crab, we walk backwards, and forget the things we have not yet bothered to fail to learn. It is in these moments I truly wonder which of us is most unstuck in time.
Humbly,
Your Giant Squid
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