Language drug

Ben Marcus in The Rumpus:

Sometimes I worry, for myself, that I’ve stopped being amazed at certain things, or I’ve taken for granted a set of ideas about how the world works, what people are doing with each other or alone, all the fundamental relationships in the world. I worry that I start taking it for granted and stop feeling the intensity of it because of language. Language starts to shut down the strength and power and strangeness of what it means to be a person in the world.

Sometimes I think if I try to articulate these things in a language I haven’t really used before or thought before, it will open up that feeling of what it is to be alive and fear that I’m going to die and all these really elemental things that really matter to me. I think that they start to get covered up, and they get covered up really easily. Language is the tool to open them up again and burnish them and put them on the page. That’s why I try to use a different sort of language. It’s not to show off something or be different for its own sake. I think it’s because I see language as a tool to reveal ourselves or to reveal the world. If we use it over and over and over again, I think we stop seeing those kinds of really primal things that matter to me.