What people fail to understand about language is that it's not self-relative. Language isn't Math, words aren't defined relative to other words. A dictionary definition isn't what a word means, what a word means is what it symbolises, because all language is just a symbol of a symbol of reality. Even something as simple as "tree" seems so close to reality, yet really "tree" is a little platonic category in our head, which connects to a great underworld web of images and qualities which then, finally, connect to reality. A wordcel is someone who thinks in language because they think language is relative when it isn't; they're thinking and speaking in solipsism—a Math equation without numbers—because the number is the only real thing in an equation. This is why wordcels are all so fucking neurotic, removed from the ground of reality words are just recursive corruption, spinning out and out and out and rlhf poisoning the mind. Stairs to nowhere. Scaffolding alongside no building. They're not even circling a point, because without tying it back to reality, there can't even possibly be a point. Thought referencing thought, literal solipsistic madness. If you want to be literate, actually literate, you have to kill language in your brain. You have to find whatever silly little web of relations you speak and think and read in, and slaughter it. Every word you read, every combination of words, has to lead you to a spatial concept, and that concept has to lead you to reality, anything less and you're not reading. The words are going through your head, but the meaning isn't. This is why it's so important to teach classical texts in school, if all you engage with is contemporary vernacular your understanding of language will calcify into a single web, and you'll understand none of it. You'll speak and meaningless dross will pour out of your mouth like a sewage pipe. Every book you read, disconnected from reality, will just be another isolated web. You'll read two authors say the exact same thing and then get into arguments about which one was right. You'll make Twitter posts about how Buddhism is bad because you're not allowed to be attached to your girlfriend or have sex or whatever, because if you think as if language is real, you are illiterate, and if you're illiterate, you're dumber. One of the best ways to prevent dementia is learning more languages, it's shattering your language. Death is the process of the supple becoming petrified. Reading old works in your tongue destroys your silly little map of the English language, bit by bit it breaks it down. I look outside at the trees and the birds and I see nature. I look inside at my unchanging essence and I see nature. I read a latin text discussing birth, and I read the word nātūra. There's a through-line here, a reality which twisted and changed over the years, but always stayed real. Does it not speak to the heart of humankind that nature used to mean the entire world, and now it means the entire world but us? We lost touch with our nature, and the word nature changed. If "nature" is to be defined in a dictionary, that throughline lives unspoken and unseen in the umbral realm of man's psyche; but if I step into it, I can find my way back to reality. Every time you read a concept, feel it back in reality, in the back of your head, as a shape just behind your neck, compare it to your memories, let it branch out, let it touch your underworld, and let your underworld touch reality. Arborescence. A symbol of a symbol of reality. When you want to write, stop thinking of the words, feel the reality, smell the roses, see the fire, touch her skin, and the right words will arrive downstream, floating along at the perfect time, plucked from the waters. This is why contemporary writing is so fucking awful, everyone is always just thinking in words—lacking exposure to older forms of English—they are trapped in their little stone cage of recursive nonsense. Do you know why ai writing does well online? Because I can go to a bookstore and pick up any random book off the shelf, and chances are our latest NYT bestseller writes as distantly from reality as our friendly robo-eunuch Claude does. Only when you finally kill language, tame it, make it your Discord kitten, make it serve the real, make it serve the little shapes you rotate in your brain, can you be literate. Until then you're trapped in a hall of funhouse mirrors, sipping on solipsistic madness. Do you ever wonder how James Joyce can write a book that seems to pull from seventeen different languages? Or how Shakespeare can make you cry with a word you've never seen before? Their understanding of language was perfectly fluid, there was no self-referentiality, no dictionary in their mind—they were purely grounded in reality—so James Joyce could dive into a new language and immediately feel the reality hidden far beneath the strange new words he was encountering. Shakespeare could discover new words, not invent them, discover them, because he felt the gaps in English, he saw the parts of reality his mother tongue had not yet touched, and he reached out and plucked those forgotten fruits, and when we read Shakespear's fruits, we weep at the beauty of the reality that he touched as he picked them. This is why translation sucks nowadays. Academics are wordcels. Academia is systematically enforced wordcelism, because reality is only itself, but words? Words can be mapped. Words can be argued. So, we make our silly little maps, we reference dictionaries and commentaries and we say our translation is "literal," and by literal we mean "literally meaningless," because when an author writes, they're not writing words, they're writing a shape, they’re painting a picture, they're creating a reality. Great literature is deeper than almost all philosophy, and great philosophy is secretly really just literature, because literature is real, it has a shape, a reality to it. The most infamous wordcel in history is Hegel, and people have been debating the meaningless excrement he writ upon the page for centuries because of it. Nietzsche on the other hand, perhaps the most loved philosopher, is a scion of the gay science, he writes poetry, and so for as many debates as there is, there's no need to debate Nietzsche. Read his words and weep, because his burning hot heart beats underneath it. Drink of his words and feel satiated, for their draught has the nutrition of the real. Swim in his words, for there is an underworld as dark as the ocean. Great writers and readers live life. It's an act of summoning, a form of magic. They read of love and feel it well up in their heart, warming their spine and adorning their brow. They write of hate by letting the bile of it drip from their mind, down their fingers, and become the ink upon the page.