Words

"That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at. (…) I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. (…) that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching (…) He had a word too, Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack" (172). (W. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)

Words as mold, in, ironically, both senses of the word, mold as hollow shape mold as 'fungal growth' that parasitizes life. Words as "view from outside", as what sifts through the sieve of our skin through our all too porous self. And the Lord God said ...animals and plants... dominion ... name them... and he named them, for they were all not him so it was easy.