Orange

I asked my orange, "Are you capable of language?"

I was going to peel my orange, and admiring it, I said, "But oh, we don't share the same language."

Somehow, I knew that my orange had a world of its own that was immersed in language.

For one, the orange clearly cannot "speak" like humans. But think of all the plants and animals and even "inanimate" objects that you've ever come into contact with. Didn't they have language, some way of signifying something, maybe not to you, but to the universe?

They all have a presence, each of them. Even the small dust-ant-dust (is it alive, dead, or neither?) has a presence.

My orange. It had a structure. It was round, and much more than just round. It was organized, certainly, but it was much more than just an organization. It was really present, and very scary because of that. Much scarier than, say, just a visualized skeleton of an orange inside a computer screen. My orange had juice, and it could go bad and become rotten. It was very scary.

It would be hubris, human hubris, H-H, to think that my orange was actually trying to tell me something. Me? No! My orange is very busy. It may not have time for me. But it was trying to tell, it was already telling. Even if it wasn't "saying" anything. It may not have been "thinking," either. But it was telling.

Because I was holding it in my hand. I was looking at it. I was loving it, even before I began eating it. Language lay in the relationship between me and my orange. Whether my orange liked it or not, ever since it had become my prey, it had entered into a relationship with me.

By itself, the orange could not have language. All by myself, I cannot have language, either. I can be alone and have language, certainly, but only because I've picked up and established so many relationships with everything and everyone around me since Day One, and I carry them around, not just in my head, but in my whole being, which, incidentally, might coincide, overlap completely without becoming one, with language itself. It's as if I couldn't exist without the existence of others. My language owes all to them, the others, as well as me. And my language is my being.

No music, no painting on the walls, without my being.