“Prius the Mius the big-headed Bius”, I enunciated carefully, but I didn’t know what I was saying. “Has language got the better of me?” I wondered. “Is it crushing me? Is it eroding my integrity? Am I the master of language or is language the master of me?”
Then a darker current took hold of me and I became a mouthpiece for a more sinister strain of verbiage. “Because it’s the summer, it’s time for chilling and grilling’”, I babbled heedlessly, and then found that I could not stop. No way could I stop. “Chillin’ and grillin’, chillin’ and grillin’, chillin’ and grillin’”, I babbled, and I could really feel the evil at work deep inside me – the evil that makes a mockery of life itself. “What else does evil ever do anyway”, I asked myself wisely. It twists life to make a joke of it but pretends that it’s doing no such thing. It encourages us to join in, on the ostensible basis that what it’s doing is the morally responsible thing to do, the respectable thing to do, the honourable thing to do.
Do you ever feel that you are vomiting up Satanic Darkness? Or is that a stupid question? That’s how I felt anyway – I felt that I was vomiting up Satanic Darkness of the very worst kind, and I just couldn’t stop. “Chilling and grilling”, I said to myself, over and over again. No matter how much I vomited up there was always more to come – it wasn’t a case of ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ (as people like to say) because there was no bottom to this barrel. It was a bottomless barrel, a bottomless barrel of evil…
Did you ever get the feeling that conforming to society is like selling your soul to the Evil One, only without admitting it? “Prius the Mius the big-headed Bius”, I warbled, as happy as Larry. As happy as a pig in shit. Language gets the better of us all, really. The words we use make us feel that we’re the boss, but they’ve got us under control every step of the way. How pitiful we are! We strut about thinking that we have mastered language, thinking that we are expressing ourselves supreme eloquence, expressing fine and wonderful sentiments and so on. What a joke that is! What a sad, sad joke…
Language is a virus from outer space, says Williams Burroughs. I can see that now more clearly than I have ever seen it, now. I wonder if he escaped from it? There’s no hope for the rest of us anyway – we don’t even know that we’ve been infected. We’re fools, such fools. We’re such ridiculous ludicrous imbeciles. It hurts my head to think about what grotesque imbeciles we are. We are totally enslaved by recycled banalities and all we ever do is strut around the place spouting humiliating nonsense. Spouting it out loud.
We go to our creative writing classes, and we write our little pieces. Enslaved by language as we are. Mastered by it. Crucified by it. It allows us our petty freedoms, to be sure. It allows us to struct around like self-satisfied fools; it allows us to spout heinous nonsense with impunity. “No one sees the terrible bleakness of language”, I say to myself wisely – “that hideously nefarious Barren Wasteland through which we are doomed to wonder, imagining that we are rolling in the clover all the while. Imagining that we the Poet Laureate. Prius the Mius the big-headed Bius, I said to myself solemnly. Prius the Mius the big-headed Bius. Prius the Mius. “I’m going to beat that virus”, I said to myself. “I’m going to beat that bloody old virus…”
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