An artist of the floating world...

...Beckett: Storming for Beauty

The fact is, words are not like paint or musical notation. Language is a vulgar medium; it rubs up against actuality at every point and is thereby, as Beckett would say, tainted. “Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts?” he asks rhetorically in that letter to Axel Kaun. To which a nonrhetorical answer might be: it is not anything sacred that sets the word apart, but something profane. Language must speak, that is its essence. There could only be an abstract writing, as there is abstract painting, if words were to lose their meaning, that meaning that we have commonly consented they should have. And what then would they be? Mere noise.