—Zork (1980)
Oh, let me have this one. We should not
focus on the loveliness of words, rather the scaffolded
lexicon called humans they pass through. My rent-controlled
apartment for a horse decked with rubies and insulin vials.
True power: language and none of its consequences.
Walk north, west, south, west—you carry a bag of leaves,
the egg, and some dangling participles. Escape from
this room for $79/hour with only a loose wire
and pattern recognition. If you stare
at a word long enough, it stops
making sense; you can get lost in the sounds:
window. Window, win-dow. What will you do next,
dig deeper inside the kitchen? Kit-chen. You can’t
access the outside—beyond the biome, space
is nothing but air that will peppermint your lungs
plus the occasional deity-strewn exception. Make a home
in the language—you can fit anyone you want
in there. If the computer program
cannot understand you, what’s left?
Just you and a screen, alone. Alone, a-lone.