Do you know what it is to speak a specific tongue?

Not one of the languages we know these days,

But a specific tongue?

By this, I mean the specific type of shared language,

Metaphor,

Symbolism,

And inside jokes

That makes up a specific tongue.

I shared one with Elisabeth before she went to school,

And I think the four of Us share one now.

It’s not unlike memes,

I think --

A complicated system of shared meanings,

Shared images,

Shared archetypes,

That allow a person to mix and remix images and text and sound.

It’s speaking but on another level.

And some of it is penetrable, of course.

We do it all the time.

I look at Picasso’s Guernica and I can identify the symbols,

The meanings hidden behind each other.

The most obvious is the woman on the left, cradling her dying or dead child.

This is Mary.

But it doesn’t have to be obvious symbolism --

We take meaning from a Rothko just the same as a Picasso just the same as a Van Gogh.

I was in San Francisco a couple months ago,

And I got to see a Sol LeWitt exhibition.

The curators note contained this:

“An idea alone can constitute a work of art”.

I think this is what we do,

Oliver,

With each other.

As we have each Become, we have developed

Our own tongue.

I know what you mean with your half-cut text.

You know what I’m getting at with my overlaid data.

We have built a way to speak.