Everything in Numbers, or 276114 (Pejoratives)
Two large pieces of art hang side by side behind a security desk inside of a building in downtown Mountain View.
Each one is a collection of old toys, broken plastic, springs, wrappers, binoculars, and books and checks and photos and bottles and computer parts and, and, and — and continue to put things after the word and, because it’s likely on these two giant frames, these two enormous testaments to decaying material stuff. The pieces are named simply: “#2567” and “#2568.” It boggles the mind, to think that there may be 2566 more of these incredible exhibits elsewhere, and probably there are — even if the artist didn’t make them — in basements and closets and garages all around the world.
But that’s not what I’m getting at.
Staring at the exhibit with my friend Aidan one afternoon, I began to think about what the world would be like if it weren’t just the exhibits that were known only by numbers, but everything within the exhibits as well.
And perhaps not only those things presented in the exhibit, but everything in the world. All of the nouns: I’m drinking a 25. And the verbs: I’m 778 a 25. The articles: I’m 778 7 25. And me too, I’m a number, 456835459. 456835459 778 7 25. Aidan and I walked around for a while that afternoon, occasionally talking in numbers, trying to imagine just how difficult the world would be if everything were represented by numbers.
How absurd and incomprehensible would it be? Actually, I realized, it wouldn’t be any different than it is now. I don’t know why it took me so long to recognize that any symbol we use to explain the world is equal insofar as it is understood. A word or a number or a scream or a scribble can all represent the same thing.
It seems a bit trite to even write this out, but it never occurred to me until a night last year.
Aidan was visiting me in Los Angeles to see plays and write spontaneous screenplays about Vonnegut short stories and visit the graves of famous Jewish comedians. We saw a play called The Four of Us, which was indisputably about Aidan and I, then attempted to write a play, but the only dialogue we ended up writing was stolen from Leo Tolstoy and the Bible. After we had broken bread over the large stone that conceals the corpse of Lee Marvin, we returned to campus to meet up with friends.
I don’t know how it happened, but Aidan ended up calling my vaguely-half-Cuban roommate a spic, which, heretofore, was a word that I had never heard.
Its etymology is mysterious, its part of speech is unclear, and its meaning is frustratingly tautological: it does not refer to anything, but nonetheless, it is a bad thing to say because it is. My roommate couldn’t really define the word spic, because all you can really say about it is that it refers to a person of Hispanic descent; if you try to say “it refers negatively to a person of Hispanic descent,” then the question that follows is natural: Why? Who knows.
Thus, my roommate was outraged that Aidan had said spic at all, and Aidan was furious that my roommate could be provoked by a word with elusive context and indiscernible meaning. My roommate began to argue that spic ought never to be said, in order to reduce its potency, while Aidan argued that any word could be spoken with any frequency, because words are meaningless and should not inspire such resent.
They are both wrong to a degree, in my opinion, and yet puzzling questions remain.
My roommate’s suggestion that by hiding the word spic away in a cupboard, we can reduce it to nothingness seems to be absurd, and, paradoxically, pejoratives often gain more power when they are given this sort of status. A more practical approach often comes out of embracing a pejorative and redefining it in a positive sense. Examples of this are numerous: goth, gay, dork, nigger, punk, and even Mormon, which we take to be a simple term for a collection of people, but which began as a pejorative.
Aidan is wrong as well though, and it is particularly puzzling that as a writer he would fall into the trap of nihilism which backs him into a corner where the only question is “Why anything?” — and the only answer, of course, is nothing.
The politics of language is extremely difficult, as evidenced by words like nigger, which are allowed to be used positively by certain speakers but which are inherently derogatory when used by others. However, the solution is neither to hide pejoratives, nor to vainly claim that they are meaningless when it is clear that they are vivacious. Rather, it seems like the most successful resistance to pejoratives historically has been to adapt their meaning and thus change the emotional response from resent to affirmation.