Only As Creators!

…what things are called
is incomparably more important than what they are.

The reputation, name, and appearance,
the usual measure and weight of a thing,
what it counts for
— originally almost always wrong and arbitrary,
thrown over things like a dress
and altogether foreign to their nature
and even to their skin
–all this grows from generation unto generation,
merely because people believe in it,
until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body.

How foolish it would be to suppose
that one only needs to point out this origin
and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy
the world that counts for real,
so-called “reality.”

…let us not forget this either:

It is enough
to create new names and estimations and probabilities
in order to create in the long run new “things.”

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 2, Section 58 by Friedrich Nietzsche

I am seduced by these lines.  Our manner of speaking, words, the connotations, are the accumulation of generations, of re-tellings which gradually solidifies.  And all of this comes along when I began to learn language when I was around two years old.  The process of language-learning continues.  I pick up a book.  I read a New York Time’s article offered in the daily email received from the Times.  Every encounter with language, spoken and written, — solidifies and adds to my accretion of assumptions about “reality.”  Is there any other “reality?”  Can there be any, apart from the conventional meanings, what words trigger in my mind?

I cannot imagine that there could be.

I have not recovered from dismay, what I thought was solid and dependable is only a misty shroud of delusion.   All arises due to belief, simply because I and preceding generations have arbitrarily believed.

What can we do?

You and I are playing a long game, one lasting many generations.  When we mindfully, purposefully, create new names and estimations and probabilities…

we create new things!