Space Bar & Other Mysteries

The key to Control. Is saying I don’t know. Asking what, when, who, where, how and why not? It is about free-falling and knowing what key to press and when. It’s about playing the game. And finding new rules. Finding words among letters. Words, lying flayed and hidden. As squares. And as rectangles. It’s about finding meaning in the falls between letters. And commas, colons, slashes, dashes, equal-tos, brackets and full-stops. It’s about pressing Shift. And not going anywhere. From lower case to CAPS, maybe. Or semi-colon to colon. Or single quote to double. It’s about changing stress and inflection. Enter’s the biggest, usually. A master key among lesser masters. All sorts of mysteries are YES-ed and OK-ed here. Cracked open. As are paragraphs. Enter allows. Escape prevents. With intent, the fingers reach out for these keys, press ’em and multiply possibilities. Each square stands for something. A black something as opposed to a black something else. A letter. An individualised character. A symbol for sound. Sometimes a symbol for meaning. In tight, ungrammatical abbreviations. Like I, C, Y, U, R, U.

Something shows up for each square pressed. Every square pressed leaves its mark. A copy, clone, emanation. Whatever. A symbolic something. Every square, except the Space Bar. The Space Bar occupies the longest space. Its mark is the most unique. The most empty. The Space Bar is called in to create space, if such a thing is possible. To create a unique emptiness for words to claim and occupy. The Space Bar is an unmarked area. A place where words find meaningful barstools to sit on. Talk. Drink. And get drunk. On emptiness. Without it, all written text is one word: long, meaningless and unpronounceable.

Then there are twelve mysterious Fs, meant for higher, complex purposes. There’s also Home and End, back to back, with nothing between them, except sometimes another key. Insert doesn’t care about the past. It writes over it. Insert rewrites history by replacement, an insidious expertise but useful nonetheless. Delete deletes. Makes space, the usual way. Erasing excesses and oddities. One at a time. Or entirely, en block.

And then there’s the rectangled Universe. The holder of keys. A switchboard of commands. Pressed into service. Whenever inspiration strikes.