It’s necessary to define things in life to make decisions. As a species we have created language and writing to provide definition to the world around us as much for communicating to others as for our own sense of control. Everything would be ambiguous again, untrustworthy without the bonds of language. Just look at these words here and now, the products of a plot to tie you down to an image of the authors devising. String some letters together to make a trap, and if you’re good enough you can capture that audience in a chapter shaped cage. Or a post. Or a book.

It’s a strange and unsettling analogy I suppose, one I’m using to clarify that words are a mechanism of forced perspective despite their ability to expand a readers experience or knowledge. How do you avoid that though? Having the ability to communicate in several languages I believe would give you more maneuverability within the words, yet still I feel this is just giving yourself a bigger cage. It is likely that the evolution of artistic expression and creation are increasingly aggressive attempts to redefine the parameters of those bars or at least make them more permeable. That’s where we are at now.

Whether you’re beaten or pampered, fed the best foods or starved, kept in filth or kept clean, a cage is still a cage. — Anne Bishop