Fission/Fusion

Geof Huth, Asemic Object Pwoermd (3 April 2017)

The pwoermd is a word taken apart and a word put back together. It is (at least often, though not always) fission and fusion simultaneously--the creation of words as an act of paradox.

We separate the fibers of the word so we can figure out what it is. We separate the fibers of another word so we can weave a next word, a tiny textile, together. We fuse words together to see what they mean.

Sometimes, the resulting word makes a kind of antisigodlin sense. Yet at other times, the pwoermd that is made has no shimmer of sense, or maybe leans only to the slightest degree senseward.

Even when a word carries no real meaning, even when wordless writing is completely asemic, we can still assume sense within it, still assume the sounds it encodes, still make something up.

Seemingly senseless symbols and the words made out of them, or those that have now become meaningless, still hold our attention, still tell us secrets, still whisper something about the magic of telling a story with nothing but marks upon a page, marks with no natural meaning that fuse to make words with no actual meaning.

Yet those are our means to communicate. Almost our only means.

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