MAN IS JUST A WORDSMITH
- Madhukar Dama
- May 21
- 5 min read
A beast that built its own cage with language
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I. THE MYTH OF MEANING
From the moment man learned to grunt, he stopped seeing.
He saw a tree — and named it.
He saw a river — and drew boundaries.
He saw death — and invented afterlife.
What he could not understand,
he described.
What he feared,
he romanticized.
What he destroyed,
he justified with words.
Language replaced life.
And slowly, man became not a living creature,
but a narrating machine.
---
II. TRUTH NEVER STOOD A CHANCE
The sky never told a lie.
The ant never deceived itself.
The stone never claimed to be moral.
But man?
He wrote poems about love,
while cheating on his wife.
He wrote constitutions about equality,
while drinking water from a separate pot.
He wrote scriptures about detachment,
while hoarding land for his sons.
He can speak about peace in six languages,
but cannot sit beside another man in silence without discomfort.
He can name every god,
but cannot name his own wounds.
---
III. LANGUAGE IS HIS ADDICTION
Man does not seek peace.
He seeks explanation.
Not relief, but reasoning.
Not stillness, but stories.
He cannot grieve without writing a eulogy.
He cannot feel pain without labeling it.
He cannot love without turning it into performance.
A hug must become a quote.
A tear must become a post.
A moment must become memory.
Nothing is lived fully — only documented.
He touches life
only through the glove of vocabulary.
---
IV. EVERY WORD IS A DISTRACTION
He doesn’t want to feel.
He wants to describe feeling.
He doesn’t want to cry.
He wants to analyse crying.
He doesn’t want silence.
He wants to talk about silence.
And so,
he writes his way away from everything real.
---
V. HE INVENTED LANGUAGE TO ESCAPE ACCOUNTABILITY
He said:
“This is development.”
“This is tradition.”
“This is discipline.”
“This is freedom.”
“This is for the greater good.”
Every mass murder was rationalized.
Every addiction was medicalized.
Every betrayal was poeticized.
Every system of oppression was renamed with neutral, technical words.
He doesn't stop destroying.
He just changes the dictionary.
---
VI. WORDS GIVE THE ILLUSION OF GROWTH
Man says:
> “We have evolved.”
But he still kills, exploits, lies, hoards, hates.
Only now he does it with eloquence.
With laws.
With powerpoints.
With carefully worded emails.
With research papers.
He still fears.
He still runs.
But now he narrates the run as "purpose."
He is not better.
He is just better spoken.
---
VII. HIS ENTIRE LIFE IS RHETORIC
He doesn’t make love.
He “explores intimacy.”
He doesn’t rest.
He “prioritizes wellness.”
He doesn’t lie.
He “frames a version.”
He doesn’t abandon.
He “sets boundaries.”
He doesn’t hate.
He “disagrees fundamentally.”
He builds a thousand bridges with words,
and never crosses a single one.
---
VIII. EVERY SYSTEM IS A LEXICON
Religion is a vocabulary of heaven and hell.
Education is a vocabulary of success and failure.
Nation is a vocabulary of us and them.
Family is a vocabulary of roles and guilt.
Mental health is a vocabulary of symptoms and disorders.
Every identity is a linguistic box.
Every relationship is a performance script.
Every culture is a repeated poem.
Nothing is alive.
Everything is spoken about.
---
IX. HE IS A PRISONER OF HIS OWN EXPRESSION
The more he writes,
the less he lives.
The more he explains,
the less he understands.
The more he names,
the less he feels.
Man cannot stop using words.
Even in love, he asks for “closure.”
Even in pain, he says “I’m processing.”
Even in silence, he says, “This is meditative.”
He has no access to the moment.
Only commentary.
---
X. HIS FINAL PRAYER IS ALSO A SCRIPT
When he dies,
his obituary will be more polished than his life.
His eulogy will speak more honestly than he ever did.
His children will chant verses
he forced them to memorize
but never made space for them to question.
His death, too, will be linguistically formatted.
Not grieved.
Just managed.
---
CONCLUSION: THE DEAD END OF THE WORDSMITH
Man did not evolve.
He just invented ways to avoid feeling the soil.
He walks with shoes and synonyms.
He breathes through metaphors.
He cries in metaphysical essays.
He lives in grammar.
He dies in grammar.
And in between,
he calls himself wise
because he has something to say about everything.
But the tree
still grows in silence.
The rock
still sits without history.
The river
still flows without narrative.
Only man
needs a quote
before he can take a step.
---
“YOU BUILT A WORLD WITH WORDS. AND NOTHING LIVES THERE.”
---
you named the sky
and forgot how to look at it.
you wrote about love
and forgot how to touch.
you described silence
and made it loud.
you called your pain “growth.”
you called your guilt “culture.”
you called your hunger “spiritual.”
you called your cowardice “philosophy.”
and every time
life knocked at your chest,
you picked up a pen
and wrote your way out of it.
---
you are a master of meaning.
but a slave to reality.
you know what to say at funerals
but don’t know how to cry.
you know the right hashtags
but can’t sit still without a screen.
you memorize mantras
but forget to breathe.
---
you named every leaf on the tree
but never once sat under it
and felt peace.
you invented careers
to justify slavery.
you invented romance
to escape loneliness.
you invented religion
to cope with the mess
you made of your own breath.
---
you told your children:
> “study hard.”
“become someone.”
“make us proud.”
but you never once told them:
> “you are allowed to be nothing.”
“you are allowed to rest.”
“you are allowed to fall apart and still be loved.”
---
you speak about freedom
like it’s a poem.
but when someone actually lives freely,
you call them irresponsible.
you praise truth
but punish honesty.
you chant “God is love”
but exile your child for loving wrong.
you say “we are all one”
but lock your bathroom when the maid comes.
---
you’re not human.
you’re a goddamn spokesperson.
for pain you’ve never felt.
for peace you never practice.
for ideas you stole and rewrote
so you could sell books
and still sleep like a saint.
---
and now,
even your death
will be turned into a paragraph.
with bullet points.
and a quote.
and a candle emoji.
and nobody will ask:
> “Did he ever actually live?”
---
you never danced.
you just described dancing.
you never healed.
you just wrote about healing.
you never stopped.
you just wrote "pause" in bold.
you never looked inward.
you just posted about introspection
in the third person.
---
man is not lost.
he is narrated.
he is over-explained.
he is worded to death.
he doesn’t bleed.
he footnotes.
---
and somewhere,
a tree grows.
no name.
no bio.
no god.
no prayer.
just life.
and it is freer
than you will ever be.
