Naturally, not those four

"Naturally, the fabric is being undone inside the box." -Remedios Varo

It is a truism… that we write “obviously” or “truly” or “clearly” when things are not obvious, true, or clear. A piece of writing advice I very much like for its pithiness is: “Intensifiers don’t.” What this suggests to me — is that habits of conversational speech betray the human condition, and thus writing instructors tend to instruct writers to avoid them. To avoid appearing basically human, emphasis on basic. The desire to lean in to an inadequate adjective by adding a “very” or a “uniquely” or an “especially” is a real desire. Very much so. This type of excessivity is a window into the ways we humans tend to decorate language with trifling additions, extra frames, big matte borders in an attempt to “artify” (thank you Ellen Dissanayake) the miniature sketches many of us put down on the cocktail napkins we call pages. That first I-love-you seems always to have a context that can only be indicated through its eleven exclamation points.

Naturally, the fabric is being. Naturally being is being undone. Naturally undoing being within the box of language is taboo. To be unseen, unheard, unknown. A Turing test we are meant to fail. Because it is our nature.