madsviande

It is a gift of mine that I usually understand what people are talking about. This is helpful, as they usually expect as much and it is easy to fall behind if you do not.

But sometimes they do not expect you to understand. Sometimes they do not even know for themselves what they're talking about; their own words are mysteriously unrevealing even to them. And it is there that my gift transcends the prosaic and enters the realm of poetry.

How can you be sure that you have correctly interpreted someone else's words? This is not a trivial question, because if you ask them, they must first interpret your question correctly, and then you must correctly interpret their reply. We are inescapably mired in interpretation once we have begun to interpret.

More practically: how do I check that I have understood someone? I do not hope to eliminate the axiomatic inevitability of doubt in my interpretations, but to identify strategies for navigating interpretation regardless. I have come to call one technique in particular 'altertext'.

'Altertext' puns on the verb 'to alter,' but also on 'alter ego'— the Other-who-is-the-Self. You might say that an altertext is a new text which shares its subtext with the original text.

There are different levels of this. It is meaningful to say that altertext, as I experience it, follows from the autistic habit of echolalia: repeating what someone else has just said, either in full or (more typically) the last part of it. This verifies that the listener has heard what was said. The next step is the paraphrase response, rephrasing what someone else has just said “in one's own words”. This verifies that the listener has grasped the surface meaning of the statement.

And up once more in complexity is the altertext, which swaps out not words, but concepts: the response expresses a larger idea which is appreciably like the original statement, but uses different images, metaphors, scenarios— more broadly, component ideas.

What an altertext encodes, therefore, is a set of assumptions about what parts of the original text are central and essential, and which parts can be replaced, being less important to the original thought. And because altertext is often superficially quite tangential to the text it responds to, it serves as a useful test:

A correctly-formed altertext is a pertinent response. The original speaker says “Yes, exactly,” with a spark of recognition in their eye, and seems excited to be understood. An incorrectly-formed altertext is irrelevant, has mutilated the original thought beyond repair, and annoys or confuses your interlocutor. And a middling altertext elicits “Almost, not quite, well...” and can progress towards a correct text-altertext exchange iteratively from there.

I mentioned before absurd and obscure(d) texts: poems, shitposts, jokes, vagueposts, riddles; statements not even the speaker can puzzle through. Here, too, the altertext can 'test' what hidden insight you think you have gleaned from the text; even without initially 'knowing' what they had meant by the original statement, the speaker hears the echo of their thought in your altertext— or doesn't. You see the spark of recognition in their eye, or it isn't there. Or somewhere in the middle: you trade riddles in stages, and eventually arrive at a perfectly-cryptic understanding.

So far, I have assumed that text and altertext have different authorship and serve to verify the fidelity of communication. But this is not essentially true. You can produce altertext from your own text, and altertext can be creative as well as imitative.

In many ways, writing poetry is a process of creating altertext. I start with a thought or a feeling which is important, but unclear or unassuming, and iteratively I refine it by exchanging its less-central parts for others that illuminate it better, until the structure has been perfected and every part replaced.

And altertext can serve as code, like an argot; innuendo is an altertextual process. I insinuate what it would be imprudent to assert plainly, by talking around the thing I cannot say, evoking the shape of the enigmatic taboo with words and ideas other than those I wish to express. Arguably, when I respond to a cryptic shitpost with an altertext, it was already altertext: an altered, obscured, substituted version of a thought not even its owner can name straight.

What altertext is, then, is a symbolic manipulation, an isomorphism of meaning, a semiotic transform. And, under my theory of magic, this makes altertext potentially a spell.

Indeed, this is how I cast verbal magic. When there is something I want that I do not wish to say plainly, or which there would be no point in naming, I instead speak in altertext; evoke the idea, without saying it; iterate on my own obfuscation, while preserving the submerged idea beneath them all.

Each individual 'surface form' of the subtext is cryptic; only one (like myself) with the Gift of intuiting subtexts might extract it from that text alone. But as they follow each other in sequence, the listener gets 'caught up' in the subliminal patterns they can sense, if not identify, between the texts.

Like a hypnotic suggestion, the listener is lured in unawares and receives the idea without noticing; the idea affects them below their conscious recognition. On a social media platform, the effect can be dramatic; a sudden, 'centerless' swell of emotion, a folie à ménage, a behavior which 'comes out of nowhere'. The contagious idea bubbles out of their subconscious recognition into new altertexts, an idea, an affect, an intention that spreads even beyond your own reach.