Mike Vargo: Language Is a Virus

The condition called writer’s block is rare. Sometimes the words come hard, but seldom do they not come at all. A more common difficulty, among those of us who write prose for a living, is getting bogged down in writer’s swamp. Slogging and squishing around, hip-deep in pools of murky thought, laboring for hours to dredge up a short paragraph — which still isn’t right. 

I spent time in that swamp a few months ago. And when I finally pulled out of it, a wicked side effect kicked in, sticking me with a problem I’d never imagined possible. The words would not stop. 

**

The seeds of trouble may have been planted during a vacation. In late summer, knowing that a couple of big projects would start in the fall, I headed for the lake. Spent those days paddling a canoe and hiking and biking around. I had told myself I would take the opportunity to think deeply and reflect, but did no purposeful thinking at all. It seemed better just to gaze at birds soaring above, or watch the breeze making the trees dance. Or see and feel the ripples spreading wide and glisteny across the lake, while the canoe danced under me. 

This was bliss. It was also a time of little verbal activity. I had brought a book to read but barely touched it. (Why stay up late reading in the cabin, when you can rise at dawn and enjoy the early-morning splendor of mist on the lake?) The only writing I did was answering urgent emails on my phone — “Yep, sounds good”— and I didn’t talk much, aside from requests at the roadside camping store and the diner in town: Eggs over easy with wheat toast, please. 

Then, back home, the projects began. I’m a former journalist and I help people write books. The projects were meaty ones: collaborating with experts on a book about the cultural aspects of international business, and doing one for a foundation about issues in social inequality. Interesting material. Also a lot of complex work, and I had let myself drift out of writing shape. Ominously, this left me mushing in the swamp while chapter deadlines loomed. 

The trouble was that writing isn’t just wordsmithing. With nonfiction — which literally means writing stuff that is not not true — first you have to perceive the reality of the subject. If you want to be accurate, you must try to grasp the bare is-ness of what is, without prejudicial preconception. This applies whether the reality is unfolding around you in “real time” (as it often is for journalists who cover breaking news), or whether it has already occurred. (In those cases it might be documented in research and records, or stored in your memory or the memory of others.) Next, having done your best to dig down to bare reality, you conceptualize — sifting through what you’ve perceived, screening out things that seem irrelevant, and ordering what’s left into forms that seem to have meaning. Then and only then can you try to cast the meanings into words. 

Ideally they will be words that evoke vivid experiences in the minds of your readers. Which the foregoing, I’m afraid, may not. But it’s the closest I can come to describing a very tricky process. 

Worse, the mental machinery that performs the process is a loopy steampunk contraption.  The human mind is easily distracted. The mind thinks itself into corners it can’t get out of. The mind hallucinates more bad ideas than any renegade AI and chases links that lead to 404 Not Found.  But when it works, it works. You just have to keep grinding the gears. 

As I did so, gradually the gears meshed. I started turning out chapter after chapter. And then the heinous side effect hit me. 

The gears of language production kept churning in my head, even when I was away from the desk. Churning faster than normal and with an alarming constancy. Everybody has mind-chatter: the rattle of interior talk that cycles through crescendoes and diminishments, like passages of Gregorian chant. This wasn’t cyclical chatter. It was a neverending torrent, flooding through me in indefatigable cascades of verbosity, and I couldn’t find a spigot to turn it off. Could not stop talking to myself, within myself. 

My mind was journaling my life while I lived it. Every little thing that I did got a running narrative or commentary inside my head. As simple a thing as putting on shoes: Look at these shoes. They’re really good. Usually, dress shoes that are as comfortable as sneakers wind up looking like sneakers, but not this pair. See how the soles have a graceful, subtle contour. Look at the fine stitching that binds the uppers to the soles. Notice the deep lustre of the leather and how it glows, softly, as if from within, instead of radiating a cheap, glossy shine. I got the shoes on sale, at a store that’s expensive, but when they say they’re having a sale they mean it, none of this 15-percent-off jive. AND! It’s important to have good shoes, because …. 

I was still composing and delivering a shoe manifesto when I walked out of the house and drove to a theater. There, my mind traveled to opinions of Chekhov — burbling on about why he’s good, and what people don’t get about his plays — while the actors on stage spoke their lines, a bunch of which I probably missed. 

My dreams were verbal. In one, a voice told me that a writing problem I hadn’t been able to solve could be solved in a flash. All you have to do is suspend the people upside down from the ceiling, like stalactites, the voice said. And they willlike it. I then wandered through a thicket of smiling upside-down people while the voice intoned See, they like it, they like it …

And during waking hours, my interior monologue journaled more than my life as I lived it. The words chronicled my life as I have lived it, from childhood until now. 

A short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” imagines a universal library, one so vast that some believe it is infinite. The books in the library contain all possible arrangements of the letters of the alphabet. Therefore, the library contains all possible books. They are shelved randomly, not by any known system. Most are merely strings of nonsense syllables, but scattered among them are legible books, including every book that’s been written and myriads more waiting to be discovered. And among these are the Vindications. For each person who exists (or has existed or will exist), somewhere there is a book that explains the person’s life and justifies every action taken. Many have searched for their Vindications, the story says. It’s as hopeless as trying to find a sesame seed in the Sahara, but people keep trying, and they die trying. Or they go mad. 

I wondered if maybe, in my interior monologue, I was trying to compose my Vindication.

And at times I wondered whether I was going mad. I know a man who’s been in and out of psychiatric treatment for decades. The man is no dummy. He has a keen eye and a quick wit, but he is chronically delusional, prone to forming bizarre interpretations of the situations he’s in. I know this from the times he calls and asks me to drive him somewhere. When I do, he sits in the passenger seat and talks nonstop. 

The last time he held a job, he did it so brilliantly that they fired him because he was making the bosses look bad. Now the syndicates are out to get him because he knows too much, like his best friend who died but isn’t really dead; he’s in the witness protection program. The nurses at the hospital where this man goes are incompetent. They’ve had to hire unemployed prostitutes ever since Kamala Harris cut medical funding. And he’s going to see that the authorities do something; he wrote a detailed report in longhand, and we need to stop at the copy shop to get a photocopy before he gives it to the FBI. He doesn’t read, never reads anything more than his US mail and he doesn’t have internet, but he writes as compulsively as he talks. 

Why does he do that? Perhaps his worldview is so dear to him, and yet so alien to others — surely, many people have told him they don’t buy it — that he has to state it in words, constantly, to keep it alive. 

I was doing the same, except silently. My ramblings weren’t delusional, at least I don’t think so, but neither were they necessary. Who the heck cares what I think about shoes? Who cares that my finicky driving habits include placing my hands side by side on the wheel, exactly at 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock, because it’s how Formula 1 drivers drive? And why in the world would I tell myself all this trivia? Was I talking to an imaginary companion I’d invented? Because no one else wanted to hear it? 

**

The incessant word-flow went on for days and days. Relaxing, deep breathing, meditation brought no relief. I felt the talkety-talk crushing my spirit, and I longed for what we all need: interludes of living non-verbally, non-conceptually. Just absorbing the world as it is. I thought of how wonderful it would be to wake in the morning, and simply be illuminated by sunbeams shafting through the windowframe. Without instantly feeling that the scene demanded a dissertation. 

I wished I could roam the streets of the city and simply take in the so-called built environment — the amazing jumble of edifices and pathways we’ve constructed — without chattering to myself about the quality of the architecture or the impacts of urban policy. And how profound it could be, I thought, just to observe and interact wordlessly with the people in my life, without exchanges that begin Hey, how are you doing, what’s new? 

I began to feel encased in words, imprisoned in language. I thought of Heidegger — “Language is the house of being” — and spent a frantic session on the web, combing through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s voluminous entry on Heidegger and language, trying to figure out what he meant by that. And of course I thought of William S. Burroughs: “Language is a virus.” It inhabits the host; it replicates and propagates; it takes over.  

The notion dawned that perhaps I was being pummeled by language as a form of punishment. Maybe that was what I got, what I deserved, for choosing a career as a nonfiction writer. A punishment for the arrogance of thinking my mission in life was to explain things to people. 

**

Finally, on a Saturday morning, the spell was lifted. I met a friend at the local basketball court to play some one-on-one. You can’t talk to yourself while you’re hooping. Not when the pace picks up. By the time you think Now I should fake a move to the right and step back for a wide-open shot, it’s too late. Likewise, once you think Ooh, I can steal the ball, the moment is gone. You can’t think at all when you hoop. I mean, thinking happens, but not the conscious, deliberate kind that you do when you write a shopping list. 

The friend and I hooped for a long time. I was having fun; didn’t realize I was being cured. Apparently, the rhythm of the morning did the job. We’d play a game, rest and chat a bit, then play another. This meant we alternated between periods of nonverbal and verbal processing — a natural pattern for a human brain, I would argue. After we quit, I noticed the pattern persisting. It felt like having the cast removed from a broken leg. My lopsided psyche was set free, able to go two-footed instead of hopping along crazily on one. The two modes of mental being have stayed in balance for me to this day. 

But I’m now acutely aware of that balance. And I worry about the balance of our society at large. 

Many scholars and pundits say we’ve become a visual culture, more attuned to images than words. To which I say, baloney. Consider the evidence. 

The dominant form of popular music in our time is rap. It’s talking — in every language from English to Arabic, to Mandarin with touches of Cantonese. Wherever you go you see people engrossed in their phones, poking at their phones, and though they share photos sometimes, their main activity isn’t “imaging.” They are texting. In TV news and online, our screens deliver countless clips of talking heads and pontificators at podiums. They speak not only of how to interpret reality, but of how to interpret other interpretations: the Bible, the Constitution, news reports and histories and recipes for chicken carbonara. Podcasts assure that we’ll listen to words while we drive and run and clean the kitchen, or whatever. 

You cannot even get away from words in art museums, where the object is to be immersed in visual culture. When I visit museums, here’s what I see: People glance at paintings, then turn to read the adjacent text panels. Which explain the paintings. 

Granted, a modern society relies utterly on words. Everything that has sustained me in my life, from a major surgery a few years ago to the chair I’m sitting in, has been a product of human hive-minds planning together and directing one another in words. We love the virus and the virus is deeply implanted. Our systems run on language. The question is to what extent language is running us. 

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Copyright 2026 Mike Vargo

The image of the maze is from Pinterest.

Mike Vargo is an independent writer and editor based in Pittsburgh.