"During a dream and even long after we have woken up, words occurring in the dream can strike us as having the greatest significance.  Can't we be subject to the same illusion when awake?  I have the impression that I am sometimes liable to this nowadays.  The insane often seem to be like this."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago, 1980)

Writing is, if not a disease, obsession or ramped up processing mechanism whereby any given human attempts to overtake what it has always already been overtaken by, something like an alien abduction.

Words as talismans.  Words as probes. The mother ship might be full of grammarians.