[D66] BozioGarman: I Am the Walrus (3)

[René Oudeweg]

WAL RUST

The word walrus did not always intend to be a walrus. It began, one 
suspects, as an innocent sound shambling across the ice of language, but 
like all good words left unattended, it began to corrode, molt, and 
mutate. Say it slowly and it already resists itself: wal–rus. Two 
syllables sharing a single coat. Pull them apart and they begin to 
misbehave.

First comes wal rust—the wal that rusts. This is the industrial walrus, 
bolted to a harbor wall, oxidizing patiently beside forgotten anchors 
and philosophical questions. Its tusks flake into iron filings. Its 
blubber squeaks. This walrus does not roar; it creaks. It is no longer a 
beast of the sea but a neglected mechanism, proof that even marine 
mammals cannot survive prolonged exposure to entropy.

But language is never content with decay alone. Rust spreads, and so 
does meaning. Wal rust sloughs into wall rust, the orange freckles on 
the architecture of thought. These are the stains left when ideas stay 
in one place too long. Every institution has a little wall rust. Every 
sentence, if not sanded down, acquires it too. The walrus, once 
majestic, is now structural damage.

Scrape away the corrosion and the word slips again: wahl-russ, a 
Germanic phantom, half-election, half-Russian, voting solemnly with its 
whiskers. Or WAL R US, a corporate slogan shouted by tusked executives: 
We are the wal. Here the walrus becomes collective identity, a mascot 
for bloated certainty, smiling from a billboard while selling surplus 
meaning in bulk.

Phonetically impatient, the word shortens itself to wal, a sound that 
leans against things. A wal is not a wall, but it aspires to be one. A 
wal separates ideas that once touched noses. Add a little breath and you 
get wha-ruhs, the noise made when sense slips on a banana peel. Add 
speed and it becomes warlus, a creature perpetually engaged in 
unnecessary conflict with punctuation.

Eventually, the word eats its own tail and becomes why, rus?—a question 
addressed to the syllable itself. Why are you here? What infection of 
thought caused you? The walrus shrugs, or rather, the wal rustles. The 
answer is static.

This is how words behave when no one is watching. They oxidize, 
unionize, advertise, and philosophize. The walrus was never just an 
animal; it was a linguistic accident wearing a mustache. Leave it in the 
cold long enough and it will turn into infrastructure. Leave it in the 
mind long enough and it will turn into everything else.

In the end, the walrus does not mean. It mutates. And somewhere between 
wal rust and wall rust, between beast and blemish, it grins—because it 
was never meant to stay one thing for very long.