knowledge is made for cutting; the sharp edges of labels and filing cabinets, the neat corners of categories and definitions, the interviews and exams and studies which chew you up and spit you back out as something predictable, digestible, processed and tamed. something with precedent which can be fitted into the orderly halls of history; something which can be filed away forever or called up at will. knowledge is not a feeling thing, but it is still capable of inflicting pain; it severs and shapes, it wounds and whittles and renders living breathing things immobile, trapping them in cages made not of metal but of meaning. when something about you is known, you are robbed of all the things you could have been; the freedom of possibility is exchanged for the claustrophobia of certainty. you are nothing so much as a specimen under a magnifying glass, a bug in a display case; pinned in place, clearly labeled, weighed down by heavy gazes and heavier glass.