Mitophagy removes and reuses the components of damaged mitochondria while regulating the biogenesis of new, undamaged mitochondria, which in turn preserves healthy mitochondrial functions and activities throughout the human body.

I think language needs to function in a similar way. We need to continually break it down, look at it in novel ways, question it, lay bare the strangeness of words both as sensory experiences and as signifiers, recycle it, make it new, and in turn preserve the flexibility and wholeness of language with the larger system of embodied communication.

This is why I like ascemic writing and erasures and blackouts and transliterations and poems with parts that are or appear to be missing and leaps in thought and elliptical writing and words that bleed into art and back into words again and writing that replaces what’s expected with what’s not expected — maybe with a similar-sounding word or something that creates the effect of reading a book that has several sets of pages stuck together.

And none of what I love is new, but it doesn’t have to be new to be important or to be discussed. Or to need a name, like mitophagy. Litophagy from the Latin lingua? That’s what I’m going to call it. Litophagy. Let’s clear out and clean up and heal what’s on our tongues.