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Thursday, November 26, 2009

Happy T-day

I have been thinking about writing, so here at 3:36 AM Eastern Standard Time (I'm an early riser...) on Thanksgiving Day, 2009, I woke up thinking about it.

 Words ignite me, like Burning Man.
The words enflame me o'er and o'er.....
(This is not an excerpt from a poem. I guess it is an illustration, for I wrote it as a statement of fact, using the words "...over and over" at the end, but by the time I edited the spelling and whatnot, it was clear that this would in some future time become:  words ignite, like Burning Man / and will enflame me o'er and o'er... )

If an image is not a product of an artistic spirit, it becomes cold and stiff quickly, and soon bores me. But even the photographs of art - like Ansel Adams, or the many artists I have used here - in my opinion tend to slip back into their basic two-dimensional straight-waistcoat over time, and they become inert, cold.
(Films escape the two-dimensional strictures of the image. Film is one of the greatest art achievements of history.)

Words are protean, and can twist and turn and take on a thousand faces.
Words of love and passion that have grown cold may be rekindled by a huskiness in the throat, an extra-linguistic growl to be love's new punctuation, a tongue to be a new orthography, or a complete temporary slipping of the bonds of language as we howl at lunar pleasure.
Words of persuasion may soothe us a thousand ways, like the perfect massage of millions of pressure points.
Words may anger us...
They can do anything, because they are the essential way we mix our essences with other beautiful beings into a subtle perfume of community. Communication is a more recent and neutral way of referring to what our ancestors called plain and simply "intercourse", a Janus-faced word we insist must take on one meaning, not two - for pity's sake! But the two faces of that word show my point: words are intimate to us, and we use them to penetrate the consciousness of those we believe to be apart from us, and wish them to be closer : we wish with them to be mutually dissolvent!
(Of course, there is the other possibility, where we have oil & water, where we split apart and desperately centrifuge our essences  to remain apart and discrete, integral...words can do that, too, and will fly as a singular flock around the singular watering hole of the singular compass point of our ego - pretending at a pseudo-migration.)

Whew! OK. There. See how peppery words are? A bit of the old ginger.
I always imagined Uhura of Star Trek tripping out with her ear plugged into her Universal Translator - which to my mind was an audio love-in.

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