On the nature of The Word
Today on the Feast of the Visitation (May 31) I got to thinking about the nature of words. What happens to us when we learn a word? what happens when we use a word? what are these things, words, in the first place anyway? Every creature that scuttles across the floors of silent seas uses communication of some sort or other. Whether it is the release of pheromones, or subtle bodily movements, or a flipping of the flagella, or oscillating tones of audible screeching all that lives and moves and has its being on earth communicates. But men alone, humans, are the only creature that uses words. We are the only creature that obsesses over words - him, her, its (it's) or zir - we furrow our brow over the right word until beads of blood form on our foreheads.
But what is it that we do whilst wiping these beads from our hemorrhaging brow? Is it mere pablatum? nonsense? "words, words, words" as Hamlet says? Or like the Trashman has everybody heard about the word?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgmh0BjLKVM
Whatever the case the word seems to have power. Use a word and change the nature of the world - of the universe. Praise someone with words and their worldview is altered. Beat someone down with an epithet or ridicule and they are crushed for the day. The old adage of sticks and stones (you know the one) isn't altogether correct. Indeed, when we say a word we either reaffirm the nature of a thing, or "conjure" something new into being. This is akin to a form of "magic" (not the Gathering). I say "12 masted schooner" and you conceive of the thing in your mind. I say "this is a seed" - and you stop seeing it as a rock. I say "you are lovely and lovable" or "you are hateful and hateable" and PRESTO! it is so.
The word may be "LOVE"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfBEqiEhCgM
but the word may also be "GREASE"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH2a30LTeWw
or perhaps, as the Hindu mystics and the Moody Blues once held, the WORD is at the center of all creation - an eternal, reassuring, stasis of OM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N36oRaEF4jA
Indeed, it seems, it is words that make us as the Miller tells his tale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFqb1I-hiHE
We are made by the words that we know - and as our vocabulary expands our being expands with it. To learn a word is not just to mimic the sounds "Mull" "Tee" "Too" "Dee" "Nus" (as my son does when pronouncing words not in his 2nd grade lexicon) - it is rather to begin to understand the profound implications of that word "multitudinous" - how it connects to other "multis"; how it hearkens back to hits Latin and Greek roots; how it contains a whole host of implications in its meaning, sound, and construction. This understanding not only allows us to comprehend the word itself, but allows us to assimilate new words of a similar structure.
Moreover, as Tolkien suggested, every language is a form of history; to really know the language is to come to know the history of the people that spoke it. The tribe in Africa that does not have words such as "left" or "right" must think of the world in an entirely different geographical way than other cultures. The people who remember what the word "gobstopper" really meant cannot forget their own connection to the carnage and horror of the first world war. The country that thinks in LOLs and AFKs and TBDs cannot know the slow, silent peace of a clockless world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k
Thus, for us, the word (Logos in Greek) seems to be in the beginning of our very minds. It is our first connection with the world beyond daddy's heartbeat and mother's breast. It is "dada" and "mama" and "googoogaga" from the start. A certain music so deeply ingrained in us that we take it for granted and, like the fish not noticing water, ignore the oddity and quearness of using words.
We no longer respect the word - seeing The Word as no more than one among many text messages to swipe left or right. Unlike the Hebrews who would only touch the word with a golden fingertip, or the Tibetan monks who revered the great Om as the basis of the physical world, or the great Haka that moves the Maori to tears - we of the West see words as advertisement, charlatanism, negligible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUbx-AcDgXo
Rather, let us begin to realize the real magic we have in words. As William Carlos Williams suggested
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Perhaps if we were to realize this "magic", The Word, the grounding of our very being, might again become manifest to us. Perhaps if we do, our mighty arrogance might be cast down from its throne and our lowliness might be lifted up. Perhaps if we do, we might return to a place we never left and see that in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_H5blQMkW8
But what is it that we do whilst wiping these beads from our hemorrhaging brow? Is it mere pablatum? nonsense? "words, words, words" as Hamlet says? Or like the Trashman has everybody heard about the word?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgmh0BjLKVM
Whatever the case the word seems to have power. Use a word and change the nature of the world - of the universe. Praise someone with words and their worldview is altered. Beat someone down with an epithet or ridicule and they are crushed for the day. The old adage of sticks and stones (you know the one) isn't altogether correct. Indeed, when we say a word we either reaffirm the nature of a thing, or "conjure" something new into being. This is akin to a form of "magic" (not the Gathering). I say "12 masted schooner" and you conceive of the thing in your mind. I say "this is a seed" - and you stop seeing it as a rock. I say "you are lovely and lovable" or "you are hateful and hateable" and PRESTO! it is so.
The word may be "LOVE"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfBEqiEhCgM
but the word may also be "GREASE"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH2a30LTeWw
or perhaps, as the Hindu mystics and the Moody Blues once held, the WORD is at the center of all creation - an eternal, reassuring, stasis of OM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N36oRaEF4jA
Indeed, it seems, it is words that make us as the Miller tells his tale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFqb1I-hiHE
We are made by the words that we know - and as our vocabulary expands our being expands with it. To learn a word is not just to mimic the sounds "Mull" "Tee" "Too" "Dee" "Nus" (as my son does when pronouncing words not in his 2nd grade lexicon) - it is rather to begin to understand the profound implications of that word "multitudinous" - how it connects to other "multis"; how it hearkens back to hits Latin and Greek roots; how it contains a whole host of implications in its meaning, sound, and construction. This understanding not only allows us to comprehend the word itself, but allows us to assimilate new words of a similar structure.
Moreover, as Tolkien suggested, every language is a form of history; to really know the language is to come to know the history of the people that spoke it. The tribe in Africa that does not have words such as "left" or "right" must think of the world in an entirely different geographical way than other cultures. The people who remember what the word "gobstopper" really meant cannot forget their own connection to the carnage and horror of the first world war. The country that thinks in LOLs and AFKs and TBDs cannot know the slow, silent peace of a clockless world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k
Thus, for us, the word (Logos in Greek) seems to be in the beginning of our very minds. It is our first connection with the world beyond daddy's heartbeat and mother's breast. It is "dada" and "mama" and "googoogaga" from the start. A certain music so deeply ingrained in us that we take it for granted and, like the fish not noticing water, ignore the oddity and quearness of using words.
We no longer respect the word - seeing The Word as no more than one among many text messages to swipe left or right. Unlike the Hebrews who would only touch the word with a golden fingertip, or the Tibetan monks who revered the great Om as the basis of the physical world, or the great Haka that moves the Maori to tears - we of the West see words as advertisement, charlatanism, negligible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUbx-AcDgXo
Rather, let us begin to realize the real magic we have in words. As William Carlos Williams suggested
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Perhaps if we were to realize this "magic", The Word, the grounding of our very being, might again become manifest to us. Perhaps if we do, our mighty arrogance might be cast down from its throne and our lowliness might be lifted up. Perhaps if we do, we might return to a place we never left and see that in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_H5blQMkW8
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