We think in words…dream in words…In our imaginations we play and replay conversations, things we coulda, shoulda, woulda said. I’m a reader and I love words and I write a bit and words are important. But I’m also aware of how the words we learn shape our lives and the way we think. A Chinese person thinks differently from a French person. Ask a translator. The differences may appear slight but sometimes maybe not. Children think differently than adults. Oh O.K., of course. People develop dialects and modify language to differentiate themselves. Old-time jailbirds used to have a language barely understandable outside prison. Hipsters and subcultures have slang …Rappers…don’t get me started…are some of the best poets we’ve had in years…dance with language.
You can tell a lot about a society or culture by watching or listening to the words that are filling the air. Lately there are a lot of very violent words…and it’s growing…Fearful, paranoid, divisive words are becoming more and more frequent. We should be listening with more care.
There are myths about words…That they are “things”. They leave our mouth and float around our head for a while and then slowly float higher and higher…joining millions of other words until they reach the atmosphere and freeze. I think there are events like wars, and bombs, and possibly hot rage that rise up and cause the words to thaw and fall…and blast our ears with a mighty, roaring, wind that makes no sense until we think it’s the end of the world…but it’s only our words. We should be more careful with them.
I’ve heard that at one time all creatures had words and they could communicate. Monkeys and mice and men and women and cats and fish could talk to each other. This is not a tower of Babel story….no. It’s story about lies. See, there have always been “eaters” and the “eaten” , and they all understood that. Still, they could communicate and there was a trust. We don’t understand that kind of trust now of course. The trust was broken when some of the eaters began to tell the eaten that they wouldn’t eat them. Well, it made it much easier to catch and eat them…Pretty soon those to be eaten got together and said…”Look we can’t listen to them any more…they tell us lies and eat us.” And so they stopped listening to the lies and stopped trusting the eaters. Now after a while, if you stop listening, you lose the language…lose the ability to communicate that way. And it spreads…the distrust, and eventually we end up here. We’re the major eaters …humans, and we don’t even trust each other. We’ve lost those words. I think that the other animals still communicate with each other though. And I think they’re saying that Mother Nature is watching…and listening and she’s not happy.
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