There is some small consolation in words when the times move in a quick succession of bloody acts, not words, just the silent sucking of air and the soul sucking rip of an explosion, each bomb blast with an eye, just like a storm, gathering itself inward, we breathe the fuel that kills us, and then a quickly expanding pupil of tree stump buildings and wretched, dead humanity. Some say that blood tastes like copper, and explosives too have a taste, plastic, almost domestic, death grows more potent in compressed fertiliser.
Of course there is some consolation in words. They become diluted in the air once spoken, once written, mixing with an atmosphere already dense in language, almost always more potent in the mind of the speaker, than the ears of the listener.
This is comforting in itself, knowing the limitations of the damage we can cause, knowing that while bearing words, we are not bearing arms, that we are occupied in an act that has ethereal effects that can be disarmed as quickly as they were armed. There are no craters left, no clean up where we have to mop the blood up off the floor. We can walk away from words, we can decide on them, for them or against them, an option not given by much in such a dire age.
Words are viral if they are to be effective. Not the language of the vernacular, but the language of the political, the language of the directive, the order, immaterial cause with material effect. So different from the language we know. The language of the politician or CEO, middle management does not count. It is always in need of a pre-existing channel of communication before any guarantee of its effectiveness can be made. The words of the President are effective because of their vector, because of their origin and direction, not from any inherent power contained within the words themselves. The origin and direction of such words of power are, of course, supported by other origins, other vectors; a self-supporting, a self-sustaining and perpetuating structure.
This is the meta-structure out there, that waits to communicate the words of the powerful and effective, and it is these metaphorical highways and arterial roads that are clear and distinct, almost beautiful in their harmony, in the way they are interconnected.
The rest of us, those not plugged into this glorious, sparse, communication transportation system, babble. The carbon sinks on the side of the freeway, shrubs and cluttered median strips, the green and grey, simple plains that give the highways their distinctiveness, their clear demarcations.
Babble. Babies do this. And gurgle and then laugh, amazed that there is some small part of reality that they control, that they find themselves autonomous within. We spend a great deal of the first year or so, playing with our limbs, delighted when we discover the spontaneous emergence of action from will and desire. This goes on until we discover language, and it is then that we discover our new play thing. It becomes a rubrics cube that takes a long time to master, but is never fully resolved. It becomes a life long obsession for some, as do all things that have no solution.
We are lucky. We are given this faculty of Reason, but are given very little to do with it, and we all know Freud’s theory on the psychic economy, what finds no outlet in its proper form will always use circumlocution to find another release. If not, it becomes cancerous and starts to replicate and fester. Reason has always found its circumlocution in the gush of language, and of course many argue that Reason and language are indistinguishable. I beg to differ, but that is a different blog entirely.
In these dark times, when we are faced with stimulus that appals our sense of reason, and in its appalling, exercises that sense of reason, language comes as a great comfort to us, especially with the aid of the internet.
At the very least it allows us to know that while we inhabit a world that has stretched itself so far beyond our individual, or even collective, control, we still have this autonomous region, a region of personal sovereignty, that extends as far as our language does.