Words are precious. Words are multi-dimensional. Words have many different kinds of uses. They point to an object. They describe an object. They help us think. They create thinking. They express feeling. They help us differentiate feelings. But lately words are being more and more consigned to the printed page or the electronic page and in turn this use is impacting how we hear the words. Our relationship to words is changing. We are receiving gifts, but we are losing deliciousness. For words are tonal. Words began in the breath and the mouth. The breath took a shape in the mouth and on the lips. And this shape probably matched the feelings or objects it described. Exhilaration, exclaiming the experience of some feeling or something. Our animal response. Tones slip out and shape themselves in the world. Carrying our inner response out and making it concrete and physical to ourselves and others.
Once out, these tonalities play you. They speak to the body part of you. These waves of sound with their tonalities and tastes of rhythm create physical sensations. Sensations which carry you more deeply into an experience, more deeply into contact with the object of the word, or more deeply into another world. Words are music, and like music they can become the muse which expands your world, your experience, and your pleasure, help you more clearly feel your pain which then is released. Shakespeare knew this. Dylan Thomas knew this. Yeats knew this. Words clank, clang, bang, bonk and fuck, push and shove, send innuendos exquisitely sliding in the air like a seductive perfume caressing your ears and skin, sets you tingling and vibrating like a harp. Or make you clutch your belly, stop you up, or fall you to the ground. This is being human. This is living in the world.