Words, Dung, Roots, Flowers


I have reached that age where familiar cultural references aren't so familiar, are, in fact, out dated.  But a good reference is worth referring to despite its new found obsolescence.  There was a song in the 1980’s called Words, by a band called Missing Persons.  It’s a great composition on all counts, with the then automatically recognizable lines:

Do you hear me?
Do you care?
The gist of the song comes in the following verse and chorus:

I might as well go up and talk to a wall
'cause all the words are having no effect at all
It's a funny thing am I all alone

Something has to happen to change the direction
What little filters through is giving you the wrong impression
It's a sorry state I say to myself

   What are words for
when no one listens anymore
   What are words for
when no one listens
   What are words for
when no one listens it's no use talking at all

Back then this sentiment roared with resonance.  Those were my middle-school days, fraught with the anxieties of early maturation when emotions, reason, self-control and self-reflection vie for primacy in governing a soul.  And all these years later the echoes of that anxiety remain, blended with heaps of habits and reactions, the regnant oligarchs in my soul today.  Through the passing years I've tried to understand that sentiment and employ means to operate within its constraints.  Here is a reflection on the possible reality of what occurs naturally, free of malice, and yet results in such alienating impressions.
Words.  No animal uses words.  Without words, or rather the aptitude of speech, the human being could not exist as distinct from the animals, from primates.  Indeed speaking seems well beyond a mere necessity of human beings, being, instead, an essential component of what it means to be human.  This fact goes a long way toward understanding why the experience of “not being heard” can be so painful.  It’s as though the person himself is ignored—words are integral to personhood.
But then some of us are more sensitive to such dismissals than others.  That has puzzled me from day one.  Why are some more or less sensitive?  That must be a mystery.  I have yet to hear the inside story from someone who, like me, can’t ignore feedback, who is effected well before comprehending the feedback, whether a misunderstanding, emotions prompted, or an absence of affect, an irrelevancy.  The mature response follows wisdom’s suggestion:
Also, do not take seriously all words which are spoken, so that you will not hear your servant cursing you.  For you also have realized that you likewise have many times cursed others.  (Ecc. 7:21,22).
Some do this with seeming ease—what do I really know of others’ experience?  They perform a dance, putting forward their words, and when the response comes, adding words that, on the one hand, ignore the response, and on the other, deal with the response and continue in the original vein.
This “putting forth of words”, as I said, has some essential quality to it.  It must be done if we are to be human beings.  So forgive the analogies, but living beings put forth all sorts of things, feces, roots, flowers, vomit, eggs, colors, fruit.  Are words to human beings what some of these things are to other living things?  Could we not then expect the human world to be decorated (or defiled) by these emanations?  As with those, so with these, we accept their existence and move on like stepping over a manure pile on the path toward home; or like a sickness for which vomit begins our way back to health; or like flowers that, though short lived, inspire others for a time.
And when an emanation can’t find words, it finds other means.  The human being communicates by more than words.  He can’t not.

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