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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