Thoughts on the Power of Words

Words that wound, words that heal, words stolen, words given new meaning. Words and their meanings and usage... having the power of language and the ability to communicate is probably one of humanity's greatest curses and greatest blessings.

Christianity isn't the only religion that has a myth about the Tower of Babel. For those not in the know, the Tower of Babel was built by either the Sumerians or Babylonians under direction from their king... Nimrod (okay, yeah, I know... Nimrod. Whoda thunk?! Where did they get these names from?). At the time, apparently, everyone could speak the same language. At any rate, they wanted to reach heaven. As punishment for their sheer audacity, the western Judeo-Christian deity knocked down the tower & sent the people to the four corners of the earth and unleashed a confusion of language so no one could collude against him anymore. The central American cultures have similar stories, as do the Nepalese and a few others - audacious humans trying to build towers to heaven & getting smoted by their gods in the process.

It's funny how, after all the time humans had to spend learning to communicate with one another, mainly through traders and political exchange, we now have this powerful tool at our command that makes it ridiculously easy. Via the internet, we can talk to people from all over the earth in an language understood by all parties (at least in places with internet access). As a result, a lot of stereotypes are being broken down and done away with even as new ones are being perpetuated (all video game gold comes from China is a pretty good example - some of it comes from Korea). There are very few mysteries anymore - if I run into an unfamiliar term or concept, I'm no longer limited to my personal copy of the Oxford English Dictionary - I can look it up on line. Of course, I'm also having to put some trust in unreliable sources, like wikipedia - things that are edited by users and such. But the OED wouldn't have something like harajuku or gasho in its venerable pages. If it wasn't for the internet, there are quite a few things out there I wouldn't know existed, like vore fetishes. Sometimes, knowledge isn't necessarily a good thing.

I've never believed that words are just words. They convey too much to be just anything. Most of the power of a word belongs not to the speaker, but to the listener. Not to the writer, but to the reader. A speaker or writer is only powerful and persuasive if the words they use convey the same idea to the person who receives the words. I think this is why, even though I am highly literate and well-read, I prefer Stephen King to say, Dostoevsky. Or James Joyce. When I read Ulysses I was at first intrigued by the stream-of-consciousness writing. However, I got to a certain point where I realized that most of the stream-of-conciousness was just disguising the fact that the character was thinking about how kidney meat tasted like urine and that's what he enjoyed about kidney meat... and then the guy went to take a dump in the outhouse. If you're going to go for the gross-out, just go for it - don't couch it in rambling prose. A lot of the failure of the Bush administration is based in the fact that when the president speaks for himself, he speaks like a plain undereducated person - but his speech-writers try to turn him into this powerful orator & use words he can't pronounce and probably can't spell. Because Bush stumbles along, he loses his audience to eye-rolling exasperation. Watching him makes me want to storm the podium and snatch his cue cards out of his hand & read things for him. Rob & I caught a session of Parliament one time on television & it was kind of amazing to me because they televised a quirky moment in time. The Parliament building had mice and they voted to bring in a cat. It took them maybe three minutes to go from describing the problem to implementing a solution by means of a yea or nay vote. If the White House had mice it would have take Bush twenty minutes to even admit the White House had mice and even longer to determine if someone needed to go through the phone book & find a pest control company. The speaker of Parliament simply stated, "Mice have been sighted in the building, so-and-so has a cat. Can I get a yea or nay?" Powerful problem-solving words, even if the solution was delayed by some good-natured chuckling in the ranks.

Words used as labels can be self-limiting, or they can be liberating. A person can take a word and strip away all that is non-essential and turn it into a fierce war-drum beat, or a person can further complicate a simple term and twist it into something useless and stripped of all meaning.

Tribal people say that words are sacred. By this, we don’t mean that you should kneel down & worship them. We mean that, in your being, you should recognize that when you speak, your utterance has consequences inwardly & outwardly & that you are accountable for these consequences.
- Paula Gunn Allen

The politician is trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.
- Edward Murrow, speech, 1959

Behind naming, beneath words, is something else. An existence named unnamed & unnameable.
- Susan Griffin

We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.
- Anais Nin

“Define interesting.”
“Oh God, Oh God, we’re all gonna die!”
- Firefly: Serenity

It seems like since I was released from the grip of my crutches on Monday, I've spent five days in the kitchen. The kitchen and physical therapy. I did my math final, no grade yet, and my science final, also no grade. Having trouble w/the last page of my website. It needs to have frames. IE7 doesn't like the frame tag, it uses iframe instead. Within each frame is a separate html file and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to line up the top of the elements in the html file with the top of the frame. Now, if I was making a professional webpage, I'd have one link going to a directory without frames and one going to a page compatible with IE and another compatible with Netscape. Which would mean an extra 10 or 15 files for one single page. I may just say 'fuck it' and do a frameless page and take the lower points. But I'm already losing points because I can't put a javascript clock on my page because my computer hates it when I attempt to program anything with java. That and I don't know what the heck I'm doing in java to begin with. Ah well, it'll be over soon and then it's a semester of psychology. Cheers to self-analysis. I've already got a topic in mind if we have to write a paper - Morita therapy.

42 & 2012

I killed both my okcupid and myspace profiles because at some point I decided that I only had time for 3 things in my life - school, work and WoW. I also dropped off tribe.net because I was too attached to some of the discussions and it brought out an ugly side of myself, that "I must always be right, no matter how trivial the subject or how stupid I actually am" side... I kept two lj's - one for secular, one for sacred and I killed my lj altar ego because I realized that I'm not a witch anymore. Journaling is important to me because I'm a failed writer and I still have the need to write, even if I'm sober, even if it's just blabbing about myself or gossiping about my co-workers or ranting in general about nutso shit I hear in the news. I eventually crept back into the life of tribe.net because I learned I was still interested in the discussions but I didn't have to get involved and I could be impartial again. On nights like tonight, I miss the quizzes on okcupid and the general stupidity of the myspace community that my co-workers created and live in. If nothing else, it gave me more to do when I should be working on my webpage or various other school assignments or exercising or some other stuff I was putting off.

Ok, here's something creepy. The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. Of course, the Question was never truly formulated, and the philosophers just came up with How many roads must a man walk down to throw a bone to the masses. Rob will be 42 in 2012. Now all the 2012 conspiracies are among all the other stuff that I don't believe in for one reason or another, but for whatever reason this number holds a lot of significance for many other people, including Rob, mainly because Rob is still hoping for a massive Apocalypse of some kind so he can become the war-God savior of mankind or something. I don't know, I've stopped trying to figure it out. It's just one of those funny coincidences that pop up in our lives. As for me, I will be 38. No big deal. My solemn prediction for 2012 is the same as it was for 2000 - nothing will happen except Rob will turn... 42.

I like the Predator aliens.

Started reading Coyote Healing. The author talks about how he didn't go looking for Coyote, Coyote came to him. He also mentions that he wanted Wolf or Raven to be his totem animal. I know how he feels. I never wanted Coyote to be anywhere near my totem pole. I wanted wolf or raven or jaguar or snake or horse - a cool animal, not a semi-urban misfit. I'm not even comfortable with Bear - I mean, I don't have the huge, angry roaring grizzly energy, or angry mother bear energy, or polar bear energy - no, I've got that part of bear that sits on its butt holding its hind feet with its front paws and going in roly-poly circles as it scratches its ass on the ground, the part of bear that sits with one paw on its belly with its tongue hanging out. I have Baloo-bear/Pooh-bear medicine, not big bear medicine. If I have otter medicine, it's otter with a rock smashing sea creatures... not graceful water otter.

I am full of crab right now and somewhere there is a piece of crab sitting in my lungs. I have to remember to not watch things on t.v. that make me laugh while trying to eat.

Blessed Be and 93. 42 and Bless You.