Fish and Bicycles

Words are awful tough.

People put on them what they want. No matter how clear.

I don’t care much about particular words. I like, more, how words are placed together. Each word is just okay. When some person gets up and says Vagina Vagina Vagina—I don’t think much of a point is being made.   What is this Vagina doing? And why do you assume that I am compelled to react to one word, repeated?

Words lose meaning because they only have the meaning we give to them. Like money. We can decide at any time that fork no longer means anything at all.

It is essential that words, basically, keep their meaning for a few generations so when we see them we understand them.  But it is truly their placement that makes the difference more than the intrinsic meaning of each word.

I love this dog in my arms today. You put that all together, you have a feeling, an action and a relationship. The words are relational. The experience of the words creates a relationship inside you with the outside when you read them. I chose love, dog and arms because those words are quite solid in meaning, for us. Of course for a culture that is not so fond of pooches, or sees them as food, well, that sentence means something else entirely. But it is still relational.

Slogans lose power quite fast. Fight the Power. Save the Whales. Hell No We Won’t Go. A Woman without a Man is like a Fish without a Bicycle.    Though, the last one, Gloria Steinem’s, still holds some saucy vitality since each word is so clear and the choice and placement of each one is pretty spectacular. I imagine she was not so calculated, that it just came to her.

Slogans assume too much. So if someone were to say to you today Fight the Power what on earth are they assuming you think this means?  Get the top dogs off your back and take some control? Shut down your computer? Or, sadly, if something powerful comes through you, fight it, because it is probably not real, perhaps something arising from your defenses? There are not enough words there and there is not enough relationship.

I do not think writing and words are as important as actions and deeds. A quiet kind of love is better than a noisy kind of person trying to make it sound like they have love in them. I do hope that writing can be a reflection of the relationship between subject and deed. And hopefully capture some of that aliveness, or deadness if necessary.

Our language will change. Mostly because the words will change. But the need that words come together in some form of clear relationship to each other will always be the same. It’s all about what is against what and how something else works against that and how if feels when it is all together.

Though this sounds very obvious or similar to a milder form of a Lenny Bruce screed about the arbitrary powerlessness of negative words, I do hope today that I think more about how words are put together. Because I am relation to the others. Even though a part of me tries to protect myself into thinking I am not.