Rage And Solemnity

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Rage And Solemnity

This is a short essay on the power of words.

            There are two conditions, and two only, that lend a sense of power to any written or spoken word.

            The first of these is the most obvious.  No word—no matter how it is used or in what context it may appear—has any claim to power without an audience before which to perform.  It is with this in mind that I say to you that never was there a word, either spoken or written, that does not possess all of the power of all of the words that were ever scrawled upon the pages of time.  For even these words—which are written to play for an audience consisting of one—do indeed have an audience.  The fact that they may never be seen by anyone other than me only serves to intensify their power.  Could there exist a more intimate literary connection than the one between an author, the one, and only fan the he writes for?

            Of course, this is a mere self indulgent fantasy—to believe that I could eve4r be happy with the thought that no one, other than myself, will ever read these words is an out and out lie—and yet here and now,, while it is just me, myself, and my words wrestling around in a room together, there seems no greater splendor than to follow their lead and see where they take me.

The second condition serves to stipulate the actual degree of power too which these words may attain in the annals of time and space.  This condition is a mental connection that is forged between the intended audience and the words being used.  It is, perhaps, the more important of the two in that it is not a pre-existing, built-in, facet such as is the first condition. 

The simplest form of this connection is the particular literary taste possessed by every individual.  If you, the reader, have a natural predilection for a good spy novel—and would prefer to skip all other literary fare altogether—than the words of someone such as Stephen King or Edgar Allen Poe would hold little or no special value in your mind.  It is to the fan of the macabre and malevolent that these two men speak.  This is the most basic form of human interaction with the things we call ‘words’.  It is simplistic in its ability to focus in on only those types of word that, when arranged correctly, dance the way we would like them to in our minds eye.  Some people like to read about marriage—some about murder.  It is all a matter of taste.

The next level of ‘word connection’ is a great deal more personal, and yet a grater majority of the human race experiences it.  In fact, all of us feel it very deeply.  It follows no rules, and no medium confines it.  There is no condition of length or content and it may range from the most benevolently beneficial to the most detrimentally damaging evocation of ideas under the sun.  it is both the truth and the lie and the gray area that we all—regardless of whether or not our sense of righteous materialism will allow us to admit it—know to be the shadow that will forever obscure the actual realization of either.  It is what happens when one man says or writes something that another man can simply not agree with or when that same man spews forth a waterfall of words that bring the whole world together—if only for that one, all to brief, all to infrequent, moment in time.

It is Martin Luther King telling us about a dream that he has, and Adolph Hitler unleashing a raging torrent of madly inspiring words that would plunge the world directly into his own hellish nightmare.  It is all of these words—leaping from the tongues of saints and lunatics alike—rushing from mouth to ear—from heart to soul—with the intensity of life itself—that, for better or for worse, make us human.  These words play to an audience otherwise known as humanity; there connection with that audience—and, therefore, the reason that they hold so much power—is that they crawl inside the very soul of our minds and make us think.

The final level is so ambiguous that even the most powerful words ever uttered can only dream of the day when they will be of use in describing, to human ears, what that connection is.  And therein lays the absurdity of it all.

It is in the rage and solemnity of the poets of all ages that we come closest to seeing the true meaning and power of words.  For—even as the final drop of their blood splatters upon the page before them—they are the only ones that truly realize what words are.  They know that all of these little symbols that we call letters are forming tiny little blood clots of their soul on that page and that—when all is said and done—the images formed are nothing more than larger symbols built from small.  The meanings that we have attached to these words I order that we might make sense of all the things that we perceive around us are but pale veils with which to shield our frail minds from the truth of what is actually there.  That is the true beauty of the poets and the reason why nine out of ten people either do not understand—or thumb their nose at with no intention of ever trying to understand—the world of poetry.  They will not accept the fact that words can mean more than what they actually spell out on the page…