I have always had trouble sleeping, and this gave me many hours to think. One night nevermind got stuck in my head. And I don't mean just stuck, it was running around and around, spinning, diving, rolling through my mind like nothing had ever before. I'm sure this was my first deep thought, or thought stream. It started with the two words that make up never mind, and ended with the notion that all words are just sounds that have no meaning, and if words have no meaning...This has nothing to do with the written word, just the spoken one. This happened when I was seven. I had no way to express this to anyone in my life, and I was limited to the spoken word, have been limited to the spoken word until the last nine months. This idea that words are just gibberish assigned to things, ideas, or concepts, by people with the need to create, has never left me.
3 comments:
And that is precisely what they are from a certain point of view. Linguistics in the broadest sense is the study of these arbitrary systems of meaning assigned to noise.
However, there is another viewpoint, especially about biblical Hebrew and old Sanskrit, that sounds are in themselves sacred and as such contain inherent spiritual power, a divine "meaning" in the world fixing and changing sense beyond any human assignations.
Spoken words contain sounds of power in that sense and a phrase such as "Om namah Shivaya" while incidentally containing human meaning as praise for the God Shiva also contains the seed sounds, OM NA MA SHI VA YA. These are arranged in the language form so that they flow and enhance each other as sounds related to creation. They need no other meaning to offer the power of divine command.
Accompanying this view is a world view: In the Beginning was the Word (Hebrew or Sanskrit) as it makes a formed and perfect sound.
What haunts me about this view and why I choose to chant Sanskrit mantra, is we say now from science, in the beginning was the bang, which is nothing but a sound which then produces light and then the light the myriad quarks, then bosons and leptons of creation based on the fixing of the constants. When the bang stops banging due to distance, then matter begins to clump due to gravity and the three other manifestations of force. The sound exists before the light and the proof of this is universal.
It's funny we're at different ends of the burning wick when it comes to words. You knew spoken words before the written. I knew written intimately. I had some hearing up till the end, but spoken words...haunted me that I didn't hear them right or missed out on something important. We learn at our own pace, with our different disabilities.
Today people say I speak more eloquently than most. If so, I want/need my words to say more than I'll ever hear. ~ Indy
P.S. At some point I'll give it a break but as you probably surmised, I'm reading through your archives.
I'm a firm believer (maybe because I'm a writer), if you want to know someone read their words. More and more of who they are slips out over time. My email is on my blog if you ever want to trade comments or stories.
Indigo, feel free to comment on all or none of my work as you see fit. Most of my writing got vewed by very few people because I had very few followers and I didn't get out and about until the last few months...Yes I will Email and I will make it through your archive as well.
Wander
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