We have almost but not quite forgotten that words themselves have a creative power reflective of their creator. This is the fascination we have with the best literature, our dearest loved ones, the humor of the incautious or well-crafted turn of phrase, and it is what we depend upon implicitly when we pore over the best books. The intuitive leaps made possible by an intelligence like our own when we encounter another intelligence like or unlike our own that stimulates us to make connections building knowledge in ways we didn’t imagine.…

We attribute happily a spiritual being to language that we can hardly admit as Westerners so enamored with a closed and perfected story; whether it is logic, mathematics, or theology we favor tying all the loose ends and making a consistent dead lump of a thing. We grind the soul of the poet and the artist for their extravagance and treat their work as a receptacle for our dusty commentary when all the while our brains feed on the creative heat we take from their genius. And yet their work is not diminished by our critique nor exhausted by the gift it gives. The unimaginative soul closes the book with never a glance back while the virus implanted by the words courses through the mind bringing it to a fever. Those who have woken to the power of words greedily seek out their effect and find even in the most obscure and disabused notions a very real transformation. The birth of an idea is the making of a universe. Man truly does not live by bread alone.

Language is in this sense a life of its own that partners with its auditors, listening to very sound of the universe as it expands, the keening of the earth as it bears the weight of its inhabitants.