Forum / The power of words

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    Gone
    Apr 22, 05:56pm

    What happened in Boston shocked me, not that I'm a stranger to violence, but because of the hatred that motivates the slaughter of innocents, its growing influence on so many people. There is this hatred that will beget hatred and wasn't that the reason for the attack?

    I'm not equal to the task of expressing what I feel just now. There is blood and there will be justice, but the hatred remains and festers alongside new hatred, sown by the evil of a violent act and new calls for revenge.

    Justice will suffice for that revenge, meager justice that will not fill the wounds, but isn't justice all we have? We need something to fill the gaps of wounds and sorrow.

    Hatred will not fill those wounds. I want hope and I will find it only when and if I step over the film of vengeance drawn in blood and concrete. I will find it only when and if I look for it.

    This would be a good place and time to begin, simply, without fanfare. A place and time in which to share the power of words without hatred in the wake of bloodshed.

    This is something I remembered:

    “Hope” is the thing with feathers

    By Emily Dickinson

    “Hope” is the thing with feathers -
    That perches in the soul -
    And sings the tune without the words -
    And never stops - at all -

    And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
    And sore must be the storm -
    That could abash the little Bird
    That kept so many warm -

    I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
    And on the strangest Sea -
    Yet - never - in Extremity,
    It asked a crumb - of me.

    Maybe you remember something too. Please share it here.

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    Gone
    Apr 22, 06:12pm

    And this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhE1VTAjNvs

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    Sally Jayne Heymann
    Apr 22, 06:34pm

    If—
    by Rudyard Kipling


    If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
    Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

    If you can dream--and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
    If you can meet with triumph and disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
    If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
    Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
    And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

    If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
    And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
    If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
    And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

    If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch;
    If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
    If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run--
    Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
    And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

    (and Woman, my daughter)

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    Sally Jayne Heymann
    Apr 22, 06:35pm

    Sorry, I had to add the last bit in parenthesis.

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    Ann Bogle
    Apr 22, 08:02pm

    Here is my own, appropriative Bible verse(s), set in two stanzas.

    Key of James

    i.

    Receive with meekness the implanted word,
    which is able to save your soles.
    Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren,
    for you know that we who teach shall be judged
    with greater strictness.
    Who is wise and understanding among you?
    ... the harvest of _righteousness_ is sewn
    in privacy by those who make privacy.
    You ask and do not connive because you ask.
    Let your eyes be eyes and your nose be nose.

    ii.

    Though I have much to write to you,
    I would rather not use paper and ink,
    but I hope to come to see you and talk with you
    face to face, so that our joy
    may be complete.

    The children of your elect sister greet you.

    --1991-93

    Appears in _dog barks up a tree at the apple left in it under a deerslim moon_, Dusie Kollektiv, 2008 and _The Argotist Online_

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    Sam Rasnake
    Apr 23, 07:07pm

    “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

    My world, of course, does have its limits - as does language.

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    Joani Reese
    Apr 24, 04:05pm

    Here, Bullet

    If a body is what you want
    then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
    Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
    the aorta's opened valves, the leap
    thought makes at the synaptic gap.
    Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
    that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
    into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
    what you've started. Because here, Bullet,
    here is where I complete the word you bring
    hissing through the air, here is where I moan
    the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering
    my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have
    inside of me, each twist of the round
    spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
    here is where the world ends, every time.

    --Brian Turner

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LguxNDdyky8

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    Gone
    Apr 24, 06:30pm

    Well worth hearing; best heard in the silence of solitude:

    http://www.ted.com/talks/suheir_hammad_poems_of_war_peace_women_power.html

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    Gloria Garfunkel
    Apr 24, 08:47pm

    Very beautiful, but she is Palestinian-American, her parents refugees when she was five and grew up in Brooklyn. It's easy not to hate when you don't experience death and loss yourself, much harder when it is more direct. Still, she's an incredible performer, not just poet. Thanks.

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    Darryl Price
    Apr 25, 08:33pm

    I often ask myself about the latest violent act against innocent people, what is the point? Is the point the violence itself? Is it to create fear? Thank God we have other voices willing to say aloud the opposite of murder. For me there have been two such wonderful voices helping me through every doubtful time in my own life, music and comedy. When John Lennon wrote,"There's nothing you can do that can't be done, nothing you can sing that can't be sung"..I listened to the hope in that sentiment and found comfort. And every time I am made to laugh out loud or hear someone else laughing fully and beautifully I am reminded of the joy there is in living.

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    Gone
    Apr 25, 08:53pm

    "Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind."

    Shakespeare, often quoted by a sainted friend long gone when properly primed and inspired by the several glasses of an evening.

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    Gone
    Apr 26, 04:15pm

    Bukowski:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVdpfhsj6uI

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    stephen hastings-king
    Apr 26, 08:28pm

    This is one of those situations in which there have already been altogether too many words. Most of these words, particularly in the American corporate press since the Marathon bombing, have been stupid and destructive. I have friends who were directly affected by the blast--one who was a doctor in the tent at the finish line who expected to spend the day helping runners with the range of problems that attend the race, and his wife, who was directly across the street from the first explosion. Neither of them were hurt, fortunately, but still. I mention this because it's entirely possible to hold more than one attitude about such things, one of empathy for those less fortunate in the situation, and another relative to the vile, stupid blah blah blah that has followed it. So I haven't found words in general able to do or say much in this case.

    Instead, I offer this piece by Eliane Radigue. It's part of her Trilogie de la mort, inspired in part by her engagements with Tibetan Buddhism and in part by her long-standing work in electronic music using an ARP 2700 to generate very long pitches recorded onto analogue tape...It's a particular kind of listening.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnbGirPTgF0

    I would recommend playing it on the highest quality audio equipment you can access. It should be fairly loud. If you can get to a better-than mp3 version of the piece, play that (mp3s are highly compressed--this is about detail...to defeat compression, use volume)

    The piece is about an hour long.
    Just close your eyes and go with it.

    I don't know if it's "healing" in any traditional sense, but it can bring you somewhere and it seems to me that this somewhere is lovely.

    Sometimes that's what one needs.

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