6. THE POWER OF WORDS
"There is no telling when
In the drafty annals of human kind
A shadow settled on the brain
Where Attraction reigned supreme.
Of questionable and dubious origin
The shadow was not part of the original
Package—the Initial System was
Famously humming along
Without it.
And there came a time when
In the narrows of a budding mind
The shadow cast a feeler
Reached a pulsing stream
And settled there for good—
Steady now in an unsteady flow
It was Reason dipping a toe
In an emotional swell—the shadow
Animated when Emotion rushes by
And drowsy when there is no tickle.
Posted outside the routes of
Sensory perception
Reason was in the dark from the start.
The intruder took notice when
Utterances: you—me—there—water—
Implied an image or gesture,
Utterance substituting
Translating an object or a movement
Into a denotative sound.
Next time around
The vocal arrangement recalls
To the mental screen
A co-relate image—
The cognitive image in memory
Holding up to Reason
A rear view mirror.
Reason proceeds by looking back—
In hindsight, after the fact.
Any spoken language is an array of
Specific sound arrangements exchanged by
A people in agreement as to which utterances
Stand in for which appearances or events—
Words substituting replacing actual things
With verbal sounds—
Words creating a world
Separate and different
From the world
Familiar through the senses.
The senses identify things by
Their energy content
By the specific impulses wavelengths
Pulsations or vibrations a thing generates
While words—names given to things—
Strip them bare of their energy content
Render them static.
What brings words to life
Are the emotional intonations aloft
In the speaker's voice—
The word-sound impregnating
The stripped & static image
With a human energy content
Alien to things.
Understanding of what is said
Hinges on shared cognitive images.
Pointing to a bush in your garden
You may say to a visitor
This is my favorite rose.
The tone of your voice flickers
The image of a rose in his mind
And makes him ask
What color is the rose.
The answer calls for
Two separate memory events—
The speaker must recall the shade of color
Stored in sensory memory
Then recall the name of the color
Stored in verbal memory.
Providing that both
The speaker and the listener
Share similar imagery
The understanding of what was said
Calls for two similar memory clicks
In the listener's mind—
Before the verbal message makes sense
He will have to recall the word
That names the color then
Visualize the color behind by the word.
Still the color held in each mind
Might differ considerably.
The information however
Does not stay put for Attraction
Binds words to a deeper level—
The rose image denoting
The word's meaning hooks into
An image pattern specific to roses,
While verbal sound intonations hook
Into an underlying feeling pattern.
In the coupling there
Originates a third layer of patterns—
A shorthand word patterns
Stripped bare of particulars.
That word pattern stitches together
Sensory memory with verbal memory
One word at a time.
(Can it be that centuries later
These shorthand word-markup-signs
Surfaced in pictographs and letters?)"
*
"Having acquired a language
Reason makes itself known—
During emotional upheavals
It insists
"Stop! Don't do that!"
And the emotion halts—
Not because a command was issued
But because the voice sounded alarm—
Fear shutting off the valves
Fear freezing e-motion in mid track.
Once Reason noticed that
In its wake the energy emoted
Leaves a trail of sensations—
A tingle enough
To pounce on the flow with
Coaxing or harassing verbal sounds—
Reason was ready to assert itself in earnest
And entered the traffic."
*
"Take a feeling—
It arrives like a breeze and
Before you know it
It fades away as do ripples on water.
Emotion rises from the deep
In a single wave rushing outward
Spilling as it must.
But not every feeling is strong enough
To trigger physical action and
A budding Emotion may halt at
Any one of the three thresholds
The energy crosses on the way out.
The first threshold is at the spine
A tingling announcing that
Energy-on-the-rise is about to spill
Into the corpus proper.
The second is in the seat
Of an emotion whereto
The energy spills collects
Lingers or swells
Taking measure of its strength.
The third is at the floodgates
That trigger muscular contractions
Whereby the body rids itself
Of that energy influx—
A chuckle a shiver a tear
Telling the one out there
How you feel about it."
*
"Reason crossed another milestone
When it noticed that a silent utterance
Reverberates the hollows of the head
Enough to rouse the underground tremors
Of a budding emotional response.
To this day Reason does just that—
It talks to itself and listens and
Hearing a familiar tremor either
Ignores it or pounces on it
Like a cat on a mouse.
If the trapped energy is
On the verge of triggering action
And Reason chooses to repress it
No problem—
Reason can shut off the flow
At any point and divert the energy
From its intended course either
Back into the brain
To stimulate thought or
Using emotional channels
Reroute the energy into activities
Intended to advance
Some rational pursuit."
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