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6. THE POWER OF WORDS
"There is no telling when
In the drafty annals of human kind
A shadow settled on the surface
Of the sphere wherein Attraction
Reigns 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
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 cognitive image—
Memory holding up to Reason
A rear view mirror—
Reason proceeding 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 was said
Hinges on shared cognitive images:
Say pointing to a bush in your garden
You say to a visitor
This is my favorite rose.
The tone of your voice brings
A smile to the visitor's face while
The image of a rose flickering in his mind
Makes him ask
What color is the rose.
The answer calls for
Two separate memory events—
One recalls the shade of color
Stored in sensory memory
The other 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 hindsight clicks
Reversed in the listener's mind—
Before the verbal message makes sense
He will have to recall
The word that names the color then
The actual color pulled up 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
Originates a third layer of patterns—
A layer of shorthand word patterns
Basic to a language
But stripped bare of particulars—
Nevertheless
Word patterns stitch together
Sensory memory with verbal memory
One word at the time.
(Can it be that centuries later
These shorthand word-markup-signs
Surfaced in pictographs scripts
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
On the way out the energy emoted
Leaves in its wake
A trail of sensations—
A tingle enough
To pounce on the flow with
Coaxing or harassing verbal sounds—
Ready to assert itself in earnest
Reason 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 tingle 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."
*
"I, Stone, happened to be
Held in hand when
The hand stopped in mid-air—
Reason had crossed another milestone
Noticed it was enough to reverberate
In the hollows of the head a silent utterance
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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