@Malcolm_Ocean persuaded me to try playing around with Twitter, so: hello. Here is a question I have, crudely put, tongue moderately in cheek: is writing bad? Should we, perhaps, stop doing it?
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Iain McGilchrist's @divided_brain has an absolutely fascinating bit about the evolution of language which suggests that it went in this order: first there was music. Then there was poetry. Then there was prose. Music is the *primordial* language.
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Furthermore McGilchrist identifies music and poetry as right hemisphere language - holistic and open - and prose as left hemisphere language - reductive and narrow (for a short intro watch https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain …).
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The Odyssey, one of the foundational texts of the entire Western intellectual tradition, came out of an oral tradition. The "texts" of this oral tradition were meant to be sung and heard. And *then* they were written down, for some reason.
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There is a magic to song. It can take you over. You can be thrillingly in relationship to it. It can bring you closer to the divine - a vessel for spiritual growth and awakening.
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Written poetry captures some but not all of the magic of song. There is an infinite loss in the inability to hear intonation, see gesture, etc. (which rap and spoken word reclaim!) but poetry written well has its own music.
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And then there's prose. Fuck. Just look at it. All those words that, if sung, might have actually meant something - might have actually carried some divine spark - casually flung onto paper or a screen. A torrent of little corpses.
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There are important things that are profoundly beyond the capacity of words to express. I am trying, and necessarily failing, to express one now. What do we do about this? Short of abandoning words for something else (tempting!), it seems to me that we can do this:
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Write prose that sounds like poetry. Write poetry that sounds like song. And write song that sounds like...?
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We can use words to point to the way out of words, into everything else. Rumi remix: out beyond ideas, there is a field. I'll meet you there?
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e e cummings gets it: http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/eec_opurplefinch.html …
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