Words

Words are strange things, aren't they? I mean, what are words? The ones you're looking at now are just shapes made out of pixels on a screen; or they're shapes of stain on paper. They exist somewhere in a kind of "between" world, with no real form at all. Yet look at the impact they can have.

I remember as a very small child - I think it was perhaps my first thought - how weird words were. I must have been about two, because I was standing, but smaller than the kitchen table top. My parents were standing in a doorway amd my father was saying something that made my mother change. I can still see her changing as the words emerged from his mouth. It fascinated me that he could affect her, and make water come out of her eyes, just with these things that existed but didn't exist at the same time.

It's so odd that our lives can become conditioned by words. They can trap us, or free us, depress us or enrage us, yet all the while they don't really exactly exist. They tap into our emotions, give us knowledge, deceive us, confuse us or trip us. We have an entire universe of words - how many yet undiscovered - that we can do all manner of things with.

And so our lives are built around them. What we fear can be perhaps let go of with the right combination of words which sit, like the numbers on an as yet to be won lottery ticket, somewhere in time and space.

Odd, that. The letter to the right person that leads to the right job, or the combination of words that create the perfect political statement, all exist somewhere, waiting to be plucked out of the ether and given form.

Just the right combination of words are there, somewhere, that might unlock all the knots in a person's mind, and give him or her the chance for peace of mind or joy, and yet a person may never encounter those words in an entire lifetime. Isn't that the strangest thing?

One set of words encountered may have just been enought to send one person off on to a course in their life, with beliefs and fears and desires that another set of words wouldn't. And yet we so often think that we know who we are.

Who knows who else I might have been had a not read "Catch 22" or "Down and out in Paris and London", or The Qabala, or Oscar Wilde, or John Steinbeck, or Shakespeare?
What If I'd never read "Stig of the Dump" as a child, and got the reading bug? Who might I have been, or not been?

Who might I have been had I read Proust or Hemingway, or Waugh, or more pulp fiction, or fantasy, or not really read books much at all, or conversed; but played soccer and read The Daily Mirror?

I know words have changed me. They've played a part in making me who I am. So mustn't it be so that who I am is an illusion, considering I might so easily have been someone else, with different opinions, different fears, different politics and such?

It's so strange how some people fear words, hese things that exist but don't exist. Some people give them such power, as if thinking that there are not some other words, somewhere, that can change their reality all over again.

It's why some people want to silence other people, I guess, from exploring the possibilities of reality. It's why "The Media", whatever that is in its role as The Great Informer, fights for control of the numbers of people it reaches.

It's why some people demand that another's voice not be heard, whether it's a lover or family member or friend, let alone enemy. That the other person might change reality is unbearable to some, so they seek to control what words are said, and who hears them or reads them.

Is it any wonder, then, that the propaganda machine is the way it is, whether it's some local, small time propaganda amongst a group of five people, or the propaganda of an entire nation?

And then, of course, there are the lies. The white lies and the black lies, the lies of ommission and the guaged insinuations. The deceptions. The masquerades, and the words that give hope, but are just empty. The words that, combined as they are, manipulate and trip, and draw people into self defeating realities, or realities of hatred and disillusion, negativity and destructive hopelessness.

How many people have lied to someone they claim they love, in the self deluding belief that their condescension is "protecting" that person? And yet, when they wonder why their reality falls apart as the mask becomes more and more of a burden to wear, and that person they so carefully love, whom they smile at while at the same time sitting on some dark secret that they bury so far down that it makes them want to puke, gets that much further away from them, and more of a responsibility?

And so, some words can trap us as effectively as any steel trap.