babbling emotions

Seven centuries ago, the Persian poet and philosopher Rumi extolled “the eye of the heart” as seventy-fold more seeing than the “sensible eyes” of the intellect. 

Growing up, language has been this tool that emits might and power – expanding reality but also limiting and contracting what is perceived and manifested. 

Tower of Babel

The limits of language and my deepening relationship with it often feel frustratingly fragile and futile. 

Like a child, flat footed getting up to take its first tentative steps, I stagger and flounder - adrift in a sloshing sea of words. Unable to fully grasp much less capture concepts – how much more articulate them accurately? 

Add to the broiling brew a history brimming with secrets and skeletons lumbering and lurching through a minefield of misinterpretation and recollection.  

What happens to the eye of the heart when it has been constantly and consistently blinded and blamed? Groomed and gaslighted growing up? Wined and dined to a glut? 

Dimmed and distorted by deluded and deranged denial at every turn. Slithering through the sleazy slime of a sabotaged slippery slope. The rug wrenched from under an already shaky unreliable world. 

None of it in my control yet each needs some nuanced navigating at every turn. 

A citizen of crime and punishment - I watch and learn through my child’s comprehension, and on into adulthood. 

Struggling to master command of the language – weak words weaponized. In comprehension or communication. In expression or exasperation. In delivery or driven direction. 

Ideas burst forth in an upheaval or frothing emotions. Feelings ran amok under pressure cooker thoughts. 

In the past, it was assumed that our emotions are merely animal energies or primal impulses - wholly separate from our cognition. 

Instead, they are now recognized as a centerpiece of moral philosophy - with any theory of ethics requiring an understanding of emotions. 

Being bilingual in language and environment teaches me that all words are stained by context – steeped in things beyond their definition. Defining a word lies in how it is used - in the meaning we assign to it. 

What the word holds for its user or recipient is what defines that word. How a word is used can change the definition of a word. The dictionary must catch up to us – to how a word can evolve through time and circumstance, as we grow and change along. 

Wordsmiths and storytellers need not be intimidated by definitions and standardization. 

We use a dictionary to learn the rules. To introduce us to new and unfamiliar words and worlds. What happens in the blank spaces and outlying margins as we explore and learn, can open new vistas. 

Emotions reveal us as vulnerable to events that we do not control – any neediness and lack of self-sufficiency. Emotions are both necessary and disorienting - acknowledging our own vulnerabilities. 

This is the concentric circle to how culture works. Often what is in the margins changes the culture. The culture then captures it, commercializes it, brings it into the center – once centralized, it shoots out a product. 

The culture engulfs innovation, brings it into the center, and then spits it out again. A homogenized commodity is circulated, the cycle keeps repeating, until things degrade and are destroyed. In a constantly circulating cycle of culture. 

This is how empires collapse. 

What's the point of all of it? Language has made my life. I am here because of it. I've been able to materially support myself because of this thing that has no weight, is not tangible, and remains undefined. 

Literature and writing do not really save us the way we want it to. Because in essence it is still the tool of tyranny. The first thing an authoritarian regime does is capture newspapers and media outlets - change the stories, create new narratives.

Monsters making monstrous moments, inhumane insanity while harnessing humanity’s greatest treasures. Art, music, literature, architecture, imagery. 

Sceptic or romantic, stoic or indulgent – the magic created on a page, once released, gains a life and momentum of its own. 

Set free into the world and out of our control.