Sometimes I wonder what my life might be like if I’d been born into a time when people still “valued” the written word, poured over it, with full immersion in the philosophical process, noticing its infinite nuances…with a love of beauty, a love of wisdom. A time… When receiving a poem, letter, or book might be an exciting gift, a thrilling experience; and not a chore. Not for everybody, never for everybody—but for enough people, to matter.
I have a gift that is utterly useless, to most “modern” people. Like a song that resonates beyond our hearing range. Sometimes I wonder if the Earth feels the same way… Wondering why we are unable to hear her subtlety like we hear a thunder storm, earthquake, or mosquito buzzing. I write a garden, they see only dirt. I write a forest, and they wonder what trees they should cut down first. I give them healing herbs, but they call them weeds.
I think a lot about my “value” in Capitalism.
It’s hard not to, too, when your life has price tags on it.
See, if an artist writes more than a few sentences? It’s for the same reason that a painter does more than simply draw a line and make a scribble or two. For the same reason that you cannot de-scribe the painting adequately in common words (“It was a tree.” Oh really? Did it grow from a seed?)
The painter spends hours and hours and hours crafting this ineffable thing—in hopes that you will give it 5 minutes of your time, and not chuck a crayon down on the table and say “Pffft, next time just scribble with this and don’t waste my time.”
Birds in the sky, in the shape of a V, and perhaps they say more than just “tweet tweet” to the painter. They’re living, breathing…in formation. Fluttering with the effect of a butterfly, or similar, if you catch my drift. A simile to make you smile. But a cold draft meanwhile might make you shiver and frown, the way it brought two birds down, with one stone-cold sound. Bones breaking, hearts slowing now. A stone’s throw from the truth of what we are…but that’s neither here nor there. Vibrations in the atmosphere. The circle of life, at the whim of human hands.
Like the written word, inscribed by a feather pen. A line drawn in the sand…washed away on the next wave.
Now you see it, now you don’t.
That painting wasn’t finished until it was completed, as a whole, and if you were to strip it of its individual parts you’d have only pigment and oil and canvas and brushes…materials to make your own picture with, with no “re: semblance” to the original source.
Do you know what the word “indivisible” truly means?
The way you know what visible, divisive, dual, indescribable, and individual means?
Scribble scribble scribe babble in Babel, baby of Babylon?
Do you know what double-entendre is, or what black and white make blended together with the light and darkness of grayscale?
Do you know what all color reflected is, and all color absorbed?
Do you even know what you know?
(Read that again. In more ways than one.)