No. 22 Golden Lane

Literacy itself was once considered a form of magic.  To look an an incomprehensible text that appeared no more than random markings and then, from these, to be able to know and speak the words and thoughts of kings and priests was surely the art of a sorcerer.  Something of that magic and mystery remains, embedded in human consciousness.

Certainly there are confusions of word and object and idea, problems of emotional connotation and comprehension of figurative expression in forms concrete and abstract, and mysteries of linguistic apprehension that provoke thought and debate.  Language nevertheless moves, challenges and stimulates reader and listener.

Logos

The virtue of the written word is its power of transmission across time and space.

The tongue asserts meaning and absurdity but briefly, while these letters express memory, ideas, description, instruction, imagination, and many of the vagaries of human thought over continents, over lifetimes and generations.

On the Sidewalk

Replicants, revenants, doppelgangers, and the repetition of history, birth and death, ceremony, ritual, honor, tradition, gunfire, bugle call--

Look at the way the light falls in photographs, as if these unknown and unknowable people are blessed, caressed, confessed divine or favored by forgotten gods, heroes, torch-bearers, crowned by the tribe, the culture--

While with these words anyone and no one may be joined, linked, connected through magic beyond warriors, farmers, women, offspring, into settings of clerks, scribes, those who have the king's tongue and ear and are uplifted and buried in the embrace of civilization.

We call on those things to which we are attached-- coins, radios, salt, voices, scandals, dangers, pleasures, sea changes of consciousness in bottles bearing messages over tides, waves generated by brain or mind or transmission towers--

Upon these we stake our reality (do we not?) and create all those impossibilities that never existed.