A Wordsmith is Reborn

It's a new year which strikes me as a convenient time to make this a new blog. No mission statements but I've rediscovered something I lost and I feel the need to wave it across the sky like a flag of flame because if that's what I want it to be then that's what it is.

If that's what I want it to be then that's what it is. Background? Just what you need. In high school I had a really great teacher, maybe my favorite ever, and on his wall he had a quote from some old dude which essentially made the claim that in poetry there was beauty, and in science there was death. This was something I identified with for a long time. Words, my friends, are the substance of life, the primary means of transmission of love of strength of courage of fear of hope of dreams of death of despair of the whole far-flung spectrum of the human experience whereas science, science is numbers on a black-board. My whole being boils down to some random gravitational constant, you say? I am nothing but polypeptide bonds nd nucleotides scribbled on cell walls, is it? POPPYCOCK!! Give me the Word and I will write you a Hero. Give me nucleotides and I will flush them down the toilet.

I have come a long way since then. Words would be tough without nucleotides, for one, and there is a vast and iridescent gallery of worlds which you cannot access with words alone. It turns out that the poem is not the final authority on what is, and Science is far from the outstretched sterile arm of death. We are products of a natural world that is far more than human, yet armed with Science we can be more than what we always have been and diligently chart our location in a universe that expands far beyond the limits of the mind. It is, of course, with the mind that we comprehend the universe, but only if it is turned out into it.

But where does that leave words? For a while in the dust. For a while in the dust, but in my quest to figure out what exactly it is we are and what exactly it is this is they have risen again like an endless spectral host, shimmering in the sunlight and shapeless against the stars motionless yet poised to move at... a word. Science has taught me that reality is fixed, that it moves according to patterns, rules, laws of nature, and IT DOES! It does those things and moves as it does, IT'S REAL! But reality is also a great and barely bound swirl of potentiality waiting for a wordsmith to come along and command it to move. Nature has laid the groundwork and the backdrop over billions of years of slow, measured churning, combining and recombining, trial, error, the slow, gradual accretion of complexity where it is warranted, and it continues to. It will continue to somewhere perhaps endlessly into the farthest reaches of time. But here, in this moment, in my very human life, WORDS CONSTRUCT REALITY and what I say goes if I say it loudly enough. Remember that for that is now what this blog is about.