Wordsickness

As much as I adore words, to the point of being an incurable mincer of them, I sometimes wish for and wonder how it would be to live without them.

I thought feverishly one sleepless night ago that words are what separate us from animals. How could we possibly be what we are without these spinal-tap shortcuts for conveying to each other our impressions, our wants and our needs? Bees dance the way to the food for each other. Birds flap a bit too close to knock an inferior off the perch. Dogs wheeze and whine to make you share that greasy morsel of food they smell in your grasp. But us? We use strings of symbols (or sounds) to argue about things we can't see, to marvel at concepts one can't point at, indeed, even to make a living. We who are people of the societal persuasion are entirely dependent on words to learn, interpret our surroundings, survive and subsist - unless we are alone. Or maybe even then.

Need I say that I couldn't sleep because too many words were crowding my head? I couldn't turn them off or wave them away like flies.

It's not actually a problem, and perfectly natural, that every impression made on our senses should automatically stream into an understanding of something we have experienced. Normally I have never considered that much of the time spent on viscerally interpreting my surroundings and taking action is accomplished via a million words silently exchanging places in my head to make a new formation of possibilities. But when you can't sleep and just want to actually STOP THINKING INTELLIGIBLE THOUGHTS, DAMMIT, it comes creeping that they're there, they're MANY, and they move constantly.

I shifted the pillow, cursed the double espresso and tried to think about pure wordless sounds like wind, waves, choirs singing vowels and birdsong. The effect didn't last for long, for some kind of running commentary kept bubbling up like a bubble trail from something living under water. It's very hard to dam it up.

I got as far as to thinking that every word is a fragment of time. Really. Every string of words I have ever, heard, read, thought, written or ignored is a directed attempt to steer the consciousness of oneself or people around. This requires attention, and attention is the act of giving someone your time. Or taking someone else's. This was a scary thought, because my sense of being very responsible for a lot of people's time suddenly dawned upon me, as well as the responsibility of choosing for myself whose word strings to devote my time to. How many times hasn't it been done purely in jest? How many times a day? To make time pass?

I wondered how many times in my life I have used the word 'and'.

And then I finally fell asleep and dreamt of sounds. Like the scraping of sparrows' feet on gravel. And rustling leaves. My walk in the botanical garden that day had decided to stay on my retina overnight, which called for a symphony of scrapes, soft murmuring and rustles.

And when I woke up, I wondered if this meant I need to grow up a little regarding my use of language, time and where to direct people's thoughts with what I choose to say. Or to just marvel at how much of the little details we convey daily still afford us the time to do, understand and accomplish grand and glorious things all the same.