Words

 “Traditionally we begin every new session with words,” said the group leader.

“Words?” asked one of the members.  “What have we been using up till now?”

Words.  We have been using words, units of language, to capture ideas and pith them in display cases, pins stuck with surgical care fixing them where they can be seen and admired.  Words, taken separately and enjoyed for their iridescent casings, frilly antennae, delicate wings, glowing with a luminosity of their own, pulsating with an inner beat, words for their own sake, as jewels, as poetry.  

But we take those words and, like jewels and bits of precious metals and shining beads, thread them on a string, join them together so they are not individuals awaiting our scrutiny and admiration, but a colony, a line of ants toiling together with purpose, performing the task of story telling, of description, of making a garment out of threads.  

We cannot tell a story without words.  They are not always audible; they may be a string of images, like pearls, forming in our minds when we watch a ballet, or listen to a piece of music.  We give the abstract meaning through words, labels to first-encountered objects, to new experiences.  We talk about those experiences, make them into our own stories through the use of words.

The young mother revisits the details of her child’s birth.  It is a tale she never tires of telling, for someday her child will want to know his origins, and she will be ready with his story.

It is language, words, the joining together one after another of nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles which gives us the stuff of our lives, and when words begin to fail us, when we stop mid-sentence, unable to continue because the next bead to be strung has evaporated, or has been replaced by a black hole that creates an impassable lacuna in our train of thought, we start to panic; for we equate loss of words with the first signs of dementia, of decline which leads to the inevitable silence of death.

The story continues, is told from one generation to the next, and words are its vehicle.  Polonius asked Hamlet, “What are you reading?” and he, on the verge of madness, voicing a lament of the discontinuity of life ended too soon, the orphan forbidden to mourn, answered, “Words, words,” and slammed the book shut, for that story was over and done, as his own sentences unravelled into their disparate parts.