words are beings

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The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. 

At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.


—Carl Gustav Jung

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But words are beings: the game will bewitch you until you become part of it; you will spend your life defending the right of the game to lure you into the maze, to lure you into humour. You read and you do not understand what you read, and so you read more, enjoying the power of words to differ from the mundane. Words are waves. You learn to swim out of the tempting wave which covers you with foam. 

Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the mysterious: “Come to me, to me in search of what you know not,” the blue calls to you. 

Luck and the coastguard saved you from certain death with the sound of words. The lamp of the sea still scratches, but you have not shunned your love to the sea, the source of the primal rhythm. 

How is the sea imprisoned in three letters, the second of them overflowing with salt? How do letters expand to make room for all these words? How do words expand to embrace the world?


—Mahmoud Darwish
Absent Presence
Mohammed Shaheen version

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