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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Tear off the mask. Your face is glorious. —Rumi

  

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"We see the seasons pass, the moons fatten and go dark, infants grow to old men, but this is not time. 

We see the water strike against the shore and with each wave we say a moment has passed, but this is not time. Inside, we feel our strength go from a baby’s weakness to a youth’s strength to a man’s endurance to the weakness of a baby again, but this is not time, either, nor are your whiteman’s clocks and bells, nor the sun rising and the sun going down. These things are not time."

“What is it then?” said Father Damien. “I want to know, myself.” 

“Time is a fish,” said Nanapush slowly, “and all of us are living on the rib of its fin.” Damien stared at him in quizzical fascination and asked what type of fish.

“A moving fish that never stops. Sometimes in swimming through the weeds one or another of us will be shaken off time’s fin.” 

“Into the water?” asked Damien.

“No,” said Nanapush, “into something else called not time."


—Louise Erdich
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

 

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The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in 

and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.

—The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

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