When the Words are Too Much With Me

     That is a quote from a rock band that I listened to in 1992; the band was called Antennae; it had a talented friend from my childhood who sang and played guitar  in it. I enjoyed listening to the music, the whole album. They cut about 10 songs, some of them were covers which I have heard by others since. Some were original.

    I do not know if the line from that particular song was original to them or not, but I feel as though the line is borrowed from an English Renaissance poet like Wordsworth or Yeats or Coleridge, or perhaps even the Bard himself, William of Stratford (Shakespeare). (I have been reading a really good book all about Shakespeare lately, published in 2004 by a researcher named Wood.)

    Reading through the book about the background and history of William and his family and the wretched times of England in the late 1500s leading into the 1600s (people being tortured and dismembered and grotesquely displayed for their religious leanings by the newer government in power), I think back on my time experimenting and dallying a bit with the theatre, and the words and plays and books and thoughts related to the world of words. There was much to learn and to become acquainted with; it was at times difficult to know what to focus on, what to memorize, what to be dedicated to...

   Of course some of the content of the words of some works seemed less important to me, or less of value, or some others could be offensive to my standards and sensibilities, but most of the time the vast gamut of sheer works and scripts were in large part overwhelming and so expansive and hard to reach that I could be left wanting to know more at the same time as having a desire to concentrate, or attempt to memorize, at least a portion of some of the scripts, dialogs, songs, sonnets, or best quotations from the huge world of art and history, ideas and expressions.

   Expressions was a word used in mathematics, too, but while universally true, the numbers and formulas and tricks of manipulating computations and shapes and distances in the abstract did not amount to be as significant to me. I loved demographics, statistics, percentages, and some economic concepts, but the plotting of points and further extrapolated "expressions" and word problems seemed to be a painful morass of phantasmagoria and finite tooth picking. Visits to the dentist, check ups at the doctor, more needles and vaccines. Plug in the value to the formula, there you go! 3 steps, 4 steps, 8 steps, a dollar! So exquisitely perfunctory and banal...

   Words and concepts of history had more appeal to me... Even beyond the chemical and the biological subjects of truth and science, which have their graces as well. But how to capture, confine, highlight, expose, illuminate, share, create, develop, craft, bequeath, utter, extemporize, and elucidate, yea, operationalize and internationalize, even universalize the greatness of the art and truth that existed for us humans to cogitate and further implement into our hearts and minds, our living consciousnesses and beating, flailing, coursing hearts of action or apathy?

Yeah, that might sum it up somehow.

I memorized a song or two here, a quote or so there; I memorized and filled my brain with all the lines of the Siamese King of the Rogers and Hammerstein play, then as a young adult my senior year, using up my limited and finite bandwidth to dedicate to rote the words of two musical play writers, who injected their inherited biases of a Western play versus the Easternness of this Asian kingdom, the purported ideas and concepts of a polygamist and struggling to modernize king, mostly of fiction but somewhat of some truth.

So some 32 years later, I reflect on then and now, here and there, some studies and work and life lived since, some dreams realized, some dreams and hopes forestalled, some hearts broken, others healed, and some people who lived; others that did not, some buried, some burned, some eulogized, some categorized as another victim of a little cared-for war, in a far off place where armies were known to die, and me still checking my email accounts, grateful for another day. 

Reading, writing, thinking, breathing.

 

Analyzing, assessing, postulating. prognosticating, pontificating, meandering. And, one hundred or a thousand other gerunds, or "ings", verbs of both transitive and intransitive and linking natures.

Blogging. Yes, the curse and blessing this far into the 21st century: logging my thoughts and curiosities and collections, past the rudimentary journals or isolated paper publishings of hard print, as they call it.

A million (nay a billion) other writers and thinkers, producers of the Internet (the Internet of Things? the Internet of All Things?) and the ubiquitous media, clamoring and clambering for attention and words and thoughts, and perhaps some alleged actions, and betterment of humanity, and the environment, and progress towards the best long arch of history.

It can be hard to want to memorize so few words, and spend valiant and precious time on it (who selects them?), when the universe and our own throbbing planet being so full of the stories and narratives and "lines" that we encounter daily, weekly, monthly...

So yes, I get it.

When the Words are Too Much With Me

 

And I want, to get away.