Lately, it has been easy for me to understand words. And to that, I owe a few regards to my Speech class in the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon. Say nothing about it being a mere acting class. It's much more than that. It's a class on understanding how to communicate an idea - maybe not your own, but an idea nonetheless. In a way, it is a picnic stop on the path to self understanding. (For more about that [self understanding] see my previous post - or, better yet, just simply assume we know nothing about anything about ourselves.) And at this meadow meal, there is a theme song underscoring that has absolute meaning for the moment and none for the next; so, in a way, the music knows us better than we do - especially when it means the most.
What is it in a lyric that makes our hearts sing? There are a bunch of letters on a page, or sounds in the air. But, there's more; the way the singer uses the words with their voices to communicate some phenomenal bit of pragmatism and sentient thought. In a moment, a single word can tell the story of human history or of love. And then the Earth purges it all and starts from nothing again, repeating the bittersweet cycle of this vicious art until finally there is nothing left to purge and meaning is lost. But really, it's not lost; it's just dormant, waiting for the end.
Words are like songs in themselves; symphonies for the classically inclined. They have phases and movements and stories and peaks and valleys and empty oceans and seas of thought. But, like every song or symphony, if you listen to it over and over again, it becomes (or seems to become) shorter and then simpler and then less meaningful and eventually - when all the instruments sink into the stage - just sound. Or at least that's how I see it at this particular moment.
Photo credit: http://www.segisramirez.com/
