In persuit of the essence
But what are the words actually? Where do they come from, and where are they shaping their course to? Are they energy, substance or ineffable?
Well… When monocracy seemed to have been installed forever, the refuge was the presence of the words, of the language, of the phantoms of imagination. Brilliant ideas or swooshed humdrums. Survival. The words weren’t able to change destinies, but they were therapeutic in maintaining humanity right-minded.
In America for instance, time is everything. It is sold on TV, in every push cart with hot-dogs, in the offices of insurance companies, in slot-machines, in the hail “Have a nice day!”– that everyone automatically utters for the only reason- of getting rid of you.
The economy of concentrated words and formulas of conventional language doesn’t come, in our case, from bareness, but from the fear of not delaying too much in a phrase that wouldn’t bring anything extra besides “Have a nice day! Time is money.”
Let’s take, for instance, the most used word in America: ^love^, that was repeated until nothing was left of it. In there, everybody loves from morning to evening and nobody restrains from making their love public. Before hanging up, either you talk with your husband, your child, your best friend or a colleague, you’ll automatically say “love you”, a sort of “see you!” but with cordial assertions.
Love broadens to objects, dishes, landscapes and situations. You can incessantly hear: Oh, my God, I love this, I love that… without tinge, ignoring the existence of the synonyms (between liking, cherishing, having an appeal for somebody and loving it’s a difference based not only on intensity, but on time too). Thus, the word disappears, its force cancels, its sense evanesces, and the unthinkingly invoked love stands for.. nothing.
It used to be so hard to utter loving words, what insensate pirouettes were making the phrases, how people used to ponder their intensity, to use an entire allusive linguistic arsenal, convinced that the inhibition it’s part of the education and that it would be indecent to steam the mystery and the energy of the most powerful word by randomly pronouncing it, or that once uttered, people would feel vulnerable. And what if, furthermore, the words would blunder into a wall? Of all that can humiliate us, the ridicule is the most blushful, isn’t it?
Happiness’s tints hover between entertainment, having fun and enjoying, palliative obsessions to induce yourself the idea that you are actually doing something with your life. In the halls of the theatres from Broadway the comic is haunted with every gesture and every word, followed by laughter bursts.
Paradoxically, the excessive use of pithy words (love, happiness, God, etc.) is, in fact, using occasions to shun living profoundly their sense. The language is used in reverse, not for loosing and communicating, but for hiding us beyond shallow words, for making us sink in ourselves.
