I'm not quite sure who wrote the following- but the degree of simplicity it reflects - I can't not put into words - each speaker exists in a context - in a world that preceeds them - some are better than others in identifying the conditions that circumscribe them - and in doing so sum up and exploit the prevailing mood - they do not create the conditions they act in accord with them - many fail to bring to them more than a handful of followers others are more successful at fashioning the message - these we make exemplary - but they should never be thought to represent the power of language - but only how language may be fashioned to exploit fear as well as hope
Words can be as mind-influencing as a psychedelic. True enough -- ink on paper is inert. It can't act. When you read, all the action is by your brain -- recalling memories connected with those sounds and inky shapes. And piecing together new notions you've never had before. Now consider how the great indoctrineers worked: Hitler, Lenin, Freud, Plato, Aristotle, Mohammed, Christian preachers and other politicians, each with his ink-filled "Good Book". Imagine a fundamentalist with a tongue so bladed it could split logs. Imagine his sermon crackling with a vocabulary vivid, garish and ringing, and horrifying imagery. Or imagine Hitler haranguing about the Jews. You would not soon forget what you'd just been exposed to. When next you hear key words they used, there will arise memories and emotions different from what they were before the indoctrineers splashed them with harrowing new hues and echoes in your mind. The recall can be so potent as to hallucinate. Martin Luther King's words come back stirringly to me, with a startling and dynamic cinematic form. Skillful, infectious, metastatic, molders of memory, all of those "eloquent" men. Consider the hallucinatory impact of an aesthetic experience. When I first read Emiy Dickinson... The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door. . . . I've known her from an ample nation Choose one; Then close the valves of her attention Like stone. ...it felt as though the "Like stone" landed not in my skull, but in my thorax, my gut. And when I reread those words today, they continue to have a hallucinatory impact much like that. *Critical Voices* 21STREETPROJECTS 162 West 21 Street NYC, NY 10011
