Hi – I’m Georgie, writer, editor, and general rambler around The Phraser.
This post is about words.
Have you ever thought about words? Each little word? About how one word can grow until it’s a whole language. About how a baby today may end up sending us a message from a faraway galaxy, and yet that baby probably learnt its first words in just the same way that the Romans learnt their first words – from their carers and those around them. I find the idea reassuring somehow, especially since I’ve been playing with words for this collection of pieces for The Phraser.
I’ve also realised that words are like superpowers, but such a part of us that we don’t even notice them. Sometimes we don’t think about them at all, about what they can do, nor that we’ve each been issued our own stash of these superpowers that we use all the time. Talking is what we do, except now talking doesn’t always come with bodies attached. And it used to. That means that our words can land somewhere we can’t even see, perhaps not even imagine, and we’ve no idea how they’ll land, what they’ll find when they arrive.
Then there are the words that come towards us, sent by others. They keep coming, often without humans you can touch or body language you can see. Instead they arrive through screens, over the airways, or plugged directly into our ears. And they might be camouflaged, disguised, hidden behind images, buried in long speeches, or jutting out of jokes. Or they could be insults, kicking and hurting, or strong as soundbites. They don’t care what we’re doing. If we let them in, they come. Tiny invaders, platoons of them, capable of unimaginable speeds.
They travel so fast that sometimes it’s impossible to get a warning of what the words are going to say, impossible to know the way one will link to others, or how they’ll shift and change when they drop their loads into our minds. They could come soft as parachutes or full of bullets. They might even be thought up by a machine with no human involved at all. And we’ll react – could be anything – fall over laughing, sink into despair, go crazy with rage, or soft as jelly.
And since we can hardly stop words now, our minds and bodies somehow have to find a way through. And we’re still learning – learning to hold steady, to grow, to love, to see what’s rotten, to protect, and to stay hopeful. It’s exhausting but it’s what we’ve got to do … to work out a path through the jungle.
Words are tricky that’s for sure, so I add mine to the mix with all the care I can. They’ll come as audio versions of my posts using the words that have helped me to look out at the world, to focus my curiosity and my imagination. I’m not claiming to get it right but I keep trying, and I hope the results might be interesting.
One final thing – after all this about words my next audio post is actually about the opposite of words – silence. I hope you’ll enjoy it. It would be great to have your company.
Thanks for listening.
The photographs in the gallery below are a selection chosen to reflect some of the places I’ve been and the details that have drawn my camera closer
