(left: opening page of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting: a rare signed limited ed.; only book of hers never published in England)
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–their power, possibilities, and beauty, is usually an interesting person.
And so it’s not surprising that creativeness with words as in writing, speaking, and expression with visuals is, likewise, interesting.
‘All we have’, so to speak, are words right from our birth to what Paul Simon called “the instant of my death”.
Quite often, of course, people abuse words (and others) through misuse and agenda-ed use of words, often to manipulate, exploit, or control. And, although, I see thru these kinds of negative applications (they’re so damned common and widespread), I no longer choose to study these or dwell with those kinds of people and situations.
My own life has had more to do with personal expressiveness, just trying to communicate clearly, and saying the things I’ve thought and felt and wanted to express in process.
I thank words, too, for their uncanny to express the richness, complexity, and intensity of life experience. Think Keats, King Lear, Hamlet, Dickinson, Woolf, Whitman, “Ode: Intimations on Immortality”, etc. It is this quality and these possibilities that have guided and elevated the quality of my life and my understanding of Life, human nature, and others.
These are the words I carry about in me, in my mind, heart, spirit, soul. It is language and its glorious expressions that have mattered most to me, reflected in my career path as senior high English teacher, writer, poet, and songwriter.
I see a lot of shallowness, frivolity, distraction, stupidity, conventionality, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, materialism, greed, money obsession, violence, limits, limitations, and lives in chains around me out there; none of which interest me.
Instead, it is to language, thought, creativity, imagination, poetry, and the Arts, that I continue to pledge myself. Ways and means to express the conflicts, irony, paradoxes, and truths of Life. What has mattered most that I never had any doubt about valuing and believing in from age 16 on.