Wednesday 26 September 2007

Words

This is something of an offshoot of the Secondary Objectivity post, where Aldous Huxley describes places such as certain places possessed of a "numinous presence...the psychic presence of men's thoughts & feelings projected into objectivity & haunting the sacred place."
Similarly, words are psychic vessels or vortices which attain their significance through the focusing of human intelligence within these symbols, and which are nourished & deepened by the accumulated concentration of minds projected within these mental forms. In this is something of the sacredness of the Word, where the attuned mind isn't simply using a kind of utilitarian communication tool, but is immersing itself within a living network of psychic vortices which have attained a greater charge of significance through the inflowing of men's thoughts into these intellectual pathways. We are not talking about objective objects after all, but nodes within consciousness.
Similarly to an animal, a word or even language sickens & dies when life ceases to flow into its forms, though there is always the possibility of future resurrections when later minds renew these corpses of thought with the breath of consciousness.
"Corpses of thought" being a line in Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan to describe charred books within a burn out library.

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