Words

BAGUIA

In the beginning was the Word; and creation was spoken into being: sun and moon, planets and comets, ocean and rain, animals and avians, fish and fowl, trees and crawlies, flowers and fruits, man and woman.

In the beginning was the Word; and words were spoken: thought and will, patterns of life, blessings and more blessings, laws of life.

There were anti-words too some time after the beginning: rumors and lies, empty promises and fake news (yes, the ancient serpent invented it, not today’s trolls), finger-pointing, excuses, and blame-shifting. The consequences were bitter: words released as curses, though with a glimmer of hope, the words of prophecy.

Then words became the substance of conversations, stories, poems, songs and tools in word wars, and constraints on life in laws, statutes, decrees. Hieroglyphs. Cuneiform. Script. Latent words became paintings on cave walls, pyramids pining for stars, statues contemplating riddles.

Words made prophets and demagogues, kings and rebels, priests and penitents, scribes, heralds, gossipmongers, apothecaries, sorcerers, lovers.

Scribes wrote on papyrus. Monks transcribed on parchment. Gutenberg wrought the press. Tracts, books, pamphlets flew of the presses, and with words, peoples imagined their nations into being, the church was cloven, dogmas were proclaimed, anathemas pronounced, demons were exorcised, saints canonized, sciences theorized, fictional worlds conceived and populated. Words flowed from pages to boards, to discs, to phones, to screens and e-book readers, and readers who flipped leaves now swipe monitors too.

When words fell asleep, they dreamt dreams that sculptors and painters turned into murals and icons and portraits and landscapes. And in man’s thirst for precise visuals of the dreams of words the still camera was born, followed by its siblings, film, silver screen and the tube.

Words were restless elsewhere, traveling down wires and through the airwaves, hence radio and telephones and microphones and the gramophone and their descendants: cassette tapes, compact discs, audio files.

But do not forget: never was there a time when words could not be exchanged by men and women face to face.

Here we are in a world of words, words flying fast, fueling international hostility, seducing fundamentalists into terrorism, turning voters into fanatics, providing for spin meisters, bot makers, trolls and fake news writers in networked economies of deception, stunted and flattened sometimes in virtual hearts and thumbs-up signs and emojis, interrupted by cursors.

Does it matter if a music video has been viewed on YouTube more than a billion times, or if a song has been downloaded over and over again? So what if one’s Twitter and Facebook posts are followed by more than 5,000 people, or if a popular book has become a blockbuster movie with multiple sequels?

Here is what matters: What do the words and their sleeping and dreaming and the readings of their dreams turn the world into?

Does content build a universe of justice and peace, freedom and love?

Or does it, aided by the media, only whet the appetite for blood and blunt the compassion of the heart and sow weeping and cynicism and discontent?