I have always been strongly attuned to the metaphysical power of language. Like music, language has frequencies, rhythms, strophes and antistrophes. Language when conveyed at its most powerful has a weight which ranges past the surface into the deep harmonics of the soul itself.
To me, powerful language has always been the manifestation of a minor form of synaesthesia. Sometimes you can see the words glowing in your mind, sometimes you can taste them in your mouth, and sometimes you can feel them in your eyes. Not literally, of course, but in the sense that they register on many different levels at once.
Saskatchewan poet S.D. Johnson caught the sense of it correctly when she titled her magnum opus “Hymns To Phenomena,” hymns to what is apparent before our eyes and also unknowable and mysterious.
Everywhere in this world we encounter ideas, sights and mysteries which go beyond the limits of normal language, but by striving to convey them in spite of that we can find language which bridges into realms of being far beyond the ordinary.
Whether descending into the depths of Yeats’ “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” or seeking transformation through Shakespeare’s “sea change” into “something rich and strange” or striving to understand the divine mystery of Ibn Arabi’s “Youth Steadfast in Devotion,” who is “knowledge, the known and the knower” and created to speak only in “signs and symbols,” all of these pulse through the written word, through the ears and straight into heart.
It is these deep harmonics which create our delight in the power of language, and why certain speakers or speeches continue to resonate with us through decades, centuries and sometimes even millennia. The Bible possesses these harmonics as anyone reading aloud from the transcendent book can attest.
But those harmonics exist in many different great works. William Wordworth’s “Tintern Abbey” taps into them, for example.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:
Language has power, and when language seeks to give voice to that which is transcendent and beautiful, it has even more power.
It carves channels in the stones of our hearts so the water of life and love can flow more easily through them.
