I wrote a poem about this last year:
Tongue-Tied
I hate the phrase tongue-tied.
It brings to mind fleshy ropes tangled in knots,
snakes dangling to the ground.
It's not really your tongue anyway;
more a sort of word jam,
a blockage somewhere below your epiglottis
that clogs the vocal flow
from your larynx to your lips.
The brain reacts,
firing words that bounce from
the frontal to the temporal lobe,
ricocheting through neurons
like excited bolts of lightning
blinding the brain with short-circuited electricity.
The amygdala's rebelling and swelling,
refusing to react.
Words revolt.
Language as arrows,
pointers to arbitrary concepts.
Plague of subjectivity,
colouring the object.
Abstract made concrete,
infinite become finite.
Il faut que we comply, reify,
pseudo-communicate through artificial maxims.
Break the word jam with false meaning.
And once you've learnt to
jump metaphorically from
object to object,
it's hard to stop. Suddenly
the night sky's made of onyx,
the sun's element is Au
and the moon's a ghost.
Alice's Adventures in Languageland,
reasoning through impossibility.
Images are more efficient
in converting electricity than words.
To return to the metaphorical sheep
(who have wandered out of
their safe, symmetrical pen into
the Wonderland of infinite impossibility),
words can be weapons.
Language as power.
Meaning hidden in metaphor,
pointing beyond the words.
I find it really hard to express what I'm thinking, or to even identify it a lot of the time. It's like it gets jammed somewhere in between my brain and mouth, and always comes out wrong. I find writing easier though.
11 Aug 2012, 11:52 am
