Words have a life in you, down to a ghostly cellular level.   Words become a part of the organic being's life.  Words shape, reform, guide inner growth.  We are the patient etherized upon a table, words the spooky doctor.

What you write, what you say, therefore, is rooted in the words you have in you, and more words will come as such, based on your being.  It's the words that come out of you that lift you, or defile you.  The old Christian understanding of what comes out of a man has a depth and an accuracy;  tending to the vineyard of our words and thoughts is a useful practice.  Words can be health, and they can be illness.  This is perhaps why it as an old adage that saying nothing is the best recourse sometimes.

A relationship with another person yields the fruit of who we are as a being, through words.

The character, the college kid in the book I wrote, to bridge the gap between male and female, as a last effort, unanswered, rhetorical, is told he's crazy when he brings the princess flowers for the second time, and his line is, "Crazy to bring flowers to a bring flowers to a beautiful girl."  Nothing more need be said. He said those words, and with them in his possession, he can go on and live his life.

Did the words have any specific motive?  Any particular coveted aim?   Did the words bring terms insistent upon as if in some deal, some bargain?  No.  The words did not.  The words were simply words, observations.  The human being the vessel of them.  

But one was a kid back then.  Later on, you learn a bit more about protecting the words.  You can try to remain in a youthful mode, but the adult learns better to keep the human being in appropriate places doing good things.  This can be solitary work, not the free-flowing swashbuckling kid approach.

Lincoln came to have a seriousness toward his words.  Perhaps he had to, from the professional angle he came to it, at it.  But his seriousness was in keeping his words appropriate to the human soul, and certainly he was well-read in such matters, Old Testament, Shakespeare, etc.  His youth as a reader let him intuitively shape himself from within, so that words had physical weight, cellular material, particular ways of flowing that could not be countered or circumvented.  His words carry the nobility that words.  Of course, he could joke, and engage in humorous frivolity, clevernesses, but the weight of words remain.  And if one were able to write, say, two of his noble addresses and deliver them as such, that would be quite a sufficient and manly literary life.  He was a poet.  Words always meant something to him, had an inner personality in accordance with which one must bring himself into agreement with as being altogether righteous and proper.

One could argue that this is why he lives on, strangely, ghost-like, over the American scene, his cracked negative sagacious smile saying that he had accomplished, as far as words, all that he would have wanted.  (One could say that JFK leaves a similar impression, as a man "true to his word," a phrase carried lightly these days of smug leadership.)

Lincoln's words, like those at Gettysburg, seem to have a deep agreement with the core.  Shakespeare's at a tick removed, at the acting level, but the actors sometimes are able to speak from the core.


For the writer of a more apparently bohemian life, perhaps it's easier to miss the seriousness of words, of the seriousness that words have for all writers and writer souls.  The reality of all human beings is a physiological connection with words and physical material.

Poets have done well to capture the relationship, the connection.  "Was it excess of love," Yeats asks on behalf of the Irish Patriots of the Easter Uprising, "enchantment to a stone in the living stream"  (to paraphrase.)

Hypocrites come along.  They might achieve a lot of damage, but one has the sense that ultimately their words will roast them eventually, one way or another.   One cannot maintain an improper relationship, a divorce between being and words, forever;  it can simply not happen at a molecular level.  The biological being cannot withstand falseness for very long.  Great cracks will appear in such a system, seen as rampage and tirade.  Nixon said as much, bowing out, about that which will destroy you (anger.)



I suppose it possible that a writer would know this, but in a way, not know it, or kind of forget about it, this deep relationship.  After the literary flourishes of his youth, what now?  What is the proper way to proceed, given the seriousness of that which he unveiled?  Into obscurity?

How to go with the light, rather than against it?

But words of yours, in a good way, can never be taken from you.  They are a part of you, part of your being, your personality, your temperament, your physical being.  There is an innate respect for them from within, just as the words are from within.


None of us have ever really figured out what writing is, what its benefit is, what its purpose is.  I suppose only those who do it, though they too must live under a limited understanding, consciously.  They have allowed something to happen in the microcosm of their own world.


Your own words will connect you to the major issues of the day.  Your words will come out to show the great contrast between what you did and the things that the real monsters of sexual harassment, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, etc.   Your words will be a protection, and then a redemption.  They will speak to the deepest issues of the day, of power, of judgment, racism and the like.

And that's all that really matters, the words, your honor.