"I wish somehow, someday, you could burst out of your words into the primitive, emotional roots where language first touches meaning and from which it derives all its beauty and its power. We live so far removed now from any communication.  Throw away your words and look at the realities again - if you dare." Now there's an interesting challenge.

            The writer sees words as something I might "burst out of," an enclosure of some kind that prevents the communication of realities. (Not an unusual metaphor for those who consider language merely a tool by which to communicate rather than an essential, inherent element of human nature.)

            The realities, it seems, are found in the "primitive, emotional roots where language first touches meaning," realities which the writer assumes I once knew, but from which I have been separated by words.

            One such reality, perhaps, is the innocence of childhood, lost through the process of sophistication, a process primarily involving language.  The dignity gained through such use of words is inevitably accompanied by a self-consciousness which makes communication difficult.  Clifton Fadiman, incidentally, says babies relieve us of this self-consciousness. They force us to be ourselves.  We don't have to be wary with them. "A baby," he says, "can make an honest man or woman out of a grownup" because he responds only to love.

            Perhaps "love" is a second reality from which we are separated by words, for love certainly is an "emotional root where language first touches meaning," but - and there's the rub - once meaning or sense or significance is touched upon, a process is started which cannot be stopped. Words begin to flow toward understanding. It was Shelley, I think, who, in an effort to explain the relationship between our emotional roots and language, asked two very important questions: "How much of our lives is concerned with the inexpressible?  Of how much of our literature, writing, talk, and thinking is the inexpressible finally the subject?"  And, of course, it was with words that Shelley expressed the inexpressible in all the beauty and power of language.

            There may indeed be other ways to the truth than through the manipulation and understanding of words, but the communication of that truth still depends upon our performance in language.

            A dramatic and startling example of such dependence is found in the personal life of Eldridge Cleaver.  He realized no one could save him but himself.  He had to seek out the truth and unravel the snarled web of his emotions.  He had to find out who he was and what he wanted to be, what type of man he should be, and what he could do to become the best of which he was capable.  "That is why I started to write," he tells us. "To save myself."

            Throw away my words and look at the realities again? A reckless contradiction, I think. I dare touch the roots where meaning begins, but the senses must communicate with the mind so the elusive, emotional, chaotic beginnings can be harnessed and nurtured toward something more human.  That is a natural inclination of man, and it is accomplished through the essential, inherently human phenomenon of words.

                        Bill Reynolds