But I recently just went off and wrote at breakneck speed about being a lover of words, and below is what i came up with. Perhaps we can make it into a short Edda or a long lament, or perhaps just a modern soliloquy. Here:
It is that I am loving words and eating the tarts at the afternoon teahouse of sentential gluttony. It is rapture on the face language, and English rises out of the fields, stands taller than three canopies of forest among her western rivals, and I will munch the sensibilities of language until i am capable of Shakespearean rhapsody even while asleep.
I do not want the politics and the purpose. What I need is the expression and beauty, and deeply, the showing of humanity as human. Not as dogma, not as that thing which is politically right or judicious; but as that thing which is humanly felt, born of care and love and longing. Expressed not efficiently or out of correct purpose, but expressed cleanly out of beauty and spoken with a lovers touch.
Once, with a group of students in China, there were questions and discussions and revolutionary analyses of Wang Wei, and it all came crashing into nothing when a child mentioned as a sideline, the open facts of linguistic dishevelment, that if you translate this pictograph as empty, then you do not understand zen. Can you see the literate crash into the wall of communist philology tempered by the craft of Confucius, Buddha, the generals, and now the use of English? We lost, surely, enlightenment when we borrowed from the Saxons, poles, germans, french, romans, and everyone except the asiatic thinkers.
But even without it we can still enjoy, adore, appreciate, be entertained, be pleased, cotton to, delight in, dig daddy O, dote on, drink in, and up, eat up, fancy, flip for, flip over, groove on, have fun, love, luxuriate in, pleasure in, rejoice in, relish, revel in, savor, savvy, step out, take to, wallow in and lust after words, bon mots, the fine and pleasant adventure of searching for a plot in Webster’s or the OED.
God, we need to love it muchly if we make our way with words.
Onward, onward and upward, build the edifice of sentences, paragraph, verse, and even creative ESL plaints form over the water. Ever wonder why the greatest cathedrals of English are all isolated by water from the threat of linguistic encroachment (England, Canada and the US, Australia)? They are creating the parable of the word, and extending the basis of poetic strength. Cheer them on and move to new heights yourselves, LOVERS OF WORDS!!!!!
For those of you who wish to participate, the forum is at: http://au.groups.yahoo.com/group/loverofwords/