So, I was having a conversation with a friend when I began to realize something … totally unexpected. I realized that we could, if we decided to, begin speaking to each other in ways that ordinary people never do. That we were totally free, or at least »potentially free… in our own experience of and relationships with language…

And while describing a kind of game or form of play in which we embodied this, I said. “As if the envelope I opened contained a fox whose landing on my floor lit my foot on fire… whereby I thought of you and rang the bell that is not real but lives in every heart.”.

And by this I meant to indicate many things that would be relatively impossible, or even »forbidden… to encode in the ‘ordinary language’ we are and have been so accustomed to.

I explained that, “like those imprisoned, we, especially those of us who are not poets or songwriters or actors… have lived like birds in cages. And even they, while they are about their lives… they only speak »coherently.

By this I mean: conditioned. And: “As expected by real or imagined authorities, evaluators and judges.” Who, while often nonexistent, too often (if not always) preside over even our internal conversations with ourselves!

{ Of course I admit the brilliant exceptions that are not yet sufficient: that groups and couples and even spontaneous others may occasionally invent and engage in small examples of private language from humor to invented words… }

But I began, then, to wonder if we could purposefully »entice people to have the experience of achieving ‘escape velocity’ from the expectations… the inner judges and evaluators… of all we ever speak and write. And I felt that nearly everyone around us has no idea what it is to be relieved of these tyrannical authorities, and so, with »speaking… know the analog of »dance — or even »flight as it would be with the body itself…

And I realized with a shock that nearly none of the people I have known, often even »including poets and songwriters… only rarely if ever knew, exemplified or embodied the linguistic equivalent of dancing, which is to be entirely entranced, taken-over, possessed… by a muse as personal to yourself as she is universal, to be »at her mercy, and to be spoken into and through by forces so far beyond your personal mind as to qualify as supernatural!

Because, what they did… those poets, songwriters… authors… speakers… primarily.. what they did… »was compose! And did not improvise! And were not yet taken over, entirely… by that which lies beyond them yet is at once somehow more intimately familiar than their own mind!

So I saw that, perhaps, we could lift ordinary people… like those who had never danced… into the place where nothing else was possible. And someday, they might… like we who have known the curses and blessings of utter possession by the muse that speaks within us… be wrung and turned and pulled and hidden, to be discovered and destroyed… while at the same time becoming — momentarily immortal… to be wracked and wry and musical far beyond anything one could ever »do on purpose…

… to have the muses sing within you so that you do not so much »compose… as half-musically obey… a thing beyond all possible description, more beautiful than a mind… and more provocative than angels…

But that we could entice them… into this experience… together. This I did dare to imagine and believe a thing that could succeed. Because the birds must no more crawl, and even flight itself is not sufficient…

And I was staggered to realize that nearly all of us spend our lives composing language in the effort to either please or fail to activate… authorities perceived… within and around us as we speak, or even if we write in private.

We spend the great majority of our lives obeying ‘the rules’ as we understand them, or feeling somehow inadequate the face not merely of the rules… but of what might be understood as excellence itself! That this, too, is a kind of tyranny! And I recognized that if we played at this together, listeners or bystanders would like us either mad, talking in code… or somehow strangely enchanted…

And then it occurred to me that seemingly incomprehensible situations like people who are subject to Tourette’s syndrome… might be thought of as expressing a sort of neurophysical reaction to the ceaseless inhibitions and judgements imposed upon us from without… and thus, in a moment of uncontrolled exclamation… escape or even sacrifice… of their own social face… in that moment… to defy the cages in which we all ordinarily strangle… while thinking this perfectly reasonable, or even… good.

Yet this is not the beginning of what I saw. It is only what I have managed to say in relation to the storms inside me now that must remain unspoken here.