Simple words, electric.

Today’s poem.

This day,
we use language
in a way
that no one
has ever known
because everything
we do
know is
yester.

Google "kthes"
for scream,
and buh-byes.

Tomorrow and the quick
next always dies, and always renews

with today.

--

Language is Time’s Signature.

The many ways our society communicates is shaping the free thinking world. To go boldly, I'd say it drives us. From how we move around with our phones that carry the contents of a forever expanding universe, chock full with data, fingers to type at the ready; to how the languages we speak are as alive as the beating hearts in our chest, ever evolving, never ceasing, giving rise to newness as experience is transformed into spirit, dialogic actions are developing our human being. (After all, it is all of ours.)

For we are what we create. And the tool that brought us down from the heavens so long ago is the gift of language, the breathe of the spirit. It's this alive attribute that I find so uncanny, as if the words we exchange indeed take a rhythmic life all unto their own, casting literal black shadows of history as time's signature.

Charles Blitz/Bliss Typecasts Simple Joy.

I was recently introduced to the story of Charles Blitz. This was his original name. He later changed his last name, however, to Bliss. Charles, a refugee during WWII, found that Bliss was more suitable, considering a man in London with a last name similar to the blitzkrieg bringing fire overhead was not the best look. He also serendipitously longed for joy.

What's so interesting about Bliss is he theorized that the languages, specifically German, spoken during the early 20th century were toxic to how people socialized and interfaced. The reason why we warred, he concluded. So he decided that a new language was in order, and thus created one.

Made up of intuitive symbols, Blissymbolics sought a means of communicating that enabled a universal type, lexicon, and dialect. There's a fantastic podcast about his story and peculiarly tragic demise, on RadioLab. It details the story better than I ever could.

But moreover, Bliss' work gives peculiar insight into the shaping of languages as modernism began to gasp for its last few breaths before midcentury. The bold dynamism and finality of postmodernism was just itching on deck to play in the game, as the exponential function of connectivity was sent through the metaphorical attic and simple, universal barebones dialogue was excited to get on stage. Couple this—perhaps subconscious—desire with the rapid acceleration of technological development, and it seems as if the blueprints for rebuilding the Tower of Babel are being rendered.

And here we know sit, facing a computer screen, navigating by way of symbols and buttons, hash tags and abbrevs, character of simplicity. Very similar to what Bliss envisioned, and the many thinkers who sat in his midst.

Consequently it seems, too, as is I'm sure you are aware by now, the simplicity of language has allowed our world to expand and connect like never before. Bliss was onto something. He could feel the charismatic aesthetic of simplicity and minimalism, two characteristics of good lucidity, and high levels of literacy that followed.

Words on Behalf of Floetry

Yet poetry has wished to accomplish this notion of minimal form since the beginning of time. Particularly when it comes to language, in rhythmic expression. The result of its trying, to quote Eliot, strangely has managed to bury itself into the ground as a form of art, where if only a few truly see it as salient anymore. My evidence is perhaps lacking, and needs further development, but I will say that the receding intellectual creativity and humanities departments of higher level institutions (or the curricula therein) suggests a cultural dismissal of literature altogether. At the very least, my perception of it and the proximal attitudes.

Thus, let's do it here to be heard.

If you enjoy writing poetry, please do so, either here or in the sweet recesses of forlorn diaries everywhere. It is to be of any kind, really. Haikus, prose poems, lyrics, sonnets, #hashtagpoems. For the experimentation with language should never cease, nor lose the playfulness that reaches sincerity

For we are constant, reflective multitudes, looking for bliss and joy with our voice boxes.