Theme

City of Words

by John Olson

I am a citizen of a city of words. Everything in the city is made of words. Apricots and granaries, fables and wires. Abbeys in the mist. Corner drugstores harboring all the secrets of the body. Longing, injury, pain. Hotels, casinos, department stores. Everything is made of words. Everything is rendered by language. Vowels and consonants surging from the chest. Barges, ferries, and gunboats. A vast horizon wild with swinging cranes, islands of meaning revealing the strange beauty of faucets at night. You name it. If you can feel it, smell it, taste it, climb it, walk on it, or wear it, it is made of words. This is the city of words. What we call light is really words. The mouth of a river assembled from bones and teeth. The air humming with the sound of ghosts.

Many of the words have become frayed from long usage. The city of words is an old city. It has been here ever since the first humans made sounds in reference to other things: fire, water, breath. Birth, death, beauty. You name it. This is the marvel of words. Their meat and bark is virtual. They are best understood as waves moving through the air carrying herring and mushrooms, grievance and gratitude. Smoke from samovars. Bandanas and catalogues. Culture, economy, tourism, sports.

When human beings began to wear clothes, plant grain in fields and build habitations to shelter their exposed and furless bodies from the cold and rain, the city of words attained dizzying heights of grandeur and dream. Camels filled the streets. Wagons lurched forward pulled by mules. Sentences lurched forward propelled by verbs. It wasn’t long after that cars were invented. And government and taxes. Human biology moving about everywhere making sounds and raising questions of existence and decency.

Everywhere in the city there are towers of steel and glass. Dials, gauges, valves, pumps, pulleys, pipes. Art galleries drug the afternoon. Buildings and waterways are lit with candles and oil lamps. But this is not the real city. These are only the surface features of the city. The real city is in your mouth. The real city is in a state of being spoken, about to be spoken, or rivers of reverie meandering in candle wax.

There is a library at the heart of the city where many words are stored in books in case of drought or plague. The words are pumped into books by poets and journalists and then placed on shelves in an order arranged by letter and number.

Every morning when the sun rises over the mountains the city of words begins its activities. Tattoo parlors offer rhubarb and conversation. The words in the zoo howl and roar and assume meanings too wild for the restrictions of grammar. Radios exude the glow of music. Stadiums fill with expectancy and hope. Light spreads in all directions. Even the subway turnstiles seem freshly awakened from a night of hollow routine.

During the summer a carnival visits the city. Here one finds cages of savage, untamed words. Words captured at the frontier between dream and experience, perception and reality. Monstrous words. Words with tusks and horns. Words with long necks and sapphire eyes. Words of fire. Words hard as flint and words so perverse and volatile they cannot be pronounced without first being fixed to the ground by chain.

Elsewhere the city is in a mode of continual reconstruction and manufacture. The words of politicians and lawyers, which tend to be supple and light, are used to make bathrobes, curtains, Frisbees, and rubber bands. The grave, heavy words of doctors are used to make fire hydrants, aquariums, waffle irons, and golf carts.

The words of poets cannot be used for anything. They are too hot to handle. Too fugitive and erratic. They are like the subatomic particles which hold reality together, although they themselves have no reality. They are mathematical probabilities, equations, abstract figures. They point to a larger reality than the one we encounter in the physical realm.

Once every few years there is a large conference given in which to discuss two important questions: did humanity create language, or did language create humanity? The first question is pertinent to the second: are we the masters of language, or are we the subjects of language, here to do its bidding?

The fact that we, as citizens of a city of words, argue these points with the very words we are putting into question, does not hinder our discussion. We cannot step out of them long enough to feel what thinking might be like without words. For that, we look to the animals, cats, dogs, dolphins and elephants. We look into their eyes hoping to glimpse something of an alternate world, a consciousness we have lost over time in the process of building our world out of words.

Occasionally, if a word slides into reality and becomes an actual object, such as a whisk broom or daffodil, it is submitted to intense scrutiny and research. It is carried from mouth to mouth and ear to ear as gingerly as an emotion gently maneuvered through a sonnet in order to see if there is a change in its structure or meaning. If words permeate our reality, how might we change our reality to better suit our temperaments?

Here in the city of words there are candy machines in all the gas stations. All the schools are exquisitely public. Nothing is static. Nothing is still. The city of words is not on any map. To get there you simply say something. Time is broken into traffic lights. Gravity gets drunk on motels. We live, we smile, we die. We process sight and smell into sentences. We weave sentences together to make rockets and silk, gyroscopes and crutches. We make pictures with sound. We build telescopes to look at the sky. Stars scintillate in their lenses unveiling a universe of such overwhelming magnitude that language alone cannot do justice to its immeasurable mass and volume. But if one were to view the city of words from elsewhere in space, one would see a scintillation of equal magnitude. A tissue of jewels with no beginning or end.

John Olson is the author of five books of prose poetry, including The Night I Dropped Shakespeare On The Cat (Calamari), Oxbow Kazoo (First Intensity, 2005), Free Stream Velocity (Black Square Editions, 2003), Eggs & Mirrors (Wood Works, 1999), and Logo Lagoon (Paper Brain, 1999). He has twice received the Fund for Poetry award, and in 2004 he was the recipient of The Stranger’s Annual Genius Award. One of his prose poems (“A Piece Of Wind”) was translated into Spanish (“Un pedazo de viento”) by Martin Camps and published by Solar, Revista Del Instituto Chihuahuense De La Cultura, a Mexican literary magazine. Ravenna Press will publish his novel “The Adventures Of You” sometime in 2007/2008.