singindemonhq | (no subject)

I don’t really understand the human race. I don’t mean the singers, or even the queens. I mean the human race as a group. There’s no thinking creature in their dimension that has as much potential power. It’s not just their power over their world. They abuse that power, anyway.

I don’t mean that they have power over other humans, either, although they do, and they most certainly do abuse that. There used to be a joke about a couple who got married and had a very successful wedding night, (although they were both human so that probably wasn’t likely.) In the morning the bride asked her husband, “Do the working classes do this?” He told her that they did and the girl said, “Well, it’s much too good for them. It ought to be stopped.”

I don’t think that there’s one thing that humans have enjoyed, discovered or invented that hasn’t brought an immediate reaction from the people who want to control it, tax it or simply stop anyone else from enjoying it.

Humans are the creature that potentially have power over themselves. They have language. There’s no stronger tool to shape your world, inside and out. In the beginning was the word. The link with God that gave the power to give shape to understanding.

They abuse that too. Words are my mojo and that makes me – well, the British would say “flaming mad”, but it don’t take me that way. , Words; 243.

Most humans don’t like the hot numbers. That’s entertainment, but not usually to the people who dance them. Most humans dread finding themselves singing about something painful or embarrassing, some truth that they buried and hid.

They set themselves up for it, though. It’s usually the deep-level lie that turns out to too hot to handle, burning it’s way up to the surface when the time came. Most humans lie to themselves and others, anyone who has much to do with them knows that – but then, given the languages they have to speak, most humans dodn’t get a lot of choice about lying.

In the very beginning was the beat, the pound of the seas and the thud of the pulse, the hammering feet of the hunter and prey, the distance between the cave lion and the tree measured in heartbeats. The beat of the heart above the cradled young. The first instrument was the drum, hairy hands pounding the hollow tree to tell the tribe…

The creatures that ran and fought and ate “thought” in pictures and scents, as most species do still, especially their young – but in some dimensions something changed and when it did, their beginning was the word. Language is the air that intelligence breathes, the rails that the mind runs on. Language can be the wings to let the imagination soar, or the bars of a cage that can cramp a mind into a shriveled, stunted thing. Oh, you can feel without words, even amoebas can probably do that – but it’s very difficult to think and understand without having the words to shape your thoughts.

Then someone set this prompt – and almost every journal I’ve seen was written by someone that wanted to take words out of the language.

I’ve been around humans too long to be surprised by that – but I have trouble understanding it. Why let someone rob your language? Freedom is choice. If you can’t say it you can’t think it. Too many words have left the language already, or changed their meaning. Language is a big part of my mojo and I have to be alert for changes.

It isn’t really my problem, but in their place I’d have tried to resist some of the changes from the last century. Who started the kids saying, “Wicked, baddest, evil” as terms of praise? Taking those three words away doesn’t leave them with much for special occasions, does it? How do you make a moral judgment without the words for it? (It’s as bad as what they did to “love” in the 1960s. They’d got a hundred words for mating but they hadn’t got one synonym for love, and no word left for love without desire.)

Words can shape a soul. Words can divide people, or show that you’re all one family in the things that matter more than skin or eyes or gender.

If you can’t say it, it’s very hard to think about it. If you want to know what causes some of the real hot numbers you really ought to think about that.

Muse, “Sweet” the Singing Demon.
Fandom, BTVS
Words, Prompt 259; Words 243. Prompt 258, Words 513.