Saturday, June 07, 2014

Words are Living Legends

“Love is for the young. It is for soldiers and athletes… Things are much more complicated here. It’s beyond love. It’s fate…”
~Pushkin Quote on. Day when we ask: What Does D-Day Mean To Us Now

“The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge – and pray God we have not lost it – that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.”


“She’s so bloody secretive, he thought. Saves secrets like sweets. Eat them in private.”
~ Parliamentary Musings of  Australian Mistresses known to Kabbalist Jozef Imrich ;-)

Words, I’ve come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we’re history’s orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased.
And:
Words are living legends, swollen with significance. We string them together to make stories, but they themselves are stories, encapsulating rich, runny histories Masters of Storytelling
What is written preserves what was passed down in conversation.  It selects and shapes a series of rambling, sharpened-up oral exchanges, remembered first hand, second hand, third hand, over many years.  What is written about things here, where no one could ever check, yields to the attraction of the tall story, and, crossing the line into fiction, makes it taller.  People contradict, and that’s just another story.  I have discovered already that it’s a town where people talk.  Their role is to fill the visitor’s ear with tales.  To keep a handle on things, they become unreliable narrators.  The lines of writing are like the slats of the venetian blind in our cabin, opening out on to the airy domain of the oval, filtering it at the same time.  But the oral, still around to comment and correct, or to simply move things along in some new direction of contemporary appeal, has power to set the record adrift.  Black Sheep in Imrich Family