Words are an incredibly interesting phenomenon. Think about it for a moment: a word can be light, vacuous and meaningless, but at the same time it can be heavy, rich and exciting. There is no limit to the shapes that a word can get: it can represent a concept and its very opposite, depending on how we understand it, or those who read it. A word jokes with the senses and it has the ability to transform itself: it could be written, spoken, read, heard, thought, touched, and built. It can be carved in marble and having no sense, or be written on the sand and meaning everything.
Words as a tool
When you need to use a tool, you must clearly learn how to use it. If you want to play a guitar, you can’t just take it up and strike the strings at will: you must know how to keep it, how to put your hands on it, how to move them to get a sound. And even at this point you can’t be sure that what you’re playing conveys a message.
Words work in the same way: at school we learn how to write them, read them, and put them together to create sentences that make sense. Yet, there are those who know how to express something with words much better than others, being able to give much significance to only few words. It may happen that certain words take on so much importance to make us afraid; so we don’t pronounce them, and they become Missing Words. Precisely due to their inconsistency we like to put them down with ink, as if we would like to materialize what we’re thinking, giving shape and color to our mental images and giving a logical sense to our feelings. We are on a sheet of paper. If you burn that fragment, you are burning yourself.
Words as art
A word fraught with meaning and written in a text can touch potentially millions of people. By writing our thoughts with ink we open the doors to the judgment of ourselves and of others. The lyrics of a song spread a world of sensations and interpretations, conveyed by an additional way of communication: music. Together, they allow us to create endless combinations of meanings and emotions, giving to the author the chance to create a piece of art and to materialize itself in his message.
Sometimes we write in a text what we don’t want in our mind, trying to settle down on paper what we would like to burn. Doing that, the fire of words becomes our piece of art, so that within us, slowly, finally, we raise a wall of silence.