Just Call Me Frank: Our Endeavour at Being Frank: A Love Affair With Words

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

A Love Affair With Words

"Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Words have the power to make you laugh, think, cry; they can make you curious, turn you on, spark imagination, learn. Words can save lives, end lives, and create lives. They tumble off of a tongue or out through fingers, from nothing but the corners of human mind created by nothing but thought and emotion.

Writing can save your life, be an outlet for your emotions, feelings, and unravel confusion; it can express your imagination, hopes and dreams; can help you understand the world around you, and the world inside you.

Reading and writing are the cornerstone of imagination, and a portal of escape, and words are an irreplaceable expression of human life.They can be colorful and imaginative all in the delicate combination of 26 letters.

"Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow" ~ Lawrence Clark Powell

We're pretty much in love with words, but lots of you already knew that.

It's sad that many of the children growing up in the age of computers/electronics, and video games, will never understand the importance of books, the importance of critical thought that grows from reading, the importance of imagination built from books. They won't understand that sometimes words can help to understand their lives, and can be a beautiful and healthy escape; instead they will learn to live a numb medicated existence free of authentic emotion, someday unable to understand how to manage them without pills.

Growing up most of us were a big reader, it was a form of escape from our abused existence both in our own home, and in school. Being of a typical "strict" religious upbringing we were often not allowed to watch television (by decree of The Father/dad), sometimes for months at a time, so our mind learned to take people's words from the pages of books and build a place of escape. While The Father didn't instill the importance of reading (on occasion he used to get angry at The Mother for doing it "too much"), in the winter he would read to us the books from the Little House on the Prairie Series. It was our favorite thing about winter.

As a child we would read book, after book, after book. By the age of twelve we had an adult reading level and were happy to grab 500 page novels and escape into the worlds of other's imaginations. We took part on one of those reading intensive programs in elementary school that gave you pizza incentives for reading books (Pizza Hut Book It, a National Reading Incentive Program http://www.bookitprogram.com/), we were always at the top of our class for pages read. We started writing poetry to deal with things in our lives at the age of eleven and was our fallback throughout our entire life.There was no medication for escape in the 80's, not that we had access to, if there had been we doubt we'd be the lover of words we are today.

As we got older our love of reading didn't subside, but our frequency did, it diminished during periods of our life, until we ended up at The Mothers house in 2002 (before moving again in 2004). The summer before we started University we were reading three books a day, nonfiction, fiction, whatever we could get our hands on. Books about politics, religion, current events, humor...if the writing was good, we couldn't put the book down, escaping into our worlds of books about the world so heavily that there were days we were unaware of our surrounds.

"He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust." ~ Emily Dickinson

We've often said writing saves lives, and there's nothing we can be told that will change our opinion on that (but we also know that writing can destroy lives), because we are alive, and we are lives that writing has saved. But more honestly, words can save lives. Reading and writing.

You don't have to be good at writing to get the benefits of it, if you are writing for yourself you have nobody to answer to, you can write however you want to.

"I write because I hate. A lot. Hard." ~ William Gass

You don't have to read something educational, or serious, to get the benefits of reading, you can read whatever you want to.

"I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve." ~ Charles de Montesquieu

Perhaps some of us in our system are hard on each other for our spelling errors, our grammar and punctuation mistakes...or we get deeply saddened for the future of words when we see things like this: http://jstcallmefrank.tumblr.com/post/14901128078/oh-the-things-you-find-while-you-peruse-the, but at the end of the day we're happy we are able to write and read, no matter what it is, because it has saved our lives, over and over again. (okay, we're not happy to read the thing in that link, it made us cry inside). Words are a blessing.

You may be thinking, okay, this was a waste of my time to read this, this isn't interesting. Seeing as how we write this blog first and foremost for ourselves, we don't care; we have a duty to ourselves to write every day, or to try to at least. If you can come up with something earth shattering to write about every day maybe you should start your own blog.