Speaking

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My concept of the word, the spoken word, is an image I have. It goes back to the time before we killed the word. Before we put it in its little coffin which the written form is. When the word was alive. When it was spirit. When what we spoke coordinated conditions (brought into harmony arrow and animal). Or what we spoke actually served as a causal function. Words as transformers. As makers of things that happened.

I want to remember what it was like. Those times before the alphabet arent here anymore, but neither are they gone. They wake now and then at moments when something stirs them. Or when, for an instant, I catch a peripheral glance of something that must have been like them. Though I have changed from what the ancestors were, and language and the world in which that language operated have changed as well. And in the end, what does it matter? That way of life, despite all its power, was defeated.

Now this is the Cherokee understanding of the spoken word, the voice, anyway. In our tradition, people do not simply speak about the world, they speak the world into being. What we say is intricately intertwined with what we are and can be. To the Cherokee people, all things in the world have a voiceand that voice carries life. Storying gives shape to meaning. This concept of speech and voice is based on a notion that the voice does not speak alone, but generations of voices speak. They must be heard and understood by others and added onto by them. When we speak we take the power of the spoken word and infuse it with new breath. We add our voice to story so it shifts, changes, renews with the multiplicity of meanings and the variables of possibilities. To keep words alive and elastic. To keep them the shape-changers they have to be for our survival.

The voice and the thought that rides upon the voice are the challenge. What you speak is spoken into an energy field or field of force that has consequence. The breath forming words is holy. The sound and shape of them breathed into being.

The Cherokee knew their words had the power to create. Thats also the guardian, the check and balance, of the word. Its power to generate force. What you said could last for generations. Therefore you guarded your words. You made them count in the oral tradition. You spoke them responsibly. You kept in mind that what the speaker says affects the speaker as much as the spoken to.

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