Super powers

We are out on the middle of the sea in a very small vessel. The night is dark. The stars are so close that we believe they are our neurons firing. Differentiation between ambient and internal is impassible. I am experiencing utter, unutterable bliss.

 

And then I hear words. I used to swear it was you that spoke first. Now I am not so sure.

"If you could have any super power, which one would you choose?" At first the words are sounds without referents, merely waves pulled out like taffy over the complex of drum, bones, shell, hairs that lead to a cranial processing center closed to business. What could I ask for that I do not already have?

Invisibility? No one has seen me in years. Strength? Speed? I am already an unstoppable blur of an endlessly energized bunny. Morphing? I do that as easily as chameleons breathe. Perhaps I could have a skeleton of steel. But that does not appeal. I need hollow bones, more hollow every day, so that I can continue to fly the effortless flight of birds that merely surrender to appearing and disappearing air currents. Mind reading? Now you are really being absurd. I am certainly not a mystical illiterate. There isn't a mind that I can't read. And I can read tarot and tea leaves and pita bread imagos.

I can stretch like rubber and burn like fire and drench like water and freeze like ice.

I can blow endless winds and I can see through any opacity.

All of this runs through my mind silently. And I assume that you hear it all, as if we are of one mind, dreaming the same dream. We are of the essence of no separation.

And then, as soon as I have that articulated thought, as soon as the words are more than onomatopoeia without content, more than oscilloscope sine waves, then quickly I know there is a power I crave.

I want with every fiber of me to be able to tell you that I feel your presence, that I know of your existence, that I delight in your compelling beauty. I want to say, like a prayer addressed to an unnamed recipient: "Never permit me to separate myself from you again."

The power I crave is the power of word.

I imagine that speaking will cure the widening wound.

I am not alone in this dilemma. In Plato's "Symposium," the original human is a double person connected into one organic whole being. The power of this unit is so great that even the mighty Olympian gods are in fear of the potential. So each one is cut in two. And the parts begin scrambling to find their connection with the original unity.

Words are so complex. They arise from out of this original separation, noting what before needed only to be experienced. Because they rise out of this dilemma, words are often blamed for the problems and pain arising from the primordial disjunct.

It seems that words have taken a bad rap from and developed a bad rep by those who are most able to feel the unarticulatable and the longing birthed in that experience. But I would like to suggest that words do not cause the separation. Rather they arise in tandem with it as our best attempt to go beyond the disconnection. They are our precious human tool, our agents of search sent out into the darkness of our night, into the mist of our aloneness.

Words are far from perfect tools. Words are flawed and funky and laughable. But they fall over themselves trying to be bridge over chasms that they often wind up making wider in spite of their best intention.

When all the super powers of the me that is embraced and connected falter, I go to words as friends in need. With the other powers, the question of efficacy never arises. These powers empower prior to doubt or analysis. These powers are truly super. The power of words is more humble. So much more humble that we dare not acknowledge how little power is present. For if we did, in that moment, we would be cast together upon a dark sea, in a small vessel, inchoate, lost under unlocatable stars.

Strange: Wasn't that the utterly unutterable bliss of beginning?

— Rx is the Florida Weekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx may be wearing a pirate cloak of in visibility, but emanating from within this shadow is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who knows: You may even inspire the muse. Make contact if you dare.