Lush is Lush

2:24 PM, Tuesday afternoon. Lush is lush.

Lush is sensual, erotic. There is a creamy organic abundance to the word; it is smooth, silky, and ripe. Antediluvian is a word that feels old, magical, and forgotten. Transgenic is wild and exotic, fearless and unapologetically strange.

Incandescent is the electrical sizzle of a wire filament, true -- but it is also halos, sunsets, and beauty in human form.

I like words. That’s why I try and play with them for a living. I like to stack them, roll them around, stretch and blend their meanings and sounds. I enjoy making them flow in streams or stutter like gunshots.

Quite often my linguistic reach far exceeds my grasp. Occasionally I get close to the means and mode of expression that I desire. Most times I just make do.

Language is a strange and wonderful thing, don’t you think?

In fact, you couldn’t even think about language without language, could you? How could you think of anything without words or some sort of linguistic tags to place on objects and concepts. I read somewhere that babies who are born deaf eventually babble in sign language if they are exposed to it.

We acquire language naturally, automatically. I think we need language, in any form.

We are language.

Everything we do is a language, a communication, an expression. We move in patterns. There is a syntax to our actions, a grammar. We are words that are alive -- rich in nuance and shades of meaning, bearing complex roots and diversified structure. Lovers are a poem, families are a story, a culture is a novel.

We are lush.

--- JWR, 5/12/98