Fire as Word

   She had become tangled in the meaning

   of an untimely word

—what does it matter now?

   When full of fear and sadness

   she turned to look at the others

   the word grew larger.

        — Maria Laina

At any moment in our life we are entangled in all the past of humanity, and that past is primarily language, so we live as if upon a background of incessant chorus, and of course it is possible to imagine the presence of everything which has ever been spoken.  — Czeslaw Milosz

Response to the question about my ten favorite words: "World, pain, earth, mother, men, desert, honor, poverty, summer, sea.”  — Albert Camus

With this mind, consider several worldly words:

rose escalating climbed composition

gases surged concentrations spurring

accumulating pushing hotter

occupied slash intensification burns

trapping precise million

jump atmospheric shift

risen calculations tracks

releasing leaks responsible

blame heat burning processes

massive emissions levels vastly

spiking spewed sucked

What-is-said fiction vs Observed reality. Words listed above in random order from news reports based on an April 5, 2024 NOAA Research news release:  No sign of greenhouse gases increases slowing in 2023

Still from The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961)

Words. Only words? Words shape, form, filter experience. Elusive word-worlds embraced to ease the way to avoidance. A necessary survivial strategy in a swirl-world of proliferation and acquisition, positioning and mystification. How do we think, feel, favor, in the pronounced now? Consider:

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future, 

the first syllable already belongs to the past. 

When I pronounce the word Silence, 

I destroy it. 

When I pronounce the word Nothing, 

I make something no non-being can hold.

— Wislawa Szymborska

In Finale, lines from a Robert Hass poem:

In our century, it was the fashion in philosophy 

not to ask unanswerable questions. That was left 

to priests and poets.

And in our age of simulacra I am compelled to add:  Posters!

Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric in Venus in Fur 

(French: La Vénus à la fourrure), directed by Roman Polanski, 2013.

NOTES

— Maria Laina (Greek 1947–2023) poem from Hers (1985) trans Karen Van Dyke.

— The Czeslaw Milosz (Polish 1911-2004, Nobel 1980) comment above refers to this poem by W.S. Merwin:       Utterance

            Sitting over words

            very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing

            not far

            like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark

            the echo of everything that has ever

            been spoken

            still spinning its one syllable

            between the earth and silence

— Albert Camus (French 1913-1960, Nobel 1957) in Notebooks 1951-1954 

— Wislawa Szymborska (Polish 1923– 2012, Nobel 1996) trans Czeslaw Milosz

— Robert Hass from the poem State of the Planet

The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961) Director Val Guest