Why I Love Language as a Medium

Today's guest post is by the fabulous Kevin Tudish. He's the author of health, happiness, LOVE, peace, prosperity, SAFETY, a tremendous fictional memoir featured here back in November.

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Writing takes the common currency of communication—language—and turns it into art. Visual art takes as its subject what we see (or hope to see, or imagine we see), but the media aren’t common—not everyone wields a brush and paint or a chisel and stone. Dance is closer—most of us move—but the vocabulary of dance is so abstracted from day-to-day movement that it has only the barest relationship to how most of us move through our lives. Most writing, though, is built from the same language we hear every day, the same vocabulary we use to order coffee, ask directions, talk our way out of a ticket. It’s the same language, the same medium, but with a little sleight of hand, it can be transformed into poems, novels, essays, and plays.

I love the esoterica of other arts, seeing someone do something that few others can: take a brush and paint and turn a blank canvas into the sensuous body of a woman or the shape of a muslin curtain around a gust of wind; defy gravity and the physics of the body, turn midair and hover on the music. Those things can intoxicate you like the daughter of a quaalude and a black beauty, leave you reeling and breathless.

Writing can do the same thing (I caught this morning morning’s minion). It sidles up to you like any evening when the light starts to change, but this day the clouds ignite and the sun burns down the horizon, suddenly the sky you’ve know all your life isn’t just quietly turning dark, but is exposing itself as a vantage point on the turmoil of the universe, a way to see how planets hurtle around exploding stars, set fire to the cosmic dust around them, and let you stand quietly in the midst of it all.
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Crossposted here at Goodreads