Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

---Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

I repost last Monday's epigraph for two reasons. First, we've had some emergents loitering on the premises and for them the English language is a fathomless mystery. I'm hoping another reading might help them re-imagine something. Second, these words are true for everyone and they bear repeating.

this poem is lousy, yes
but it is mine
my creative act
a yelp for the world to hear

There are 19 words right there. And contrary to our unconsidered response, they have not failed. They have succeeded. The poet Mike Stavlund has succeeded in telling us something.

And here is Makeesha:

Or maybe, a better way of saying it is that I have words but I'm afraid to write  them for fear that they will be misheard, misunderstood, criticized or worse. I'm afraid that people will read them and consume them like a day old happy meal wrenched from it's [sic] chipboard box instead of scooped up with decadent care and enjoyed with the ecstatic pleasure I feel.

Makeesha has written words she fears to write because they might be misunderstood or criticized. This prose artist is afraid that her reader will not share her ecstatic pleasure with them. [I wonder if that was just a lucky guess.] I should confess that by comparison, a day-old happy meal would taste like an Auguste Escoffier triumph.

Emergents are fond of illiteracy and they love to build their castles in the trash. This is what my visit to Journey Church taught me. For the emergent it is not what words mean, it is all about their feelings about them. A meaningless sequence of acts, for example, needn't constitute worship so long as some claim these were "personal opinions or subjective assessments" of worship. Not unlike Steve Pettit's view of sacred music.

I think we have exceeded Mitchell's minimum dose of inanity and we dwell in the midst of a people who have exceeded Mitchell's minimum dose of inanity.

This poem is lousy, yes/but it is mine/my creative act/a yelp for the world to hear.

This is self-expression without art. This is indeed sitting around and saying anything you want. This is Frank Garlock, this is Dan Sweatt, this is Jamie Arpin-Ricci, this is Joel Osteen, this is Majesty Hymns, this is the Northland International Overarching Entity, this is Mark Galli: speech that does not bestow reason on us.

This is "seepage".

Now I make these comparisons for a reason. I fully realize this will make no sense to emergents: they are not my audience. (A fact they pretend to be troubled by.) If they truly believed what they said, then they would see my post is also lousy, mine, a creative act and a yelp at the world. What Plato, Augustine, Knox, Beza, Calvin, Edwards and Machen have said are lousy, theirs, creative acts and yelps at the world, and emergents would accord them the same dignity they reserve for their lousy poems, their creative acts and their yelps.

But it will have to occur to us sooner or later that all words, though perhaps not as bizarre or grotesque as emergents' words, do not fail either. Stavlund has told us something, Garlock has told us something, Mark Galli, "the evangelical mystic", has told us something, and we live downstream of them all.

You, dear reader, live downstream of them all, and to comprehend this horror is to begin to be cultured.

No, I must retract that statement. It is not to begin to be cultured; it is to begin to understand what culture is. To actually become cultured would, for one thing, put an end to all this yelping.