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1. Any written work is text. “Text” is from Latin texere, textus, “to weave.” So then, to write is to weave language anew, and all we read and unravel is a word-weave, a text-tale.

The text is not so much written in a historical language, like English or Tagalog, as wrought from language. For the writer, the language is not a given. In every instance of writing, language is re-woven, reinvented, because the writer must find his own path through the wilderness of language. Our thoughts and feeling without our words are like brambles – the underbrush of the human psyche, dream and intuition.

To write is to breathe life into language. For the words of any language are single and bereft in the dead sea of the language’s dictionary. No meaningfulness arises from there, from that dead sea, because the meanings of words do not arise from themselves, but from lives lived. The words come to life only when writer or reader light them up with their imagination – then, and only then, are the words brought into interplay in some order by which a thought or feeling, a human experience, is endowed with a definite form. From there – that form made up wholly of elected words, that configuration of a human experience constructed with words – a meaningfulness arises, from reader to reader, from critic to critic, each one drawing imaginatively from his/her experience of the world in his/her own community of a shared ideology.

Continue reading Language and Literature: Imagination’s Way