Скачать или смотреть Under the Stars (original composition, details in the description)

(lyrics at bottom of description)

An endeavor of humankind that we can often take for granted is language. Humans have been creating languages for thousands of years, each iteration slightly different, in its form and mechanics, from the one next to it. (For, most languages have neighbors and relatives, separated by distance or time.)

The role of language in human society has affected us much more than we might guess. The growth of a language, and its effect on people who use it, can be slow, often escaping detection because each of us has only one chance to use it, one lifetime. Language has given us the ability to unlock subtleties, cure diseases, build towering structures, pierce into the microscopic and macroscopic worlds, and view into invisible worlds like gravity and drag coefficients and such.

Language itself has its own terminology, highly important in determining meaning. Do you know the difference between a gerund and a present participle? "Cooking" can be either, and its usage and meaning and conveyance change ever so slightly, to degrees of accuracy that are very difficult to measure, sometimes minuscule, sometimes complete. Each language has its own set of principles and concepts that it can access through its own grammar and syntax. Some languages contain concepts that others don't: for example, some languages only use the numbers "one, two, three" and "many", and there are languages that don't have a word for "blue".

Languages open up into usages like irony, sarcasm, or something I call "signposting" (which probably has an official name which I know not), among many others. Words can take on very different and even contrary meanings given a particular usage.

I wrote this song, "Under the Stars", around the beginning of 2003. I employed a usage of language I know not the term for, but I have found a similar employment of this language in other songs and works. One example is Dolly Parton's song "The Grass is Blue". Another is Willie Nelson's song, "I Never Cared for You". Those two songs, which I fully encourage you to explore, are spectacular examples, if you ask me, of this particular usage of language.

This recording of "Under the Stars" is quite crude, constructed on equipment that had been tracked as refuse, around 2005, but hopefully you can at least make sense of the song itself, despite its technological shortcomings.

=M=

Thumbnail: Alex Grey's painting, "The Visionary Origin of Language"

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Under the Stars

under the stars, I sit and think
wherever you are, to you I drink
this water sinking in my chest
it's just too late
dried up and cracked
only soil is in my veins

it won't be long
the wind will take my face
it won't be far
to my resting place
where I can't see any colors anymore and
I can't sing, I've got nothing to sing for

no use for light
no use for air
no need for searching
you won't be there
no need to talk
got nothing to say
no need to walk
right here I stay

there's water sinking in my chest
it's just too late
dried up and cracked
only salt is in my veins
there's no where on this earth where
I can just be free
I've failed to live by
my own policies

I've got no vision and
I've got no melody
I've got no beauty
left in me