Breath and Sign

“Language . . . is the real capital in the human sphere. It produces the greatest effect with the least effort (by means of breath and sign).”
—Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, 1974. (via DJMisc)

The Power, the Magic, and the Mystery of the Word

"Opening it entirely at random -- to any page, any paragraph, any sentence -- I feel at once in the presence of the miraculous, awakened once again to the power, the magic and the mystery of the word." —Jonathan Yardley, describing Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory.

The Magic of Encoded Meaning

"I don't really know why I like letters, by which I mean characters by which language is written down, because we really don't know why we like anything. To say I like letters would force me to say because I like the mystical way in which humans created written language so that meaningless signs could be meaningful. But to say that is to raise the question why I like the magic of encoded meaning., and the questions just come again." —Geof Huth

The Innermost Alchemy of the Word

"With these sound poems we should renounce language, devastated and made impossible by journalism. We should withdraw into the innermost alchemy of the word, and even surrender the word, thus conserving for poetry its most sacred domain. We should refuse to make poems second-hand; we should stop taking over words (not to mention sentences) which we did not invent entirely anew for our own use. We should no longer be content to achieve poetic effects which, in the final analysis, are but echoes of inspiration." —Hugo Ball (via Social Fiction)

Magic Words Change as We Use Them

"Just as language will change as its speakers use it over decades and centuries, so the language that creates the world—the language that is the world—its Meaning, its Logos—can change as we use it, all of us human persons and others, and when it does the world in which we have our beings is remade."
—John Crowley, Daemonomania

The Language of Poetry as a Minor Magic

"To write a poem is to practice a minor magic. The instrument of that magic, language, is quite mysterious. We know nothing of its origin. We only know that it branches into different languages and that each one of them has an indefinite and changing vocabulary and an indefinite cipher of syntactic possibilities."
—Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in The Critical Poem by Thorpe Running

One Word: That's Magic

Professional magician John W. LeBlanc notes that there are “untold numbers of anecdotes told by professional performers who found that just changing one, single word made an enormous difference in the response of the audience to a performance piece. One word. That’s magic.”

As in the fables of old, “It’s in the words that the magic is—‘Abracadabra,’ ‘Open Sesame,’ and the rest—but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next. It seems . . . that the real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what” (John Barth, The Tidewater Tales, 1987).