Our environments—social, commercial, public, transactional, entertaining—are rife with “voices” and linguistic resources like these, and they are available for conversion to psychological and artistic purposes. We can call such voices foreign and impersonal, invasive and manipulative—they are often all of those things—but they are not entirely foreign in one sense, for indeed, they are already inside us. Moreover, we are already deeply fluent in their idiom, their rhythms and cadences. We ourselves are chambers filled with such voices, and, awake or asleep, we hear them in our dreams. Just as they have cultural power, they have artistic potential.
As St. Benedict advised: "Listen with the ear of your heart."
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