Why Tyrants Fear Speakers of Living Language

Alexandra Barylski on the Language Crisis

Umberto Boccioni, 1912 | Silmutaneous Visions

Language is in mortal peril, and we need to do something about it. The current trajectory of AI, left unchecked, will globalize the strongest weapon of colonialism. The late Kenyan novelist and activist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, knew that the destruction of language was the oppressor’s most powerful artillery. In his 1986 book, Decolonizing the Mind, he writes:

"The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation."

Tyrants fear free speakers of living language because they know a well-spoken word can cause a regime to fall. Language is the path to becoming human. If you want to "do" science, philosophy, history, or poetry, you are doing them in and through language. We must work together to keep language alive because when language dies, so do we. As Toni Morrison says in her 1993 Nobel Prize speech:

“When language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem…all users and makers are accountable for its demise.”

If language were regarded, it would be treated with care and dignity instead of being handed over as food for machines. What I don't see being talked about, and what must be talked about, is that there is a very real danger of AI colonizing us all. AI creators treat language like a thing that has nothing to do with being human.

Machines have controllers; humans have minds. “What language AI's make up for in efficiency they lack in humanity,” writes Philip Ball, winner of the William Thomson, Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize (2019) for his contributions to the public understanding and communication of physics. When a person gives you their most precious resource, their time, I think it is unethical to give them a poem or essay made by a machine.

AI is fantastic at summaries, and I’ve played around with it to create drafts that gather and compress information. It’s a remarkable resources as a tool for research. AI can complete your unfinished sentences. AI can correct your spelling and grammar. AI can even write all of your papers. But, the machine did it, not you. And maybe you are okay with that. Or maybe you want to voice your own mind. What is language, if not a living expression of what it means to be human?

My great-grandparents (one of whom I knew in this life) are from Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary, and I love that my ancestors on one side were Roma. I loved making kifli in the winter on my great-grandmother’s dough board, as my mother told me stories about how she fled oppression in Europe, escaping a world that kept people illiterate and disempowered. My mother taught me that if a person could read, then they would be free from intellectual and political tyranny. Reading was the sure route to personal freedom, and my public library card wore out more than once while I was a teenager. This belief set my feet on the path of Poetry and Literature as a Way of Life.

Even as a teen, I had a reputation for exciting literary analysis among my peers, and I was peddling poetry in the halls of my high school long before I was a published poet, an educator, and the founder of The Writing College (established in 2020) because I foresaw our current language crisis thanks to the flaming cocktail that is plummeting literacy rates, a dramatic increase in student cheating, and the rise of AI.

As an educator with a diverse range of classroom experience, which includes teaching in a top public school disctict in the DC area, working in college writing labs, and teaching reading and writing to emotionally disabled students under ankle cuff arrest, I can tell you that our crisis is not caused by smart phones. My students, if and when they read, are reading on their phone. You are probably reading this on your phone. The crisis is psychological (psyche, the soul) and it is pressing us to confront that young people are literally dying because they find existence overwhelming and meaningless.

Our crisis is not one of literacy, that is merely the word for the set of technical skills most needed to solve our problems, rather, our conflict is the confrontation with the effects of disenchanting the world and dismissing truth, spiritual imagination, and psychological depth from the process of education. As poet William Carlos Williams says:

It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there.

We are looking for life. Every true poem, all living language, is a spark of life itself—the force of energy organizing itself in space and time with purpose. “The word purpose describes something acting as a whole, to deliver something for the whole organism,” says biologist Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel Laureate and Director of the Francis Crick Institute in London. A true poem is a whole organism, like a cell. Every line acts together to achieve a wondrous unity. We marvel at wholeness. That is why every true poem is a flame from the fire of life. We find in the space of a tiny poem, like an atom, the power of the entire universe.

This is why AI poetry is a misnomer. Yes, AI can create interesting poems, but there is no poet’s life behind them, living in the words. It is the life of the poet that creates lasting poetry. Empty rhetoric, propaganda, even the words that come out of our own mouths, sadly, often arrive empty. There is no life behind them.

But we also know when language is alive.

We know that certain words—what I call poetry—pulse with existence. The right word at the right moment gives us life in a way that is only comparable to water itself. That is poetry. There is the word that rises, against all odds, and cuts through all the clamor to reach you; it is as if everything around you goes still, and you hear a voice that seems to be calling you, and only you. But you might be in a room with over a hundred people listening to a great poet or an inspiring speaker. We all know, or at least I hope you know, the feeling of language that strikes your heart and mind in a completely particular way that no one can take from you. You may have some inkling your neighbor is undergoing a similar experience, but only similar.

What is it like when I personally hear living language? It's unmistakable. It is like the sudden rush of wind reminding me to look up and take notice, not of my surroundings so much as my spirit. It is the feeling of meaning and sense. It is the feeling of hope. There is an energy, an excitement—a feeling of possibility and purpose inside of me.There is the sense of someone holding my hand when I need it most because their words, spoken in my ear or read from a page, name my grief and my sorrow, but they never leave me in despair.

The Free Mind

There was a post recently on Substack by the North Sea Poets asking: Where have all the Great Poets gone? They name Names, all of whom I love, and most of them are Eastern European in their roots, which is no coincidence. Cezław Miłosz is one among them.

Miłosz ranks among the most respected figures in 20th-century Polish literature, and he won the Nobel in 1980. But, he is also an American. He fled Communist Europe post-WWII, after witnessing the Nazi’s devastation of Poland, and he lived in America until his death in 2004. His book, Visions from San Francisco Bay is utterly American and yet completely European, much like Boston in the 1800’s. When you read Miłosz, you feel a presence, and that presence is not here to trifle.

Many of the poets on the list, like Miłosz, they suffered under fascist or communist governments. The list also included Adam Zagajewski, whose family was expelled from Lwów, Poland, and Wisława Szymborska. Both poets have shaped my poetry and my thinking, and I associate the writing of these poets with moral clarity (not authority), social courage, and aesthetic confidence.

What are moral clarity, social courage, and aesthetic confidence? They are exemplified by Miłosz in his essay, “Szetejnie, Gineity, and Peiksva,” where he describes the beauty and individuality in rural Lithuanian life. After pages of being swept up into the most magical, natural word of his childhood, filled with specific names of flowers and trees and rivers, one exits the essay in exile, in a landscape laid waste by a regime:

“Among the many definitions of Communism, perhaps one would be the most apt: enemy of orchards.”

Miłosz shows you the effects of Communism, and Miłosz's showing reflects his broader critique of totalitarianism's dehumanizing effects in his poems and essays. At the end of Miłosz’s essay, I think any feeling person would be persuaded that, whatever Communism promises, it is a lie. Ideology eradicates what is human in whatever form it appears. But this transformation of the mind doesn’t come from an argument about politics or religion; it comes from seeing beauty and traditional ways of life destroyed right in front of your mind’s eye. Miłosz, as a philosopher and poet, has a clear vision that motivates all his work. He never tells us what is is; he shows us.

Chekhov says, Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. Much of contemporary poetry tells you that the moon is shining. Writers and editors are not here to tell you what to think and feel. We do not need more moralists. We need more humanity. The power of words, through an ancient alchemy, effect a new way of thinking and feeling. You are not who you were a moment ago. That is the magic of living language; it transforms you and frees your mind.

Living Language

Living language is found in all people, in all cultures and all tradition. Living language is beyond creed, culture, or religion. It’s a universal way of life, open to all.

The ability to read and write was denied to women—as it was denied to slaves and many other classes of people. Why? Because it is equated with freedom. Maybe this is why all the market research shows that women, overwhelming, read more than men and purchase the majority of books, particularly novels and poetry. The reason women overwhelmingly represent the reading market is because circumstances often place us in conditions, to this very moment, where the only avenue to our freedom begins in the inner life, in language.

Women’s rights are recent. White women gained the right to vote 105 years ago. Black women only gained the right to vote 60 years ago. And it wasn’t until 1974 that women could buy a home in their own name, apply for a loan or credit card in their own name, or own a business in their own name. It is 2025, and there are groups who want to repeal women’s rights, groups who argue for "equality" but focus on dismantling women's political and social gains, including the right to vote. A culture may evolve into a more enlightened belief, but the change creates instability. Progress for women is not de facto permanent.

In the 1990’s, a woman writer was held hostage by a man who, after becoming her husband, turned abusive and controlling. He only permitted her to leave their apartment for her job each day. She had no key. Her bags were searched every time she came home. She had no apparent way out of her desperate situation, especially since this man stole her book manuscript as the means to keep her hostage. Why? Because he understood that her writing was the means of her independence and escape.

The woman found it, but there was no way to walk out with it. So she took a page or two to her work place each day, only a few so that he wouldn’t notice, and she photocopied the pages and kept the scans at work. Then she put the originals back in place. The hope of escaping with her manuscript and her daughter, who was safely inside her at the time, is what kept her alive through a constant state of fear and allowed her to plot her escape. This was in 1993. She is the first author—not woman author, but the first author—to achieve billionaire status from book royalties. You know her name. She is J.K. Rowling. Rowling, like many women before her, including Louisa May Alcott, wrote her way out of poverty and a narrow existence. Language saved their lives.

Reading and writing (the more more permanent forms of listening and speaking) have always been the sure road to freedom. With so much encroaching on our physical world, I think women, more than men, turn to interior spaces. I am not surprised that a group of people (mostly men) have a vision for the future that, if left unquestioned, will kill language globally. In every Age, there are powers that want to control instead of create. Language is the distinctly human way of life, a channel to our inner life. The inner life is the space available to all captives and exiles. This space is more protected than others, but there are many works of science fiction warning us that, yes, in the future (aka, now) there will be those in power who want to take that from you, too.

As modern people, we are in exile from our humanity, and we sense this intuitively.There is great hope for our species in this feeling of expulsion because it proves a deeper form of collective progress: the idea of the human itself, one we must nourish.

Philosophy as a way of life, as a pursuit of self-knowledge, is not like academic philosophy, as our Editor-in-Chief, philosopher Samuel Loncar, has written about here and in Metaphilosophy. All people are born philosophers because all people are born with the knowledge instinct; we desire wisdom so that we can live meaningful lives. We desire to integrate what we know into a meaningful unity, but often we struggle to know how. Philosophy and poetry help us experience life as an ordered and intrinsically valuable, as dignified. Every human has the right, and responsibility, to answer the questions: What does it mean to be human? Who am I? and Why does it matter who I am? These are difficult and dangerous considerations, to borrow a phrase from poet and philosopher, Adam Zagajewski, but they are necessary if we want to preserve our humanity. Philosophy and poetry are modes of becoming human, wherein life speaks the human into being through language itself.

Children spontaneously speak in poetry. They sprout philosophy, though they can not yet explain why their sudden declarations to you are utterly profound. Children express life, and the more childlike they are, the more they do so without any effort. All humans are children of life, of existence. I had the chance to discuss this point on my podcast in a recent conversation with Christian Wiman, Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School and former Editor of Poetry, where he shares a profound example of this.

All humans are children of living language, and poetry is its most accessible form. It is less daunting to write ten beautiful lines of living language than having to write a complete short story, essay, or novel. Everyone is ready to hear or read a few sentences full of life’s fire from a novel or essay even when they may not have time for the whole. Poetry, like philosophy, is about the whole of our lives. We feel frustration or discomfort inside our daily lives because we have forgotten how to actively unify a concrete whole from the chaos. We then struggle in the Uncanny Valley, encountering something that seems human but is not. Like the Cheshire Cat, we fade in and out of existence.

Kay Ryan was the US Poet Laureate from 2008-2010, and she captures this uncanny feeling in her poem, “Cheshire:”

This is Plato expressed in 17 lines, read in less than a minute, and written by a woman. You could read the Republic, which I highly recommend doing with a philosopher-guide, as I did. But you could also read this poem and learn one of Plato’s most essential philosophical principles for sustaining life: harmony.

The Cheshire Cat is defined by his dissolving. That is the opposite of harmonizing. I have read this poem countless times, and I still marvel at the use of a character as whimsical as the Cheshire Cat used to express a deeply philosophical and sober insight.

Language, poetry, is the hope and salvation of so many women. Anna Akhmatova was a woman whose life was haunted by the suffering of the Stalinist purges. She famously memorized her long poem, Requiem and had her friends memorize it, too, because she had to burn all her handwritten copies. It is tempting, I know, to fade out of existence when life brings wave after wave of suffering, pinning you beneath their weight as you struggle up for air. Living language is the front line of resistance. Akhmatova’s mind was her own, a space free from the regime, and full of poetry. She knew how to retain her humanity when everything threatened the human.

Poetry as a way of life is all about re-kindling the fire of the human spirit. It is about learning to wield words well as a multi-sensory human superpower. It’s about taking responsibility for the reality that words create the atmosphere of the human mind.

We all know there is much that happens to us. There are forces we encounter, often when we are young, that are beyond our measure to fight. This is why we must protect and defend children. We also know that our choices may not have been what we now wish them to be. That as adults, our choices could be otherwise. So we feel lost. Maybe abandoned. I know that I am not alone when I say a living word has reached me from the pages of a book and given me hope that restoration is possible, that the knots of my life will be loosened and made straight.

Wholeness is our birthright because life itself is our birthright. Even if we have soiled or knotted our lives, we can always return to a place of dignity because, as the Tao Te Ching says, “Return is the movement of the Way” The Tao also says:

Water benefits all creatures, yet contends with none. It resides in places most men hate, thus, it takes after the Way.

Living language benefits everyone, and contends with none. It resides in the hearts of children and women, in the afflicted and oppressed, in those who sing and those who rejoice. Poetry resides in hearts of all humans.

Everyone is responsible, as Toni Morrison says, for the demise or life of language, which is the demise or life of the human species.

Tyrants know and fear what poet Elizabeth Scott Stam knows and expresses in her poem, "A Jingle of Worlds," that in language "you have a weapon more mighty than a gun / you can sway the multitude or stir the heart of one." Tyrants fear those who know how to wield the living word because they know the mind is the most powerful weapon against injustice. Language cultivates and stengthens our minds and sends courage into the heart.

In some of the bleakest moments of my life, it is Richard Wilbur's translation of a Jorge Lious Borges' poem, "Everness," that has saved me: One thing does not exsist: Oblivion. / God saves the metal and saves the dross / And his prophetic memory guards from loss / The moons to come, and those of evenings gone. A line of living language can tether you when you most need to stay tied to this world, and print and audio resources on poetry and literature have never been more available to the public. Language is the distinctly human way of life, and there has never been a better time to reclaim your birthright as a sovereign rational being, expressing and manifesting reality in and through the living word.

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Alexandra Barylski, M.A. (Yale University) is the Exective Editor of Marginalia Review of Books, the founder of The Writing College, and The Poetry Peddler. Her second collection of poetry is Necessities of Mending.