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Key ideas: The power of language & human emotion in our voice, how the future is first in our mouth and then in our hands & how we need the linguistic existence of a fire escape.

1 quote:
"No words can say I love you more than feeling it from the actions of somebody." - Ocean Vuong

Who is Ocean Vuong?

An associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won multiple awards.
Author of "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous", a book written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother.


Idea 1 @ 15mins: 
Language can divide people and build walls, or it can bring us together and build bridges between our understanding.  Speaking adds a whole other dimension and level to words.  Words on a page can be turned in a beautiful song that sparks human emotion, through the pauses, cadences, oscillation and amplification of words with the full range of human emotion in the voice.  We are all participants in the future of language and it's up to us to use language to cast new meaning.
Idea 2 @ 17mins: 
We often tell our students the future's in your hands. But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to you have to articulate the world you want to live in first. We pride ourselves as a country that's very technologically advanced. We have strong, good science, good schools, very advanced weaponry. But I think we're still very primitive in the way we use language and speak.
Idea 3 @ 42mins: 
Some parts of language iterates a loneliness. The way we say hello to each other, you know? Hi, how are you? Oh, good is almost always the answer. So how are you is now defunct. It doesn't access reality, It fills it with fluff.  What can we do when some language starts to fail at its function and it starts to obscure rather than open.   And a lot of the crisis around suicide that Ocean's uncle and friends went through was a crisis of communication.  They couldn't say I'm hurt.  Ocean would remember when he heard of his uncles suicide, he was a student at Brooklyn College in New York and he went for the longest walk and he kept seeing these fires kept.  And he asked himself, what is the linguistic existence of a fire escape?   Ocean says he think we're so we built shame into vulnerability and we've sealed it off in our culture; not at the dinner table, Don't say this. Nows not the time.  We need to find the time and ability to ask Are you really OK? I know we're talking, but if you want to step out on the fire escape. And you can tell me the truth.

1 question:
Can you think of a time where the language you used could've been improved to bring better understanding between people?

Other topics:

The love story of his parents and his upbringing as a queer war baby from his Vietnamese & American parents in America.
How Buddhist practice is incorporated into his life and thinking.
Teaching language, and the power of language.

Written summary: https://www.owltail.com/summaries/awuwB-Ocean-Vuong-A-Life-Worthy-of-Our-Breath