Pain's Simple Sounds

In the previous post I discussed the obvious answer to the question as to why people that have suffered tremendous pain in their lives make better horse trainers. That was an easy one.

I cannot answer a deeper question of pain and communication. Why are those who have suffered horrible, long term emotional pain able to master the use of simple words and phrases that create indelible images on our hearts?

Lincoln, Crazy Horse (e.g. "One does not sell the land upon which the People walk.), Hank Williams, Townes Van Zandt, and Gram Parsons to name a few. Only Lincoln among them lived to be older than me. Two assassinated,three killed by drugs and alcohol all geniuses, all simple, all complex, all suffering, and each profound.

And each more popular in death than in life.

Lincoln's second Inaugural Address made sense of the senselessness of the slaughter. Crazy Horse gave meaning to both the fight and the flight of his people. Williams, Van Zandt, and Parsons wrote words of the clearest insight while blind drunk.

I have no hypothesis to explain the tie between their pain, their poetry and their prose. I only recognize what a shame it was that none of them understood their own greatness.