You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail. ―Czelaw Milosz
Language, for me, has continued to be both blessing and curse, a love affair and a trial. To commit a word to paper (or screen), to launch a string of words into a public sphere, to destine a paragraph for the larger work of an essay or story, to craft poetic words that hold the integrity of a line–herein lies the pleasure and the pain of language.
During my university and professional years, my season of language was largely characterized by explaining, interpreting, analyzing, critiquing, reflecting upon, and recommending. I remember the evening hours I spent in the Calvin T. Ryan Library on my college campus. These were dedicated writing hours during which I labored (and I mean labored) to transfer my research and insights into something worthy of being submitted to my professors. A productive night? A three-hour hashing and re-hashing of the best words I could muster into a single paragraph. A blood-letting of the mind and soul that resulted in a fatigue that often left me even too tired to sleep. There was no quick-drafting. No spontaneous overflow of ideas or emotions. Nothing like that. This was more the work of a laborer than an artist. This was the gut-wrenching work of trying to reach with words/what matters most only to fail more times than I succeeded.
Ernest Heminway writes:
All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
In spite of the challenges of this season of language, I was, and continue to be, smitten with the beauty and power of words. I like the way they sound when spoken, the way they appear, letter by letter, on the page. I like the feeling of seeing them for the first time–those I’ve never encountered and those I see with new eyes. Sometimes, I carry a word around with me like a stone in my pocket, taking it out every now and then to admire it. Or to shudder in its presence.
When my brother was in kindergarten, my mother and I were in the kitchen and overheard the neighbor boys yell across the fence, “Throw our ball back, nigger!” Even before I really understood the power and history of this word, the shudder that went me was seismic, literally off the language richter scale. And after my brother had thrown the ball back into the neighbor’s yard and burst through the back door, he asked, “What does it mean when someone calls you a nigger?” Standing before my five-year-old brother in that moment was a moment in which my language failed. Any words I might have offered would have been woefully inadequate or tragically wrong in the face of such injury. For as Wilkie Collins writes: Our words are giants when they do us an injury. . . [A Woman in White]
I admit that I’ve often used words thoughtlessly, tossing them out too quickly–sometimes in the heat of the moment and sometimes in a moment of what can only be called ignorance. Regardless of the intent or lack of intent, I’ve come to understand the consequences of such careless words which generally take on lives and intents of their own. In The God of Small Things, novelist Arundhati Roy claims, That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
Unfortunately, the season of careless words has no apparent end. It hangs around our necks like an albatross, groaning at the words that make people love and respect us a little less, take us a little less seriously, and make us wounders instead of healers. For better or worse, we live in a time when words–carelessly, intentionally, or naively delivered–are under considerable scrutiny. Say the wrong word, and you make people love you a little (or a lot) less. Say an inadequate or an ambiguous word, one whose history and intent may be questioned, and you can also inflict pain. Keep your words to yourself and maintain a carefully cultivated (or cowardly) silence, and your unspoken words can still wound. And that these careless words can be from your past–even and especially words from a younger, less introspective or less ‘woke’ self–matters little or not at all.
Op-Ed staff editor and writer for The New York Times, Aisha Harris recently wrote about the current season of This You?. In her article, she explains the movement and its intent:
Brutally crisp and blatantly rhetorical, the phrase has become a catchall representing the internet currency of receipts, forcing bandwagon participants to confront things they might have said or done that seemingly contradict their newfound commitment to the cause.
In the season of This You?, whatever language you may use now to support a person, idea, or cause may be tarnished or even obliterated by language you once used. And so, language from your past can become the proverbial gift that keeps on giving, keeps on making others love you less, keeps on reminding everyone of who you once were, and keeps on targeting words you once used. Truthfully, when I consider things I’ve said and written in the past, I can only brace myself for a potential This You?
But there are seasons when words delight and bless, when they move us with the sheer magnificence of their beauty and power. St. John of the Cross writes:
They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field.
Before I die, I want to write one thing that truly does for the heart what light can for a field. One thing that–if I were digitally outed by a This You? devotee–I would joyously say yes, yes, yes! I would say this is me, and perhaps these words are the best of me. I would confidently announce that, of course, the sun must shine when I commit these subjects to paper: the violet clouds along the horizon, the hand of my grandson in mine, the sound of the cottonwoods in the wind. In this season, the words of poet Anne Sexton are as close as any in describing my bliss:
Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face. ["Words"]
Let the doves fall from the ceilings and the legs of summer stroll through fields of sweet clover! Let six–no 100–holy oranges sit in my lap! Let us call upon all the words that do for the heart what light can for a field! Let us choose a word to hold in our palm and, as Emily Dickinson writes, look at it, until it begins to shine!
And if we can’t find the right word, then let us throw caution to the wind and invent our own like an 11-year-old girl did the day I worked with her during a poetry residency. Struggling to find the right word to describe a keepsake–a glass figurine she kept on her dresser–she’d erased a hole in her notebook paper when suddenly she cried, “I got it! It’s glassable! Yup, that’s exactly what it is, glassable!” I might have offered up the word I thought she was searching for, but how this word fragile paled in the light of her sun. And I could only hope that her season of wonderful words stretched long into her life. Like writer Aldous Huxley, I could only hope that she might have Shakespearean feelings but never talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors, that she never practice alchemy in reverse–touch gold and it turns to lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash. [The Genius and the Goddess] In her season of words, let her become a master alchemist turning a leaden world to gold.
In her poem “Words,” Anne Sexton concludes:
Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren. But I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
In all my seasons of words, I, too, most often fly like an eagle/but with the wings of a wren. I have sent my words into the wind only to find that they lack the muscle to stay the course. I have used words of prey only to discover that they cowered in rock crevices or were eaten by more capable foes. I have summoned words of color and sound and motion only to realize that, wren-like, they furiously flap their wings but fail to take flight. And yet, I send them out. Again and again. Because even when I try–and fail–to reach with words what matters most, even when my words struggle and subsequently die, they have too much life-force to contain. And when they occasionally soar? There is no better season.
