Blog 7: Meanderings around Talk and Language and Writing And Words and Meaning Part II

I talk to you. You talk to me. You ask me a question and I answer it. Two people using words to communicate. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? It isn’t. We use words. We use language. And all is well. But what accounts for so much miscommunication? Why all the misunderstandings? Perhaps we can get to the words that can communicate pain when pain is what we feel. Perhaps one speaker is using irony and the other understands only sincerity. A conversation can be complicated.  

And adding another layer to an already complicated matter, language does not exist in the singular. Throughout earth’s history, there has always been a biodiversity of insects and plants and trees and animals that grew and evolved in response to their surroundings becoming a part of the balance of nature. The same applied to the languages that developed among different peoples and the places where they settled and lived. All languages were developed as a direct response to the physical surroundings of the people who spoke and invented it. Not every language has a word for skyscraper. Not every language has a word for cactus.

We often think of languages as having fixed rules regarding grammar. The word correct  come to mind. But languages are not static and are as alive as the people who speak those languages. Languages evolve. Old English gave way to the English we have today and in some ways, it is a far different language than the English most of us are familiar with. Take English out of England, and it evolves and changes in the environment. Americans don’t speak the same English as the British. And each area of the America has a different way of using the English language and uses words and expressions that are not used in other sections of the country. Ever been to Maine? Rhode Island? Lafayette, Lousiana? Texas? Alabama? Wyoming? Each regional accent offers us not just a different sounding English but a different way of thinking. This is part of the diversity that makes America America. Because languages are like living organisms, that means languages live in each speaker and there can be, nor there should be, a strict uniformity. There are people who believe in the purity of their language and they devote themselves to keeping watch, gatekeepers who try to stop the influence of other languages from soiling and ruining what they fight to preserve. There were royal academies devoted to  accepting new words into the language or rejecting them. I have always wondered what they did with the rejected word. Did they send it to prison? Did they exile it to America?

No language is pure—or ever has been. To believe otherwise is an illusion. Languages were formed by borrowing from the languages of the past and the languages of the present. It is mpossible to stop a language from evolving.

Diversity within a language is necessary for that language to stay vibrant, alive, meaningful and relevant. And languages, because they are alive, also have the capacity to die. Just like people and animals and trees.  

Experts (a word I honor and take seriously but not in any absolute sense), estimate that more than thirty-one thousand languages have existed in human history. Today, there are about six thousand languages that are still alive. And there may be more languages that are very much alive that we are not aware of. We can guestimate that about twenty-five thousand languages have disappeared. There are reasons why so many languages are now extinct. Some languages are extinct because the people who spoke those languages are extinct. While it may be true that some cultures died off due to famines or disease, many of those cultures were either killed off through assimilation and the many violent acts of wars of conquest.

A conquered people eventually speak the language of the conqueror. The most expedient way to destroy a culture is to destroy its language. And even easier to destroy that language when the language does not exist in written form—and most languages in human history existed only in oral form. Language was something that was lived. And it was lived in the speaker’s tongue. As such, it only existed in their present.

Added to the complicated matter of language is the function of memory. Of memory, I have this to say: memory is as unreliable as it is necessary for human existence. That is what makes Alzheimer’s such a heartbreaking disease. As to the theories about language, well I’m a writer not a linguistics professor. I’m interested in words and language and memory not as a scientist but as an artist. I am obsessed with words and memory with regards to how they function in my body and in my body of work and how they function in our society.

I know each particular language has its own particular history. Each language creates words and puts the words together systematically to create meaning. I am obsessed with meaning and how it is created. Cynics argue that meaning is merely a construction. That may be, but the house I live in is also a construction. I happen to need it. I happen to believe that language gives order to the chaos. Language is the angel that hovers over the chaos of the waters and creates a world. Having lived in and out of chaos most of my life, I think I prefer order. I no longer have the energy to live in chaos.

I have always thought of words as a way to translate the world precisely because the world is so overwhelmingly vast and large, and I am insignificant. I have to do something to make myself feel a part of a universe. Words are labels, or better, representations for more tangible realities. Words make the inaccessible, accessible. Words do not replace what we experience—but they do offer a translation of our experiences. Love, hope, sex, grief, joy, anger, despair—these are words that attempt to convey emotions that are beyond words and yet we must rely on words to translate and communicate our lived experiences. Words are not knowledge, but they are what communicates our knowledge. 

And yes, words themselves can become an experience. Though, perhaps only writers believe that this is true. 

We like to say that in order to be present to our lives, we must take one step at a time and live one day at a time. But this is inaccurate. We live in a present that is always moving, creating a past and giving us a future that arrives one second at a time. We live one second at a time—and that second is gone as soon as it arrives. And yet, it is the accumulation of those seconds that make a moment, that make an hour, that make a day. That make a life.

It is impossible to be always aware of time, and this is true because we our attentions are turned toward living. It is those experiences that make a life a life. Words express complicated emotional, intellectual, and sensual realities. But I’d like to think that words are more than tools we use to explain the phenomena around us. Some would argue that words are poor substitutes for true experience—whatever that is. And while it is true that I would rather have sex than look up its etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary, I would argue that we need the word sex just as much as we have a desire to engage in it.

We need experience, but we also need a way to express those experiences—and this despite the fact that our linguistic expressions at times fall short. When we experience something—anything—we need to communicate that experience. Or those experiences will be lost. Not to be able to communicate what we are living  is to begin to die.

In the Old Testament, there was no real word for God. There were four letters known as the Tetragrammaton which is Greek meaning “four letters.” In the west, we  transliterate the Greek into Latin letters as YHWH which has evolved into the word: Yahweh. We mistakenly think that this is one of the Hebraic names for God. And it is a mistake. The four letters are not meant to be a name. They are simply meant as a stand-ins for a God who cannot be named.

It is God who names ,and we who are named. God stands above and beyond language. He is the Ur Word who needs no words.. Not so, for you and I. Words are a sign of our mortality but paradoxically, they are symbols of historical continuity—which is the closest we can come to immortality. Words are the tools of remembrance. Where would the world be without the books that help us remember?

I recall a lecture on the Old Testament when I was in the seminary many years ago. I was enthralled with an alternative version of the Book of Genesis which said something like this: “And God breathed into Adam the Gift of Words.” I love that version of Genesis, because having received the gift of words, Adam becomes the first namer on earth. In this, he resemblesd the God who created him. Adam named the animals and the trees and all of the new creation. It is not accidental that one of the tasks of the poet is to name. But if a poet is to name, then he must in turn know the names of things. Many years ago, I was walking through the desert with the poet Denise Levertov who was my friend and mentor. As we walked, she pointed to different desert plants and asked their names. To my great shame, I did not know the names of half the plants she pointed to. She chastised me gently, as well she should have. How could I be a poet if I did not know the names of things? How could I not name the things that have miraculously survived for centuries in a desert that receives  so little water, me who was born and raised in the desert?

And what is a name, anyway? A name is a word with special significance. Why is Benjamin a different kind of word than window? Words have a hierarchy that we assign to them. Our culture assigns these hierarchies according to a set of values—values we are compelled to articulate and put into words. “Thou shalt not kill.” Four words. (Never mind that we happily ignore those words). But as individuals, we have our own hierarchies and the words we use to translate the world say a great deal about who we are and the village that raised us. For example: “Hello, how are you? / Hi, what’s new? / What’s up? / What up? /s’up? Each one of those expressions publicly reveals the village to the rest of the world. Villages express themselves in words. In language. I can even imagine the bodily movements that go along with those words of greetings. I sometimes ask myself: which one of those greetings is superior? Which one is more civilized? Or better, which one of those expressions is more literary. But that’s perhaps the wrong question to ask. What passes for literary criticism is actually an expression of our cultural values. But if I have to choose, I think I’ll go with “What up?”

I have never invented a word in my life. And yet, I invent with words almost every day of my life. I want to go back to an idea I brought up a few paragraphs back. I said: “I would argue that we need the word sex just as much as our desire to engage in sex.” We think of having sex as experience. We privilege experience over language. We think of communicating our experiences of sex as, well, anticlimactic. But for people like me, words themselves are an experience. I experience words. I make them mine. I steal them from other people and from books and from dictionaries and from the cultures that formed me—I steal words and place them on my tongue as if those words were communion wafers and believe in them and feel them and they live not only on my tongue but in my body.

And it is only when I feel these words in me—only then can I place those words on the page and use them as tools to write a story or a novel or a poem. I speak about this sentiment in my most recent young adult novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, a story which revolves around two adolescent Mexican-American boys who live in El Paso, Texas in the late 1980’s. In one particular passage, Ari and Dante are sitting in Dante’s room as he cleans it. Dante grabs a poem written by William Carlos Williams (who is, by the way, one of my favorite poets). Dante is reading aloud:  “He’s dead/ that old Bastard.” Ari studies his new friend with a great sense of wonder and he observes: “When Dante read the word “bastard” he smiled. I knew he loved that word because it was a word that he was not allowed to use, a word that was banned. But here in his room, he could read that word and make it his.

“All afternoon, I sat in that large comfortable chair in Dante’s room and he lay down on his newly made bed. And he read poems.

“I didn’t worry about understanding them. I didn’t care about what they meant. I didn’t care because what mattered was that Dante’s voice felt real. And I felt real. Until Dante, being with other people was the hardest thing in the world for me.  But Dante made talking and living and feeling seem like all those things were perfectly natural. Not in my world, they weren’t.”

In an earlier passage Dante had referred to his mother as being “inscrutable,” a word Ari was unfamiliar with. When Ari leaves Dante’s house, he reflects: “I went home and looked up the word inscrutable. It meant something that could not be easily understood. I wrote down synonyms in my journal: Obscure, unfathomable, enigmatic, mysterious.

“That afternoon, I learned two words: Inscrutable. And friend.

Words were different when they lived inside of you.”

I fell in love with books at an early age and reading became the lens through which I saw the world. And what are books but a collection of words strung together by a single author who has perhaps spent years gathering words together until at last there is a rich harvest gently or even angrily placed on the page.

And everything became a book to me. When I was a boy, the night sky was a book to read. I didn’t much like that I was told how to connect the stars. And who were the ancient Greeks to dictate to his imagination, anyway? I wanted to connect the stars in my own way. Did no one see a coyote in the night sky? I once did. I was told that there was supposed to be a man in the moon. But the Mexicans believed there was a rabbit there. I decided everyone was wrong about this. I saw mountains. Perhaps a man lived in those mountains and many rabbits too. And coyotes chasing those rabbits. The whole large and vast and mysterious world was a book to be read and deciphered. I decided that you could not decipher the world if you did not understand words.

Perhaps I was fascinated with words because I grew up with two languages living inside me, fighting for my attention. I remember being confused when I realized not everybody spoke Spanish. Sometimes I knew a word for something in Spanish and didn’t know the word for it in English. Even now, I move between allegiances. And yet, it is so unnecessary to choose. But the truth is, I have chosen. I write in English. But always, Spanish is sitting on my shoulder whispering cadences that simply do not exist in English. That was the thing with words, they had a rhythm and you could find that rhythm if only you had the patience and the discipline to put them together in a certain way. And if you grappled and fought and gave yourself over to words, then the song would reveal itself. Yes, yes, the lyric. The song was different in Spanish.

And yet English, with its natural iambics, feels like home to me now. Iambic pentameter lines come to me all the time. Sometimes they are busting down my door. One day, I just had to write a free verse sonnet and it came so easily. I patterned it after one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets—perhaps his most famous one and a poem I have always loved. In fact, I included a line from Donne’s poem in my own poem.

I came to you one rainless August night.
You taught me how to live without the rain.
You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
You are sand, wind, sun, and burning sky,
The hottest blue. You blow a breeze and brand
Your breath into my mouth. You reach—then bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
I wake to you at dawn. Never break your
Knot. Reach, rise, blow, Sálvame, mi dios,
Trágame, mi tierra. Salva, traga, Break me,
I am bread. I will be the water for your thirst.

Near the end of the poem, I had to break out into Spanish and yet I did not break the rhythm nor the spirit of the English sonnet. Sometimes words in English and words in Spanish don’t have to be at war with each other. Sometimes they are friends. Sometimes they are lovers.

The first word I fell in love with was ephemeral. I found the word in St. Exupry’s The Little Prince.  The word fascinated me. I remember looking the word up in the library.  The word came from the Greek and it meant literally, “lasting for only one day.”  Brief. I wondered why, in the list of synonyms, the word mortality did not appear. I had heard several times that our lives on earth were brief. I put those two words together in my mind. And from then on, I became fascinated with all the words in the world and how you could put them together and make something that had never been made before. I came to the realization that when we spoke a word, well that was the most ephemeral of things. When I spoke a word, it was gone almost as soon as the word left my lips. The word was gone in less than a second and only the memory of it remained. And so it occurred to me that memory was necessary for words and language to exist. Words and memory were necessary partners.

The thought occurred to me just now that when Diego De Landa, the Spanish Franciscan Friar who accompanied the Spanish conquerors, burned the Mayan codices, he deprived future generations of the way the Mayans used their language. And the world forgot. He stole their words in hopes we would not remember a culture he considered barbaric.

I wonder how many words, how many languages our violence has made extinct?

When I start to write a poem I suppose I begin with an idea but that idea can only be expressed in words. So I begin with words and put them together so that they form an idea. The idea cannot be present without the words. It’s no different with a story. I am writing a story now that begins with this line: When I met him, he was someone else’s lover.” I have thought about this line for a long time and I am fashioning a story that builds on that line.  The last line of the story? “I never smoked another cigarette.” I have the story in my head. I keep it there and when I sit down to write it, I remember it. Maybe my memory isn’t so bad, after all.

But here’s the rub, I will spend weeks, perhaps months, trying to find the right words to tell the story. The readers will experience the story through the words I choose.

I wrote a poem once and I had no idea what I wanted to say, exactly. I wrote down the first line: “There are certain things that cannot be undone.” I could not write the rest of the poem until I had a title: “Arriving at the Heart of Tragedy.” And then I could write the poem. What I decided to do was to juxtapose a little salvation history, Greek mythology, pedestrian human experience and a piece of the conquest of the new world. It was a large order, I thought to myself. How to accomplish this? Through memory and words. I looked nothing up when I wrote this poem. I relied on my memory and I trusted that I could create some kind of meaning through a juxtaposition of words. I wanted to write something moving. I don’t know how to measure “moving” except to say that if what I write does not move me, then why should anyone else give a damn.

Memory. There are some things we think we remember clearly. And there are some events in our lives that we have forgotten completely. We constructs our lives and build them only the events we remember—and we may not even remember those events accurately. Still, there is something in those memories that are the remains of the essential truths of our lives—and it is those truths that help us to understand or misunderstand our lives. We cannot re-create what we have lived.

We cannot reconstruct the stories we have lived—and why would we want to? Keeping the friends we have known for a very long time is the only part of the past worth treasuring. The rest of it? I don’t want to live in a present that looks like the past. I don’t want the little that is accurate about my memory and hand it to the lens of nostalgia.

Even if I believed that the past was better than the present, there is no going back. We can face the future in fear and fight it—which is futile. Or we can face the future with courage and not allow uncertainty to paralyze us. To live and love in uncertainty is not only brave—it is also beautiful.

And though we need our memories to help us survive, I do not believe it is helpful to turn those unreliable memories into weapons to fight our visions of a future that has room for all peoples.

When I discovered the OED, I was more than a little angry that none of my teachers in high school had told me of its existence. I could have spent my entire high school career studying that book because it told you where all the words come from, how and where they were born. Instead I had to settle for reading books unsuitable for young people: Moby Dick which begins with two men in bed and The Scarlet Letter which is about Adultery, hypocrisy and a child bastard born out of wedlock. We were also forced to read Macbeth which was about witchcraft, murder, greed, and ambition. I never really quite understood the logic of my teacher when she confiscated a book I was reading in the back of the room as she lectured. The Book was The Exorcist. She said it was not suitable for a young mind. She said that the book should be banned. I wanted to tell her that perhaps The Scarlet Letter should be banned. I’m glad I didn’t say it. I wouldn’t have meant it. By then, I was too in love with words—not just with stories, but with words. I would sit in class and write down words I knew. It was a list of words that were mine. I had pages and pages of words. And I would wonder: If I look up a word in the dictionary and learn it’s meaning, is it really mine? Well, I didn’t think this was a simple matter because I felt that a word, as if I’ve previously stated, had to live inside you for a while until it became truly yours.

At this point, of course, you all realize that I am utterly incapable of linear thought. If you think this essay is a little too associative and a little too chaotic, you should see me in a classroom. Where was I? Words. Memory. The OED. Where words come from. Another word I love and hate. Faggot. Perhaps I’m obsessed with the word because I’m gay. A faggot is a twig you use to start a fire. Hence, a cigarette, which resembles a twig. But a fire, the twig you use to start a fire to burn homosexual men. Faggot. That word has existed for a long time in the English language. It is part of our history. It is part of our historical memory. It is a part of our cruelty.

Words. Words, words, words, words, words. We spend all of our waking hours using them, listening to them, reading them. And yet, for all of that, words remain nearly invisible. We’re thoughtless and careless. We toss around words and have little respect for them. Which is to say we have little respect for ourselves. I am fond of telling my students that if they do not master language, then the cruel language of the world will beat the crap out of them for the rest of their lives.

I am also fond of telling them that words are so powerful that the wrong word spoken at the wrong moment can break a human heart. And the right word, whispered in just the right moment, can heal a human heart.

Words are not a toy.
Words are not something you play with.
Words are a serious matter.
 Words are worthy of our respect—for they are holy.
And God breathed into Adam the gift of Words.