Losing a Language

Blog, end of September, following the interconnected threads of my mind, thinking of language and loss




Losing a Language; W.S. Merwin


A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something they could say

But they know now such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

Many of the things were about
no longer exist

​

! am thinking of lost words, what happens when we have no words to give form to our complex feelings.  And also thinking of the joy when we find words.  In prison, Jimmy Santiago Baca wrote of that joy, of words, metaphors, images releasing him from inner prison:


A mass of molten fury in this furnace of steel,
     and yet my thoughts became ladles, sifting carefully
Through my life, the pain and endurance
to the essence of my being,
       I gently into the long night, unmolding
       my shielded heart, the fierce figures
       of war and loss, i remolding them
       my despair and anger into a cry and song,
I took the path alone, nuded myself to my own caged animals,
and learned their tongues and their spirits,
and roamed the desert, went to my place of birth...
          Now tonight, i am a burning bush
          My bones a grill of fire,


The power that come when we can find the words.  But if we have no words the often inarticulate anger and rage.  In her Lost in Translation, Hoffman writes about hearing a man shouting at his wife and children, his curses  repeated over and over again:  “In my New York apartment, I listen almost nightly to fights that erupt like brushfire on the street below--and in their escalating fury of repetition phrases (“Don’t do this to me, man, you fucking bastard, I’ll fucking kill you”) I hear not the pleasure of macho toughness but an infuriated beating against wordlessness, against the incapacity to make oneself understood, seen.  Anger can be a force--it can even be satisfying--if it can gather into words... But without this means of ventilation, it only turns back inward and swirling like the head of a stead--building to an impotent, murderous rage.  If all therapy is speaking therapy--a talking cure--then perhaps all neurosis is a speech dis-ease.”  She continues: “What I heard that night was impotent murderous rage...that is what I hear a lot….We all, I believe, need a vehicle, a way of making manifest the energy within.  If we have no form to express our life energy, then, it seems to me, we must destroy either ourselves or others.”  


In his Seeing Voices,  Oliver Sacks writes about a history of disallowing deaf children their natural “tongue”--sign language--believing that they should read lips and speak orally in order to fit in to the “normal” culture. This arrogant assumption is  part of our colonial and imperial attitude and history:  defining another’s language as strange, primitive,  and seeing one’s own language as superior:  forcing native children into boarding schools, insisting they not speak their language; making people ashamed of their accents, native tongue, not realizing that if one speaks in one’s natural language one can then learn another language, can be bilingual.  The almost extinction of so many ancient languages and all the wisdom they contain.




As I get older,   the accessibility  of names and nouns and words gets more difficult.  I like to think that i will remember what is most important...and that is often true.  In  Majesty of your Loving,  Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle traces the losses her husband experiences as his  Alzheimer worsens.  At one point, when it seems that he has lost almost any ability to communicate, he suddenly expresses a few lines from Shakespeare that are totally relevant to the conversation taking place around him. As Merwin says: “something still remembers.”


Loss of words exists on many levels.  I am now thinking of words that have been eliminated from some dictionaries and an article by Martin Robbins on “Why Oxford Dictionaries are right to purge nature from the dictionary.”   Words taken out of the dictionary include acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttcut, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, willow.  They are now replaced by new words: attachment,  block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut and paste, MP3 player, voice-mail.  Robbins’ point is that the decision is based on usage, on frequencies in which words appear in literature.  Not prescriptive but descriptive-- changes in a culture, ways of living and seeing the world. 




Shifts in a culture can make even one’s native tongue sound foreign.  In Germany, not just during the Nazi realm but even before that, many literary writers felt that the shift to militaristic language made it difficult to capture the heart and nuance of what they wanted to say in the changed German language.   And we,now,  here, the words of nature becoming for younger people a foreign tongue, replaced by words of our now technical and digital age: abbreviations, texting... How can one speak in this new tongue?


In Refuge, Terry Tempe\\st Williams sits with her grandmother looking at shells, naming them, her grandmother saying it is important to know the name of things; otherwise we won’t be able to know what we have lost. When i would ask my mother if she wanted to go to the botanical gardens near our Bronx apartment building to see  emerging flowers and the old trees changing with the season,  she said: Bernice, I have seen trees.  But the question: have you seen this tree, this specific and unique tree, in this season, with this lighting, here and now, to recognize shape and size and bark and leaf.  To  be able to name but also to know in a different and distinct way: to  touch.  And what softly touches the world outside of us often touches the heart within.  We have lost touch.


Clearly the loss is not just of the name but the disappearance of the being itself...the last of a species, an extinction of a tree or mammal  or plant or insect or….A disappearance forever..


Painful--to hear the call of a bird whose mate has been killed, a hawk, guinea hen, cardinal...calling out.  I think of the poignant photo of a small gorilla climbing a naked tree in the Congo, the forest  cut down--their only habitat destroyed in war.  Even more plaintive, a calling for a mate when you are the last survivor of a species….That kind of loneliness for all that is lost.


My mind thinks of other shifts and other losses: of letters,  those letters I have received and saved through the years, words written by a hand holding a pen, the handwriting that lets me actually connect to a person, the old paper, brown and crumbling, the sensory feel of actually reading a letter, the art of that heart no longer accessible to most people.  For many years i wrote long letters to women and men in prison. I saved letters they wrote to me because they spoke directly, deeply, with an honesty often absent from casual conversations.   One man,  a beautiful writer, was  recently paroled.  He writes now of being lost and alienated in his now “culture”...where people don’t write letters anymore.   A lost art, the slow art,long words, thoughts, reflection, not present in a culture that often seems raucous, screaming, moving too quickly with  cell phone in hand.


And photos also, not the quick scrolling through the hundreds of pictures on one’s cell phone but a book of photographs saved.   When I taught a recent workshop I spoke of the t.v. program I would see with my parents: “I remember mama”  It would start with the daughter Dagmar opening the family album, looking at each photograph,  naming each person, and always ending with her”and most of all, most of all, I remember mama.”  I know we can still remember “mama’ and tell stories, but those pictures, from long ago, the small ones that are now on my walls, showing their age, are no more.  Letters with distinct handwriting, old photos each one standing alone. The digital age making everything easy, accessible, but losing something precious. 




A  separation from our senses, our ability to hear, smell, touch: Hopkins’ “nor can foot feel being shod.”  The question not just of our finding words to voice what is within us, but our inability to hear another’s language,  the deep knowledge of native peoples, other cultures, of animals and plants, of other ways of knowing and seeing, the world of smell,  the reading the night skies, the ability to return to  places of birth after nine or more years, to  migrate thousands of miles, to sing and communicate long distance through the ocean. To see not a tree alone but a forest, a  community of trees or birds or plants or animals that interrelate in ways far more than we have  imagined, and because we couldn’t imagine we often destroyed. Finally seeing the essential role the predator we tried to eliminate, recognizing the keystone species which holds everything in balance,  the biodiversity that is the essence of life, the community of living beings all dependent and interrelated.


Suanne Simard, a forest ecologist writes of the mother tree, of  her discovery  of underground channels, a web of interdependence, the communication between trees, the messages relayed back and forth “through a cryptic underground fungal network, a “constellation of tree hubs and fungal links,” the Mother Trees “at the center of forest communication, “responding to one another by emitting chemical  signals: knowing which seedlings are their own kin,  providing food and water, “protection and sentience,””passing their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever changing landscape.”  All we didn’t know, a knowledge often scoffed at by our arrogance and the limits of our science.  What we didn’t learn, could begin to understand.


I recently read over sections from my Breaking Out of Prison: a guide to consciousness, compassion,and freedom  and could see how I knew even then what i am knowing now and  need to remember, again and again.  I wrote 20 years ago:  “What  I want to do in this book--and in my life--is attune my senses: train my ears and eyes and heart and body to pay close attention to the language of other beings, in all their different forms.  To be respectful.  To not demand others speak my language , to not assume I know, to not react in fear, to catch myself when I do react in fear, to use fear as my companion in my further travels.   I want to be the open eyed child, the curious, open and respectful stranger.  And I want to give my students tools for paying attention, for catching themselves in the act of inattention, dismissal, judgment, in the act of blocking out what goes contrary to a belief system, a value, a prejudice, an opinion.  I want them to hear the language of equus and chimp and child so that they cannot separate out, believing animals do not feel pain when they are subjected to pain or held in confinement, or that darker children from other cultures, imprisoned in factories working for thirty seven cents an hour, six days a week, do not feel the deprivation of their confinement...or refugees fleeing from violence and poverty...or women in slave trade...or ...or...or...I want students--and of course myself--to listen closely  to others and, also, to the others within ourselves, our own different voices.  To listen with curiosity , empathy, and love of our own words flowing from our own pens.  




I think of the poet Stafford who wrote a poem a day and said that if we follow the threads of our own mind gently and without judgment we will be led to the holy land.   My whole life has been circling around the same thoughts, my roots reaching out into the forest landscape, but also continually returning to what i always knew deep in my roots.