What is the Language Using Us For?
Such an arresting title. And a question we probably never thought to ask in this way.
Oh we might have pondered the reverse: “What are we using language for?“, the assumption being that we’re the overseers, the pilots, the ones running the show here, and language better get with our programme. But what if it’s the other way round? What if language (and by extension “life”) is using us, and all the control is quite illusory?
I’m not going to attempt to learn the whole poem as it’s bloody long and I’m not sold on all of it. But the bits that I like, I really like, so I’m going to stick those together and make something of them.
I suspect this will be part of the skirmish between myself and the poem: me trying to use it for my purposes (an abridgement imposes that impetus), the poem using me for what it/you need.
Here’s the reading:
I like this poem a lot, Steve, I’d not heard of it before. It poses several questions, some repeatedly, which it seems to me is one of the important things that poetry must do in order to engage us.
The title, as you point out a reversal of the question we might have expected put me in mind immediately of Richard Dawkins and “The Selfish Gene” - now, surprisingly, published over 35 years ago! His thesis that Darwinian selection rests upon the “selfishness” of the gene, rather than the organism, helped to explain the existence of altruism within populations, but more importantly Dawkins strongly refuted the common misconception of his work that this implied intent upon the part of the genes.
Likewise here we can posit the question “What is language using us for?” without recourse to a personification of our mother tongue. Indeed, it seems quite reasonable to assume that facets of British character, say, have their origin in the very syntax, lilt and substance of the English language - similarly for Spanish, Japanese or Urdu.
I’d be really interested to hear about the parts of the poem that you are not sold on, too. I’ll take time out to absorb the poem a little and gather my thoughts about what it is actually saying.