Category Archives: What is the Language Using Us For?

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:

What is the language using us for?

Hopkins is still with me, who got it into his self-castigating/denying head that he shouldn’t write poetry, because he was now going to dedicate his selfhood to Christ and being a Jesuit, and even though there was no explicit Thou Shalt Not in the Jesuit “rule book”, he denied himself the pleasure of living at that high-holistic pitch that only art, it seems, and maybe good relationships (sex?), can offer us, until language came knocking again at his door.

Or more like sloshing into his world. For on the 11th of December 1875, he opened up his copy of The Times to read about the death of 5 German nuns travelling with another 123 emigrants to New York on the good ship Deutschland, and their death-throe cries (“My God, My God, make haste, make haste”) moved him^[1]. He was moved by their agonised end, but it was language that called.

Hopkin’s took, according to Martin, what was perhaps just a “hint” of compliance from his rector at St Beuno’s^[2] that maybe someone should write “something” (a poem?) to commemorate the nuns and allowed himself to write again. This one “vague suggestion” from “a kindly man” gave him a kind of psychic accession to a place he felt he hadn’t “allowed” himself to participate in or with until then.

I’m also thinking, about another poem I heard only recently on a Poetry Foundation podcast by Gerald Stern called ‘The Name‘: the name being the literal hebrew translation of HaShem (יהוה– YHVH): God.

the

name still on my mind whatever the reason for

mystery, or avoidance

Particularly pious Jews are so beholden to The Name, the nominative, this noun, that they will get extremely irate if The Name is not rendered according to their laws. For example, one is not allowed to write The Name in full, but must render it so: G_d, which I’ve always thought is the equivalent of star-filled bowdlerisations (f*ck, sh**, c*** etc.), only drawing more attention to the word, making it something taboo-laden and shameful, as if screaming it out in one’s mind rather than a natural part of the sentence. But maybe that’s the whole point.

I once held a reading group in a Jewish drop-in centre and was roundly told off by one of it’s users for leaving the ‘o’ in my photocopy of a story which mentioned The Name a few times. It was explained to me, which made absolute sense, that this wouldn’t be a problem if The Name were in a book, as the book would be cared for. But the photocopy would more than likely end up in a bin somewhere underneath a leaking can of baked beans. And this was no way to treat the Name^[3].

Part of me admired this reverence towards language. And yet, it was not entirely towards “language” (which I feel is my reverence), but specifically and blinkeredly towards one word (The Name). At the end of our session, they did not take away the photocopies on which the Name had been printed inappropriately so as to dispose of them correctly. In fact, they never took away any of the poems or stories I brought them . That was their way of trying to keep on top of (the) uncontrollable Language, do-gooding me with all the power-play inherent in that, and maybe even The Name itself.

 

 

 

 

 

What is the language using us for?
It uses us all and in its dark
Of dark actions selections differ.

The “dark of dark actions” really gets to the heart, for me, of how little I’m truly conscious of the language machine whirring, purring (more often stuttering, spluttering) away in my head.

As I begin writing this sentence you’re reading, I’m only faintly aware of how it will be shaped as I proceed from clause to clause, what words will adhere to the unfolding of thought. And will they be the right words? What are the right words?

Well, surely the words that at once encapsulate a thought a person like you or I might have, but also the words that take you beyond that inchoate, semi-formed smother of perceptions, assumptions, apprehensions, reflections; words that create something half-you-half-other. Which is perhaps to say: half-you-half-new.

For you are generally the same old words constellating in pretty much the same old patterns in your head, your daily thought combos wearing everyday apparel. But in the crafty dexterity of manipulating language for our own purposes (or at least the purposes we think are “ours”), we may, for just a punctuated beat or two, feel like we’ve netted something tasty and good, something somehow “better” (for new is always better, isn’t it?) than what we’ve always had.^[1].

I am not making a fool of myself
For you.

This sentence in the poem could also be shaped as a question: “Am I making a fool of myself?” It’s question that governs a lot of our behaviour. Maybe necessarily so. If we were all making fools of ourselves, all the time, who would run the hospitals, give sermons, recycle our waste?

What does it mean to make a fool of oneself? If you trace back the etymology of the word, it leads us to three besmirched associations: 1) “You’re unhinged” [Old French fol: mad person] 2) “You’re stupid” [Latin follis empty-headed], or 3) “You’re digressively boring, or consternatingly loose-lipped [2nd meaning of follis: bellows - from flare: to blow].

So in order not to make fools of ourselves we “play by the rules” (or whatever we believe the rules to be). And in doing so potentially trammel something “alive” in ourselves that may sound foolish because it is new or uncomfortable.

This paradox emerges from the poem itself. I don’t want to make a fool of myself, but “I would like to speak in front/Of myself with all my ears alive/And find out what it is I want”, and once I’ve found this out, it would be great if I could share it with you, so that for a moment we might be:

telling

Each other alive about each other
Alive.

But most of the time we’re policing this desire to tell each other about what is most alive in us by worrying we might be making fools of ourselves. Especially “in front of the best”. It seems to worry us less if we think we’re doing it in front of “the worst”. So maybe this is more about vanity than anything else.

How does one make the right amount of a fool of oneself, if fool seems (as Graham suggests) to be linked in some way to “aliveness”?

A passage from an essay by Alison MacLeod on ‘Writing and Risk-Taking’ comes to mind, where Alison literally embodies the topic by allowing the reader to remain with her whilst she takes a bath. After describing the private musings of the bather, she writes:

These are things I shouldn’t be telling you. We’re strangers. If ever we meet, I’d rather the image of me in the bath didn’t flash up before your eyes - and I’m sure you feel the same. But I’ll risk it because that’s what writers need to do. …On paper, they have to be real.

Graham also talks about wanting the place of language in his life to be a “real place” (“Seeing I have to put up with it anyhow,” he adds wryly). But where is the line between the real and the madness, the doltish, the dull?

This has not been a good week in terms of actually learning the lines of this poem. I have learnt about ten lines, maybe twelve or thirteen if I allow myself to glance down occasionally at the text.

So I have learnt ten lines.

This is because I haven’t given good, solid blocks of time to memorising, which is needed if this is to matter.

It matters only in
So far as we want to be telling

Each other alive about each other
Alive.

I’ve yanked it out (the poem) in supermarket shopping queues and run through the first three stanzas a couple of times, but before I can move into the more crepuscular regions of unknowing, my groceries are being scanned and my mind is elsewhere.

My mind is elsewhere is the main issue. Not that it’s elsewhere on anything particularly urgent or useful that needs thinking about. It’s just flitting around as minds do, here and there, this way and that. Mainly away from the words on the page.

So why won’t the mind stay with them? Why this ever-wayward pull to chaotically-creative thoughts, words becoming inconsequential squiggles on an inconsequential page or screen?

In the execution of a mindful task, unless that task is all consuming (arduously - the 100 metre sprint, childbirth; pleasurably - chocolate, masturbation) we come up against the nitty-gritty limits of our attention and focus.

So if anything we do is to matter to us beyond the things we’re paid or pressurised into doing^[1], we need, Graham seems to be saying to pay attention to how we “make…a place” for these things in our lives.

Gah.

The poem will only be learnt if this afternoon when I stroll out into the Chilterns, I spend a couple of hours learning it. This screen of words will only be written if I stay on the page and write rather than flit off to where the mind wants to go (which is to all those other open tabs and possibilities on my Chrome browser window/head)^[2].

It’s hard work, this [insert something that matters to you] stuff - bloody hard (but meaningful, satisfying) work.