“Words are events, they do things, they change things… they change both the speaker and the hearer… they feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin in her remarkable meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and to others two centuries after Mary Shelley prophesied that “every word can fight any world; in these times of civilization, it is carried on.”
Lately I've been thinking about words, their power and their prison, the way we pigeonhole the unexplainable and come to confuse them with the middle, how they are our best hope to close the abyss between us for understanding. And yet without music and mathematics, the dream of a common language is just a dream. We talk about the language as if it is united, forgetting that within any one language there is infinity – the slang of subcultures, the native language of different generations and values, the private dictionary of lovers. When the parts we live with try to talk to each other, speak different languages, we keep translating to separate everything and explain it to others, to say who we are and what we want, how we suffer and how we like to be loved.
bell hooks take these infinities in one of the essays they collect Teaching Transcendence: Education as a Libertarian Practice (public library). With an eye to a line from Adrienne Rich's poem that stayed in his soul and became the basis of his account of language, he writes:
Words force themselves, ingrained in our memory against our will … to challenge and to help.
“No one is created or destined to love anyone,” Rich wrote in his epochal collection A Common Language Dream. We talk about our love to make it real, to make it tender. To say “I want you” is to walk straight into the abyss and jump, hoping to be caught; means “I want to live.” A generation after Pablo Neruda made words desire, hooks made desire the subject of words:
Like desire, language disrupts, refusing to be contained within boundaries. It speaks against our will, with intrusive words and thoughts, until it breaks through the most secret spaces of the mind and body.
[…]
Realizing that we communicate with language seems especially difficult in a society that makes us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to hear deeply is to be inferior, because within the duality of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language.
However, we are not just users of language — we are its creators. Language is a container of thoughts and feelings that shape content. Einstein's great relativity revelation was that spacetime – the fabric of the universe – tells matter how it moves and matter tells spacetime how it bends. Language is the fabric of our life. Language tells thought how to move and thought tells language how to bend. We can bend ideas with words, we can break them and even make a mosaic of pieces in the image of the world we want to live in, according to our desires.
Thinking of desire as the bridge of duality, the most important integration of body and mind, hooks writes:
To heal the separation of mind and body, marginalized and oppressed people try to restore ourselves and our knowledge through language. We want to create a space for intimacy. We cannot find such a place in standard English, we create a sad, broken, unmanageable expression of the native language… There, in that place, we make English do what we want it to do… free ourselves with language.
Couples with hooks on the hove, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin's transformative and redemptive power of language and artist Julie Paschkis' illustrated love letter to words.
