“Words are events, they do things, they change things. They transform both the speaker and the hearer … to feed understanding or feelings back and forth and repeat them. Words are the invisible hands with which we touch, feel the structure of the world, hold our experience. We live in language – it is our inner narrative that sews the events of our life into a story of self. We love it in language – it is the lever in every deep and great relationship, Adrienne rich saw that “a process, sensitive, violent, which is often terrifying for both people involved, When two people meet in a third language, parts of each remain untrusted by the other. When two people meet with the same language, they must learn to say the same things with the same words in order to meet the truth. And so we must love language to love each other well, to love our lives.
I know of no book of greater love in language, in its simplicity and its boundless complexity, than Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) Tucks published Hopes (public library) Under the title “Words” – The Preseed Poem Elevation was arranged between the chapters of his revolutionary change in Chile and his chosen choice
A generation after Virginia Woolf came up with the only recording of her voice “Words belong to each other,” wrote Neruda:
… You can say whatever you want, Yessir, but it is a name that sings, rises and loves them, I soften them, I forget, I forget, I forget, I forget, I forget, I linger like silver fish, they are foam, thread. Metal, dew … I run after some words … so beautiful that I want to count them all in my poem … I hold them, I clean them, I wake them up, I encourage them, I drink them, I drink them, I drink them, I drink them. Below, I have turned them away, I decorate them, I let them go, I leave them in my poem like stalactites, or slives of molded wood, or one is arranged according to its place, or another arranges its place, or one sits down in its way, or one sits down in its way, or one sits down in its place, or one sits down like its stare, or everything sits down Weight, feathers, hair, and everything they collect from the river too much, from wandering more from country to country, from being rooted for a long time … they live in the pit, they are cleaned a lot …
Entering Neruda's passionate ode to the brilliance of language is also a reminder of the darkness from which its light emerges:
Olunjani ulimi olukhulu, lululimi oluhle esilizuze khona abanqobi abanolaka … Baphuma phezu kwama-cordilleras amakhulu, ngaphezulu kwamazambane, ama-basaji, ama-piramid, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe, izizwe zithandana nje Labo abaletha emasakeni abo amakhulu … nomaphi lapho beya khona, badabula izwe … kodwa they fell like stones boots boots boots, their beards, their horses, their horses, their horses left shining here … our language. We came lost … We came the winners … they took away the gold and left us the gold … they left us everything and left us all thoughts …
We forget this, but it is true this is unpleasant and liberating – that no experience is wasted, that disasters, spoils of trust and the whole world leave the seeds of something new. Our very earth was born through trauma, formed from debris that first accumulated four and a half billion years ago before coalescing into rocky bodies that continued to collide with the earth and moon. Words can do that too – the unity of looking at each other to form a pure truth, sharpening the stories we tell ourselves to live, the stories we tell each other and call for love.
