It’s been awhile since I’ve written one of these things. The good news is it’s because I’ve been busy, taking care of things that should have been taken care of a long time ago. I started a new project that is both exciting and daunting, and hopefully I’ll have more specific news about that before the end of 2021. I moved, and in so doing sold or threw out or gave away most of the things I own. I’ve been staying offline, mostly. I’ve been making my corner of life a home.
Above all, I’ve been good, I’ve been really good. So, here we go.
When the words came back, they whispered their return with the faintest of flutters, like the beating of wings in the dark, or else, and maybe more accurately, like the flop of the gut at the moment just before you turn to see an old friend; a familiarity, a premonition, an awareness of presence that reaches the heart before the mind can catch up. The next night, she sat down to type and, for the first time since she’d started her latest adventure, the words didn’t fight to be pulled out of where they rest, formless, in the inner wells of creation. They came when she invited them. And they said: “You still don’t understand. We’re not the ones who left.”
When I tell folks I’m a writer, there are two common responses. The first, which most often comes when alcohol or naked feelings are involved, is “this is off the record.” It’s meant as a joke but, let me tell you, gets a little stale. The second goes something like this: “Oh, so does it drive you crazy when people spell things wrong?” Or, alternately: “does it drive you crazy when people have bad grammar?”
This is an interesting one, part curiosity and part, no doubt, a hangover from the red-pen remarks of unimpressed teachers; a lot of people have a lingering insecurity about their own spelling or grammar. This is understandable, and I’ve seen enough drive-by spelling corrections on Twitter to know that it clearly drives some people nuts. But spelling errors barely nick the radar of what I notice about how folks write; and so-called “bad grammar” actually delights me.
To explain this, I go back to how I fell into words in the first place. Before I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a linguist; my dream was to travel the world, observing language where it thrives, between people. I abandoned that dream after I learned that the majority of academic linguistics — the phonetics and phonology of it all, the fricatives and plosives and voiceless consonants — was interminably boring and, definitively, not for me. But the fascination with how languages grow and change, how they can be different or the same, how they live in the minds and tongues and hands of every human on the planet, how they can fundamentally shape our experience — that love never went away.
In following this passion, the story that linguistics told me was that there can be no “bad grammar,” at least not in the way that people commonly mean. Language is not static. It is not like physics, or mathematics; it does not have to be consistent or conform to any natural law. Language has but one task, which is to convey meaning, and if that objective is achieved — if the one who receives the words understands the person who issued them — then its use has been successful. Many of the most evocative, the most beautiful, the most perfect expressions of feeling or idea have been been constructed using what the pedants (and bigots, to touch on how dialect is often wielded to enforce social stratification) would call “bad grammar.”
This, more than anything else, is what makes language so beautiful to me: it is best understood not as a set of rules, but as an agreement between people. It is only as rigid as the limits of what it can create and still be understood, and the trillions of words exchanged around the world every day test those limits all the time. It is inherently fluid. New words are born. Old ones shift sound and meaning. Grammar moves with a tectonic drift, pushing entire languages further apart: Latin becomes French, becomes Portuguese, becomes Romanian. One ancient language, spoken 6,500 years ago by a tribe who lived on the steppes of Eastern Europe, eventually gave birth to everything from Hindi and Persian to Polish and English. Once, proper English demanded the use of grammatical gender, as languages like French still do; but that hasn’t been a feature of this tongue for hundreds of years. And in six thousand years hence, the languages English will spawn may not be recognizable to us at all.
In other words: it’s all bad grammar. Everything we say or write was once somebody’s bad grammar. Bad grammar built our language through lifetimes of sharing thoughts and hopes and fears. Bad grammar is part of the journey. Bad grammar got us here.
Sometimes, I find bits and pieces of writing on the Notes app of my phone. Disjointed words, mostly. Mental debris. Things where I just started tapping words on the screen, trying to hold onto something, trying to call each facet of an experience by its rightful name. Sometimes these bits are for work, jotted with little respect for punctuation but left only as impressions, later to be shaped into a more suitable form. Snippets such as: “Where he was found / In sight of the rocks sticking into the water like ribs or spines.” Or else, an even shorter thought: “The smallest town. Why here.”
Mostly, though, these notes are personal, things felt or seen and eager to be given to posterity in verbal form. Here, I am reminded again of what makes the potential of language so limitless, and its frontiers so wide: these fractured bits contain few specifics, but the texture of the words is enough to take me back to the exact point in my life where they started from seed. They remind me of how things unfolded and what they meant, or still mean.
we were there at the heart where
all things converge and the mechanics
of being were broken open and laid out
in pieces on old sheets and wood floors
where my hand traced the grain, and…
And so on. You get the picture.
This type of writing, to me, is where the power of words is most abundantly clear. If you find the right ones for the job, they can preserve events in far sharper definition than memory alone. They can encapsulate an entire experience, drawing from the five senses but also going beyond those senses into the deepest realms of the mind. What you saw, what you heard, but also what the whole experience felt like.
Sometimes, students ask me why I decided to become a writer: fundamentally, this is why. (There’s another, less flattering answer, which is that I’m not good at anything else.) The course of my life stretches back to when I was 14 years old, huddled under my blankets in my usual pose, flashlight in hand and nose buried in books; it was around this time that I discovered George Orwell.
It was 1984 that drew me in, but my second foray into Orwell was his seminal non-fiction work, 1937’s The Road to Wigan Pier. It transfixed me more than any novel ever had. Early in the book, an account of socioeconomic conditions in the poor mining towns of Northern England, there is a passage where Orwell describes the owners of the boarding house at which he stayed.
Partly blocking the door of the larder there was a shapeless sofa upon which Mrs. Brooker, our landlady, lay permanently ill, festooned in grimy blankets. She had a big, pale yellow, anxious face.
This is not the most beautiful English prose. (For that, give me Rushdie.) It’s also not a flattering portrait of Mrs. Brooker. But the first time I read this passage, the words seized me: I went over them time and time again with my finger, hungry to know why they had given me such pause.
At some point, I understood: it’s because the masterful precision of Orwell’s words made the scene indelible. Mrs. Brooker was certainly long dead by the time I read about her, and yet I could see her in my mind, as vivid as she must have been to Orwell at that exact moment of her life, a vision conjured by a few sparse adjectives chosen with exacting care.
The sofa being “shapeless;” the choice to use “festooned” instead of a word such as “wrapped,” which comes more easily to hand; with those few tools, the author sculpted a scene that would pass through time, and through a million minds. Orwell was not verbose and never strayed into purple prose; yet his control of language was such that he had effectively made Mrs. Brooker, or at least his impression of her, immortal.
Knowing that was possible, how could one not want to at least try?
I’ve written in public now for a long time. Of course, folks don’t always like what I write. Sometimes their critiques are bang-on right, and I try to learn from those mistakes and, after a suitable period of self-flagellation, move on. Other times the critiques are unfair, or just misguided. But every now and then, the source of their disapproval strikes closer to the heart of something very fundamental about working with language.
Years ago, I wrote an article about a local sports kerfuffle. It wasn’t serious journalism — the whole thing was pretty tongue-in-cheek — but after the story ran, one of the fans I had interviewed wrote me to express disappointment, and even a bit of anger, at how he had been portrayed in his brief appearance in the piece.
The issue, as I recall, is that I’d used the word “lurked” to describe how he observed a discussion on an online forum. He was dismayed by that: to him, I was implying something sneaky or underhanded about his behaviour. I was surprised, because that was certainly not what I’d intended: I’d just reached for a word that, to me, conveyed only observation. He felt impugned; I felt terrible. It was not a conflict I could have foreseen: the two of us just knew that word with different shades of meaning.
This, to me, is the biggest challenge of being a writer, and also the reason so many of us are gripped by a constant gnawing sense of being frauds: nothing we make is real. When a carpenter makes a table, the thing she has made exists outside of her. Others may not want a table, or may not like the table she’s made. But these perceptions can’t alter the fact of the table: they can still put things on it. It’s still there.
By contrast, words are a writer’s tools, but they are only borrowed. What they produce — meaning — does not exist independently of the creator or recipient; but only in the minds of both, and another person’s mind is the one place we cannot truly go. To write is to make an educated guess — or maybe, more honestly, to hope — that the words we use will mean the same thing to the reader as they do to us. As long as both parties speak the same language, they usually settle at more or less the same place; but it isn’t guaranteed. If language is an agreement between people, well, people don’t always agree, and our unique experiences of life shape how language is crafted and also how it is received.
But if this is the challenge of writing, whether a novel or a text or a Tweet, it’s also the mystery and the beauty of it, right? And not just of writing. Every word we choose is, in its small way, a hope that the person to whom we give it will see our meaning, and through that, know our mind. And sometimes we stumble, and sometimes we fail, and sometimes even the words we think are perfect for the task don’t adequately lift that veil, and the truth of it all stays partly hidden from the other. But I meant… but I meant… I’m so sorry, I really didn’t mean…
In this way, writing is more than just a means to an end. Writing is a prayer.
Back to the notes on my phone. Back to the fragmented impressions of touch and scent and sound left by myself, to myself, months and years ago. Back to these little prayers that I found the right words to help my future self remember, and in so doing, learn and grow. They do that for me, still. Like any other reader, my own mind of the future is one place I cannot go, but at least I’ve got better directions than anyone else.
snake eyes, bitter lips, every word a mountain
wet grass, cold cement, can’t you see I’m trying
But now, running over some of these again, I see the hope in them, the same hope I first found in Orwell, that an experience can be made to last forever; that words, if chosen well, have the power to capture and preserve the essence of a thing, a time, a person, and render it eternal. I see this hope, and wonder now that it was not also tinged by fear: the fear that, if something is not named, then it will not be forgotten.
Yet there is memory outside of language too, is there not? And there is communication without words, and given the right conditions any set of selves — including those of strangers — can understand each other perfectly, even when language fully divides them, or when not a single word passes between them. On the other hand, people say things they don’t mean, and struggle to find words for the things that they do. And there are a multitude of joys and hurts we walk through, not all of which we lean on words to describe, and yet they are not gone. They’re still part of us. They’re still real.
Words don’t take us everywhere that matters. So maybe it’s time to let them go.
Because if there is a divine, then it must exist where words do not, the fact of its perfect wisdom rendering obsolete such an imperfect vehicle as language. It would make meaning felt, not heard; known, not seen; innate, not received. So if we still reach for words to describe a moment, an event or a whole life, then perhaps we have not yet arrived at the place where we truly understand it. And if we still hope for words to do all our speaking for us, maybe, just maybe, we are asking of them too much.
Wait a minute. Did I just talk myself out of my profession?
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