Saturday 28 March 2015

Three short thoughts

I wanted to write a blog post about the bananas. I want to unsettle the way we hear things. I want to unsettle the way we see each other. I want to put into words some of the conversations I had with Andy that week, the dialogue, the thinking-through, the working something through within the medium of words. And are words only these things, the signs that we make with our pen-strokes? Are they just as valid when they are spoken and not written or recorded? Are they an extension of our bodies? Are they also these words that I type without leaning in?
*
The phrase ‘lean in’ has become quite popular I’ve noticed. Lean in, lean in, lean in, while I speak quietly and you must listen. Lean in and hear the news. Lean in and show you are part of the club. Lean in, put your weight on me, I will carry you. Lean in if you can bear to trust me with your weight. Lean in to show you are in the club of those who trust and are trusted. It’s a complicated phrase, just like all of them. I think that one of the reasons I like using a microphone when speaking is that I can speak in my quiet voice and other people can hear without needing to signal anything by leaning in. Some people tell me I’m wrong, that a microphone is a physical barrier between me and the audience, that it is more genuine, more friendly, more honest, to speak “naturally”. These people are usually people with loud, resonant voices. People who are used to being heard.
*
I have a feeling that everything about language has become a club. We trust words too much. I wish we had only just invented them and then we might treat them with a kind of wonder, a mistrust, a reluctance, a reticence. We might prod them and not know how they would respond, what kind of creatures they were. We might invent them at once more carefully and carelessly, playing with their form and their weight as they travel between us. We might not kill them with presumption and the expectation of fixity.


Next up: a blog post about the bananas

3 comments:

  1. The rustle of language (with reference to mr barthes)

    ReplyDelete
  2.  Now listen. Can’t you see that when the language was new – as it was with Chaucer and Homer – the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? He could say ‘O moon’, ‘O sea’, ‘O love’, and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn out literary words? The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, as something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the now. Now it’s not enough to be bizarre. The strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That’s why it’s doubly hard to be a poet in a late age. Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about ‘I have a garden! oh, what a garden!’ Now I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it’s just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it. You make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘… is a … is a … is a …’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.

    - Gertrude Stein, quoted by Thornton Wilder in introduction to Four in America

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Sombeody who says 'It was only words' [...] He must know words are acts. And that they can become stones."

    ReplyDelete