How astonishing it is that language could almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
Trong tap tho The Great Fires, the poet Jack Gilbert raises the discussion on Language to a new, different, poetic level. Using words of visual imagery, he presents the limitations of language -- iterating that what we write and say could never completely encapsulate our meanings, that there is a mystery of being that language could never signify.
"Love, we say, / God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, but the words / get it all wrong." The words themselves could only link us to something greater, deeper, far beyond what a few alphabets could conjure. Whether French, Sumerian, Vietnamese, English, whatever the tongue, they "can almost mean" but could never capture "what we feel most". Language "does not quite" express who we are, our essences, or our ideas -- but nevertheless, we try. Perhaps it is the signification, what these words recall within us that makes us understand the full meaning of what is unstated, implied, absent.
When Gilbert uses the word "cinnamon," we smell the fragrance, and when he mentions "slabs of salt" we think of the deep taste in our throats, on our tongues, the necessary condiment of life sinking into our palettes. And that is what he means about God -- about the presence of the Divine. Think of how accurate it is for him to say the Holy, the Divine, is as life-giving salt, is like the beauty and preciousness and value of "ingots of copper."
Yes, with these words, Gilbert demonstrates what we must not forget, that it is our construction and understanding and usage of language that changes how we think, and influences who we are. What if we were to recapture "lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can"?
This is why I write poetry. To articulate thoughts, feelings, hopes -- crafting them into different expressions in order to understand them differently. New ways of feeling, new ways of being. Instead of saying how much we love, instead of merely gesturing toward worship, we could actually mean it. "What we feel most" may not be articulated in words, with language, but if we think of the objects, if they were actually the things that stood in for those "feeling words," then we could understand better: "what we feel most" is the color of amber, the fragrance of cinnamon, the grace of flying birds, the power of thundering horses, the precision of archers stringing their bow and arrow...
And so, when I write my comments, when I blog, it seems as if everything is so insufficient, inadequate. Regardless of what is written, listen to what my heart is really trying to say...
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