Language, words, and people

[The spoken word is as important as the printed page. I wrote this to record for a project called Tales on Tape. This is their third year of collecting stories. The project seeks to contribute a “Contemporary Local Narratives” section to our local (Salt Lake) city library, and to become a public space through various projects and installations. I, of course, showed up as they came to the end of this particular pod, as they were breaking down. so I’ve recorded it on my computer and attached the audio file to an e-mail. If I learn how to embed audio here, I’ll share the recording with you as well. Please enjoy this original text of the original essay, and don’t be afraid to comment, whether you liked it or not. ---MrW]
Enigma in English or What I’ve Learned from Life and Words
I am an awfully good procrastinator, which means I lie terribly well. I’m constantly making up excuses as to why I’m late, was absent, or have failed to fulfill some important obligation. These fully fictional fallacies have met with mixed acceptance and limited success, much like myself and my writing career. On the occasional occasions when I am on the ball, it is a permanently temporary situation. The one thing upon which anyone can rely from me is that I am unreliable, dependably undependable. The perfect proportion of these and my myriad other faults makes me a writer.
That may be a pretty ugly thing to say about myself, and writers, but I have concluded that self-realization is preferable to self-deception. (As a fiction writer, predominantly, I prefer to concentrate my deceptive qualities toward others.) I’ve either reached that magical age, paid enough dues, or sang enough blues to know myself well enough to know that I am the perfect specimen of an imperfect specimen.
This might be attributable to my life experiences. I recently had to solely extract myself from the height of lowliness. This involved firmly exercising my own will, taking full advantage of rare opportunities, and enjoying the even rarer gift of good luck. Unfortunately, it also involved being brilliantly dull, blandly vapid, and freshly banal. I learned to exude a bountiful emptiness, fill myself with a vacancy, and offer a wealth of neediness. Because of this charade, others have come to perceive me as a genuine fraud. There may be a minute morsel of truth to this judgment, but it is only a fraction of the full story.
True, I may be a successful failure, a professional amateur. I have been known to present myself as a transparent enigma, frequently fatuous, distantly disinterested, generously selfish, cautiously reckless, continuously fickle, falsely true, and cordially crass. Yet, I have more often been original, engaging, charming, charitable, honest, dedicated, serious, attentive, polite, loving and kind. Some closer acquaintances have accused me of being intelligent, or a genius. Both of those accusations have been proven doubtful on numerous occasions.
In the interest of self-definition, I have invented the following phrase: “I am a unique and singular double entendre.” I find this summation of my entirety witty, clever, and brief ─ three more things I can be, on a good day.
I suppose this is the point where I’m expected to reward you by piloting this languishing literary junket into the port of dénouement. I will therefore attempt to provide you with a palatable point. Please keep in mind that taste is a preference. Also be warned that I very rarely have one single point. That is the case here, but being foolhardy, I will attempt to relate them all.
First point: If you’ve listened this far into this essay, you now know a little about me. All of my aforementioned traits, of which I once considered myself sole proprietor, actually seem to be present in everyone else I know. That is to say we are all quite similar to one another in our differences.
Second point: If you actually paid attention while you listened, you may also have learned something about the American English language. It is consistently contradictory and regularly repetitive. It is unyielding in its flexibility. It constantly changes, evolving into either something better or something worse. It is firmly unstable, largely incomprehensible, unknowable in its entirety, and insanely frustrating. When used incorrectly or carelessly, it is an opaque sticky morass of mud. When cautiously and sincerely sculpted, then properly tempered it is a noble, statuesque artistic powerhouse. This is true of all languages.
Third point: Language is, in many cases, very like everything else in within the realm of human experience. Words are quite similar to people, planet Earth, the Milky Way, and the Universe. None of these are ever what they appear to be, or even what we believe them to be. We don’t know as much about them as we’d like to think we do. They will never be everything we want them to be. All are simply too complex to control, beyond our power to significantly change, and will more times than not fail to live up to our expectations. Even with this knowledge, we never stop trying to do things largely considered impossible, and to do them better than we have in the past. This is commendable.
Point Four: Apply this aspiration to language, and you are doing something exceptional. I have foolishly made this largely fruitless activity a regular part of my life. I am determined to simplify the complexity of my chosen tool of expression, tenaciously wrestling it to a takedown, until I pin it enough times to achieve a respectable draw if not a pointed victory. I will strategize until the clock runs down, achieving a stalemate if not a checkmate. I know this is futile, that the result is more apt to be unsatisfactory than fulfilling, but I’m addicted, and thus by popular definition, also insane.
When compared to his compatriot James Joyce, Samuel Beckett remarked, “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” Perhaps the trick is to strike a balance between these two extremes. The writer should attempt to simplify the perceived difficulty of language so that it becomes easily comprehensible and universal to the broadest possible reading audience. Writers must continually attempt to clearly communicate intent using an imperfect and inconstant medium.
So, I suggest that instead of agonizing over the abstract and ethereal nature of language, think of it as something material and concrete. Perhaps become a gourmet word chef. Shake and bake your writing. Chop, dice, mix, fold, and puree your lingo into something tasty. Create your own cocktail. Revise every recipe. Add spices from the back of the rack. If you can’t cook using the widely accepted ingredients, grow some hybrid forms. Start from scratch; make something up. Use the failings of language at large to perfect your personal use of it. Not everyone will find the result delectable. But you are the writer, and you alone know what you want to create.
In this spirit, I have attempted to cohesively show the relation between words and the people who use and abuse them. My success or failure is irrelevant. All self-expression is subject to judgment from those who are unfamiliar with its creator, context, and process more often than it enjoys constructive criticism from the like-minded. Not everyone will get what I’m saying, but that’s not going to be my fault if I can help it.
In conclusion, I maintain that people are like language, but they are not words. However, each individual is a unique part of the culture of their country, on a continent afloat in a vast ocean, on a small blue planet madly spinning through a small unremarkable galaxy, spiraling toward the edge of the cosmos. They are just like a word, in a phrase, in a sentence, in a paragraph that is part of a page in the chapter of a book that becomes part of the identity of a nation, on a landmass, adrift in a deep ocean that shapes a pebble that races around a flaming ball of gas ─ and on and on it goes. Still, you can’t define people like words. You can’t indiscriminately shape them to your needs. They are more special and complex even than language.
I don’t know if all of this is a paradox, an anomaly, or what. I just know that it is.
So, may I presume to give some final advice to writers and non-writers alike? (Yeah, that’s a rhetorical question.) Don’t treat your fellow humans in the same way writers treat language. Don’t mercilessly scrutinize them or categorize them. Don’t attempt to bend them to your will. Repeated attempts to permanently pigeonhole any person or any thing is pointless. You will, nevertheless, like me, continue to do this against your better judgment, but it will be interesting and fun. You will be doomed to become, by popular definition, as crazy as me, yet to an equal degree, different. In the long run, you will know yourself and others better, and you will like ─ no, love ─ them, and yourself, more.
© 2010 Mr. Write ( J. Phillip [John] Wilkes). All rights reserved.