Powers of language in shadowy times

St. Elijah's Monastery near Mosul, Iraq, constructed in the late 6th century,
obliterated in the 21st century

Each of us is in contact with so many people via Facebook, twitter, the comments under online articles, and and so on, and I've felt burdened of late by certain dominant, humorless tendencies online. What if we tried to take a world that is slantdicular and often evil--something we simply cannot deny after Auschwitz, the Holodomor, the Gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, Syrian gas attacks on children and families, and much more--and tried to make it stand up straight by each of us being examples of clear-speaking truth (with good humor and without obfuscation or jargon) with no residue at all of contempt and hatred? What if we made ourselves stand up a little straighter in the process? Maybe even we could even be examples of out-of-fashion plain old goodness, as best we could achieve it.

Could we each make a tiny but transformative difference in the world with words? Could we make the world a little better, small as we are? We are tiny compared to the mass of human beings, yet we contact so many others via online sites and social media, and they contact others in turn... Our word-reach is, in fact, enormous, and we have no idea how far the words go. Are we in fact making the world for ourselves and others a worse place by wielding so much scorn as a word-weapon (rather than generosity and humor and clear back-and-forth discussion where people learn from one another)? 

What if we kept to clarity of thought, practiced fair back-and-forth discussion, and sent out light-drenched word-bouquets of truth and beauty and even love instead of weeds dripping with scorn and contempt? Could we affirm by such acts that each human person is of some mysterious, precious value? Could that help to transform the nature of the world for the better? Could that make the situation of all of us a better one? Could we live into the ideal (despite the existence of error and evil and despite those who refuse the good) even through the debased modes of social media and online comments?

You see what I am: change me, change me! --Randall Jarrell

Nuggets

Don't be a nozzle!
Tiny Equus africanus asinus
Creative Commons Wikipedia

Note: It seems to me that Roderick Robinson's comments are more interesting than the post. So maybe you should read them!

I've been researching such interesting topics as  total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace and so on, hanging with Calvin and the reformed tradition, hanging with Puritans and Separatists. All for the sake of my current novel.

Though in the past I've done lots of reading in seventeenth-century writings, this time I need to understand the theological underpinnings a bit better so I can understand worldview of characters. I'm finding my head a bit hard when it comes to Calvin, Bucer, Bullinger, etc. vs. modern-day "Calvinism."

And I've also found lots of curious nuggets along the way. Some of my favorites are words.

How about nazzle?
A "ludicrous diminutive of ass."

Or niffle-naffle?
To trifle and play with one's work.

I like the old word for marzipan. March-pane or marchpane. A still-popular confection of sugar or honey and almond meal. “To make Marchpane to Ice and Gild, and garnish it according to Art. Take Almonds, and blanch them out of seething water, and beat them till they come to a fine paste in a stone Mortar, then take fine searsed sugar, and so beat it altogether till it come to a prefect paste, putting in now and then a spoonful of Rose-water, to keep it from oyling; then cover your Marchpane with a sheet of paper as big as a Charger, then cut it round by that Charger, and set an edge about it as about a Tart, then bottom it with Wafers, then bake it in an Oven, or in a Baking-pan, and when it is hard and dry, take it out of the Oven, and ice it with Rose-water and Sugar, and the white of an Egg, being as thick as butter, and spread it over thin with two or three feathers; and then put it into the Oven again, and when you see it rise high and white, take it out again and garnish it with some pretty conceit, and stick some long Comfits upright in it, so gild it, then strow Biskets and Carrawayes on it. If your Marchpane be Oyly in beating, then put to it as much Rose-water as will make it almost as thin as to ice.”  (A Queens Delight also has a recipe to make marchpane “look like Collops of Bacon.”) From A QUEENS Delight; OR, The Art of Preserving, Conserving and Candying. As also A right Knowledge of making Perfumes, and Distilling the most Excellent Waters. Never before Published. London, Printed by E. Tyler, and R. Holt, for Nath. Brooke, at the Angel in Corn-Hill, near the Royal Exchange. 1671.

Or how about lollop? To lounge about, to saunter (but heavily!)

Light and language

Candlemas

Candlemas Eve: no doubt this year we are all looking for more candles in the dark. For me, more light goes with clearer language and less jargon and less political correctness (a kind of jargon of thinking  and language together that obscures sight.)

I have been rereading colonial materials that I haven't read since graduate school, and marveling again how literate and bright the godly (as they sometimes called themselves) were. The level of literacy among Puritans was astonishing, and since the great migration of 40,000 souls to the Massachusetts Bay Colony (and more elsewhere) tended to leave out the very poor and the very rich, they possessed a greater harmony and order and agreement than one might have expected of so large a gathering in and spreading out through a wilderness. Like us, they held some convictions that have lasted but also some that were mistaken and put a kind of darkness in their eyes and brought many to grief. And this led to their own decline in power and to change. It's a lesson.

I'm still considering what I want to accomplish in words this year. I want to finish the novel that I'm working on, despite lots of travels away from family that will break up my time. And I will write "13 Way of Looking at Form," which I have promised for the Buechner workshops. I have some poetry manuscripts that will be looking for home, and I ought to finish up or tidy up some prose manuscripts that have been lying about, waiting for me. I have taken the path less traveled in recent years, weary of a literary world ruled by marketing, and in some ways that has been good for me and in some ways bad for the visibility of my books. I need to bend my mind to what I can do there. And I must eventually get to the matter of right reversions for prior books and reprints; I hold rights to a number of books and have been asked about reprinting them. But I want to do this myself, so that I can do exactly what I like with them. So far, I have not found the time, and I know that a mother of three young adults may frequently not have time. But I'm hoping to do something about the reprints before the next winter begins.

And there I am. Still wishing for more time and more light....

Word power

This page in the nigh-infinite library of the web is devoted to words arranged in the right order. Here are heartfelt, powerful words of anguish, beauty, and forgiveness--words that reveal the heart and soul, the mixed tangle of feelings, and the chosen determination to hew close to the injunction, "Love one another."

"You have killed some of the most beautifulest people I know. Every fiber in my body hurts.... May God have mercy on your soul...We are the family that love built."

The response by "Mother Emmanuel" church to the shootings reminds me so much of the words from the Old Order Amish to the shooting of ten girls, ages 6 to 13, at the Amish West Nickel Mines School back in 2006. They were shot at close range, execution-style, and five of the girls died on the spot or soon afterward, while the others were seriously injured. The Amish expressed forgiveness and comforted the family of the killer. The thought of an Amish man holding the killer's father in his arms makes an indelible picture.

Joyous path--

Courtesy of sxc.hu and Rodrigo Lozano of Brazil

Old English Wordhord ‏@OEWordhord #OldEnglish #WOTD: gomenwāðu, f.n: a joyous path. (from twitter)

One of my favorite things about the internet is coming upon small, startling facts left like Hansel-pebbles in the woods. (My least favorite thing is, naturellement, the general addiction of everybody and the much-discussed decline in book-reading.) It's amazing that one (this very one, long ago) can spend a year tangling with Anglo-Saxon and not remember a marvelous nugget like this. A mind-nugget. A thought-pebble. Perhaps we should bring back some of these wonderful words. Here's the Bosworth-Toller (Anglo-Saxon dictionary) entry example for gomenwāðu (n; f):

Gewiton ealdgesíþas of gomenwaðe the old comrades departed from the joyous path,

Gomen is an interesting word for joy with, as far as my limited understanding goes, touches of the jubilant, jocund, mirthful, and sometimes pleasure in games and sports about it. While noodling about in the Anglo-Saxon dictionary, I also stumbled on the also-happy gamen-wudu, which Bosworth-Toller defines as "pleasure-wood, glee-wood, a musical instrument, harp." Isn't that a wondrous kenning for a musical instrument?

The not-unflawed but often interesting Wikipedia tells us that kenning as a term for a literary trope in modern English did not come into usage until the nineteenth century, being borrowed from the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson and other treatises, "and derives ultimately from the Old Norse verb kenna 'know, recognise; perceive, feel; show; teach; etc.', as used in the expression kenna við 'to name after; to express [one thing] in terms of [another]', “name after; refer to in terms of”, and kenna til “qualify by, make into a kenning by adding.” So a compound like gamen + wudu is a kind of circumlocution meant to make us know a thing more strongly, to perceive a thing more nearly, and to makes us ken what we did not--gamen-wudu gives us the concept of harp mingled with a consciousness of its source in a tree and its identity as a thing that gives glee and pleasure. In one word is packed much, as in a small poem that radiates in many directions.

So may you dance along the gomenwāðu, lovely notes of the gamen-wudu accompanying you... They might be notes from a distant harp, or they might be the song of a breeze combed by branches and leaves. What would that be? In old English kennings, the wind is a tree breaker, but maybe this one could just be a wind-comb, sweeping and singing below the bright heofon-candel.

Death of the novel and why writers write

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, image
from the rear cover of The Foliate Head
(UK: Stanza Press, 2012)

    For some reason or other (people do argue about why these things happen, don't they?), I wrote a little short story--one about a fantastic event that caused a woman to begin living a set of experiences that would become her next novel--after reading Will Self's essay, "The novel is dead (this time it's for real.)" I didn't believe a word of it! Well, perhaps I believed he had a teen son who strummed a guitar... I immediately dredged up one of his prior remarks as commentary:

I’ve always enjoyed bullshitting people. I still enjoy it. --Will Self, interviewed by Jacques Testard at The White Review

     I've been equally unbelieving (albeit good-tempered) about some of the responses. After all, when a death is predicted for too long, methinks there may be too much protestation.
    David Ulin, book critic of the L. A. Times, says that Self is wrong (so far we agree, and I perhaps Self does too), and points out that even to have any ideas of lodging a book in historical memory is absurd, given the brevity of life and the deluge of books. In face of such difficulties, the job is "how to evoke experience in a manner that does it justice, that gives dignity to the evanescence, to the ephemerality." He believes that the ultimate vanishing of the evocation and the one who experienced is "part of the point; we’re just creating sand paintings against the void." Ulin concludes,

No, the only reason to write is self-expression, which is by its nature a fleeting conceit. --David L. Ulin, in "Notes on the (non-)death of the book," latimes.com

I enjoy his tribute to the shad-fly evanescence of life, but this idea of why we write is wrong. Wrong! Oh, yes, sure, along the way we can say that some evidence of the self (another rabbit hole--what is the self, Mr. Self? Mr. Ulin?) may possibly be expressed or extruded or fingerprinted or some such, but it's not why writers write.
     You have to be very cautious about listening to the claims writers make because they are in the business of making things up. In fact, right now, I might just be making things up. Don't trust me! I might be, like Self, "bullshitting people." I might happen to "enjoy it." However, such a thought never flew into my innocent head until I read Self's claim of the same, so you're probably reasonably safe, if (if only!) I can understand what my own reactions are and not trundle off on some possibly-circular digression.
    Ahem! End of small digression.
    So why do writers (real, sure 'nough writers) write? Because if there is a legitimate reason, perhaps word-twisting and this baggy, odd, changing creature we call a novel really can't die. I will tell you why writers write, and you may laugh at me and go on clicking on links, or you may pause and believe me, as you will. Here is the answer to a hard question (or at least to a much-debated one) in a mere four lines . . .
   Writers write because they find joy in playing with words, hearing them chink together and sing, and feeling them marry and meld with what is told. Writers write because they love to make things and so to bring something with the illusion of life and energy out of nothing. Writers write because to make a story or a poem is an act that is true, beautiful, good, and a singular mirror held up to creation and God, maker of the universe (or the multiverses) out of nothing, and to creation itself. Oddly, all this is true whether a writer believes in these elements--play, word-music, sub-creation and creation, truth and beauty and God and goodness--or not.
     The end. There. Settled.

* * *

P. S. I've been a bit unfeeling to write another post not many hours after posting an interview meant to help get the word out about a brand new anthology, so please pop down to the previous post and take a look, have a read, buy a book, etcetera!

Zander, Montana, and The Ministry of Sanctioned Words

DERP

* * *
For the latest word-controlling proclamations 

from the Ministry of Sanctioned Words, see here.

As it is the clear and simple duty for poets and novelists in all times and all places to stand for absolute, wild, untrammeled freedom of speech on behalf of their narrators and characters, I draw my weird line in the sand right here in opposing the recent fracases caused by those in the academic community and elsewhere who would strive to create and rule The Ministry of Sanctioned Words. This line has nothing to do with whether banned words are "nice" and everything to do with the power of literature, whose makers have long stood against the dictatorial hive-minds of the world.

* * *

Zander and Montana are texting their friends, talking, and drinking lattes at a corner table in a freshly-renovated lounge at Alastair College.

Zander: Do you ever think about the abyss? I mean, like, space and death and stuff like that.
Montana: I hate philosophy. I went to two classes and dropped. I prefer thingness, you know--like a pebble. Something heavy in the hand. Tactile.
Zander: But just imagine being dead.
Montana: Um. No.
Zander:  Or like the weeping angels got you, tossed you back in time. Use your brain!
Montana [Silence]
Zander: Well?
Montana: I dunno. It's no good.
Zander: What?
Montana (laughs): My brain, you nutcase!
Zander: Hey, shh--you'll be reported to the Ministry of Sanctioned Words.
Montana (drops her phone and fumbles around to pick it up): What Ministry of Sanctioned Words?
Zander: Shh. The Ministry. Haven't you seen the "oppressive impact" posters? At first there were only two or three around campus, but now they're like everywhere. Even in the toilets.
Montana: You're making it all up--maybe not the abyss but the Ministry of Sock-puppet Words.
Zander (lowers his voice): No, you'll get hauled off for questioning if you use words like crazy, girl, you guys, wuss, lame, retarded, gimp--
Montana (shouts): Gimp!
Zander (jerks back and looks around): Shhhh!
Montana (irritated): I'm a budding novelist. I want to write the Great American Novel. How can I do without a word like gimp? It's a really good word. I mean, it's so full of gimposity--it's like essence of gimpness. My characters need to use words with gristle and blood and muscle, not some white-bread, Wonder-loaf words. Would Herman Melville let them take away the gristle words? No, he would not! You are crazy.
Zander: I'm going to have to move to another table if you don't shut up.
Montana: What?
Zander (leaning close and whispering): Shhh. Don't say crazy. 
Montana (stares for a long time before speaking): So what do you say instead of crazy?
Zander: Like, "person with a mental health challenge" or "person with a cognitive disfunction."
Montana: What?
Zander: What what?
Montana: You have a cognitive disfunction?
Zander: Of course not. Didn't you go to the last town hall meeting on campus? About how the culture is racist and patriarchal and even transphobic! Homophobic. Ableist. Symmetricalist. Humorlessnessist. Cellulitist. Orbist. Ageist. Heterosexist! Folliculatist. Honestly, Montana, I really like you a lot, but--
Montana interrupts, making a loud sucking noise with her straw before she crumples up her cup, smiling. She leans close to Zander, making a little twirly motion with her finger close to her ear as she speaks.
Montana: Derp-a-derp-a-derp-a-derp-a-derp.

A Sandbergian Modest Proposal

Jeanne d'Arc on campaign.
Unknown earlysixteenth-century artist.

Bossy is a word that started life referring to a swelling (as, say, a raised area on the skin) or to those nail-like studs on, say, a sixteenth-century shield. It isn't recorded as a name for a cow (round and often swollen creatures!) until the 1840's, and it didn't migrate to become a name for a domineering woman until the 1880's. Is it coincidence that the 1880's were a very important time for suffragettes? I doubt it.

Billionaire Sheryl Sandberg and her famous word-knight followers wish to ban the word bossy, so I hope from her position of might she will forgive me for teasing her a little! Because I expect she'll have the usual absurd results that attend the efforts of people who want to rule our words because language is like water and rushes and falls where it will. But it's curious to see her in armor with her bossy posse, tilting at a windmill. I is, inevitably, a rather ridiculous sight when there are so many problems in this world that are better worth the effort of a quest and campaign.

Language is a greater power than any billionaire can wield. History tells us that where language is forced underground, it will, like water, burst out in some surprising way elsewhere. Who knows where bossy will go next, now that she has hailed its powers in public? I don't give Ms. Sandberg much hope of victory in her knightly quest to pursue and skewer a word.

What's next? Surely a male billionaire will put on cuirass and helm and gauntlets and go tilt at that primarily guy-related term of endearment, asshole...

A Sandbergian Modest Proposal

Elsewhere, pre-teen girls and women are beaten by the police for not wearing the proper hair covering. So let's ban bossy.

Elsewhere, women's faces must be hidden from the light of day because "the face of a woman is a source of corruption." So let's ban bossy.

Elsewhere, little girls finish their narrow educations at the age of eight. So let's ban bossy.

Elsewhere, a young woman was raped and destroyed internally by a phallus in the form of an iron bar. So let's ban bossy.

Elsewhere, three women were imprisoned for years in a private home and one forced to give birth in a toddler's inflatable pool. So let's ban bossy.

Worldwide, women with HIV acquire their disease primarily from longterm partners and the inability to exert any control over a husband or partner's choice not to use protection. So let's ban bossy.

Worldwide, 603 million women live where domestic violence is no crime. So let's ban bossy.

Worldwide, women comprise 9% of the police force. So let's ban bossy.