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Entertaining Ideas: Barbara Knott

Time to Pay Attention to Words. They matter.

A riddle that appeared on a chalk board in front of the check-in counter at the Y:

We hurt without moving. We poison without touching. We bear the truth and the lies. We are not to be judged by our size. What are we?

Though I did not anticipate the answer (WORDS), the puzzle felt synchronistic with my writing this article. Public discourse in both speech and writing, disseminated so widely through television and other media, sometimes seems to be falling to pieces, into highly imprecise word choices and figures of speech, often repeated so often that they become clichés in a matter of days or weeks.

A single word buzzes in my ear: unprecedented, used first during the past year to describe an unusual presidential action and then repeated ad infinitum so that a skillful writer would avoid the word (except to do what I am doing here, to say why it needs a long vacation).

One political assertion that caught on and quickly exhausted itself was this: We may campaign in poetry, but we have to govern in prose, meaning, presumably, that campaign rhetoric is full of flowery language that can’t be trusted because it doesn’t translate into laws or even lies that come in the form of promises to make life better for those who have the least and want the most and who will vote, if hard and divisive prose can convince them to vote, for the prosy one. That, dear readers, is an insult to poetry, and it betrays a major deficiency in our educational system: liberal arts are mostly missing from the fields where politicians are cultivated. We heard the line over and over, like a ping pong ball going from politicians to journalists who pinged it out over the airwaves. Even people with a better-than-average education ponged it along.

The breakdown of language skills is not just in politics. It’s also reflected in general public discourse through a careless mixture of civic and religious motifs, and in human prejudices, expressed or implied, against animals and wildness.

For instance, the holy grail is the name given to the drinking cup of Jesus from the Last Supper, said to have been retrieved by Joseph of Arimathea following the crucifixion. Legend has it that the cup eventually wound up in Britain where, in the tales of King Arthur, it became a symbolic item for questing. Now, in present-day American culture, we have the holy grail reduced to clumsy symbol and cliché. Here are some recent examples that I took note of as they appeared on television:

A reference to the president’s tax returns as the holy grail of tax returns. (Tax returns are not holy, and they don’t in any way resemble a wine cup. They do have an ironic connection to Jesus in that he was born into a world where his parents were being taxed, even as his mother gave birth.)

One store (I can’t recall which one) was called the holy grail of bargain shoppers. (Commerce is not holy … remember the money lenders? … and shoppers are not usually in search of the sacred). When I googled to see if I could find which store it was, I did not, but the googling turned up these variations: the holy grail of weight loss, the holy grail of cars, the holy grail of feet, the holy grail of hot wheels, the holy grail of baseball cards, the holy grail of speed training, the holy grail of energy. My favorite of these was the holy grail of Irish drinking songs. I can almost believe in that one. But see how the image of the drinking cup once held sacred by Christians has gradually lost all its original associations and means nothing more than an ill-defined goal?

Wall Street hates the “old one” like the devil hates holy water. (Old what? I think the reference is to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the present government’s intention to enact new legislation to benefit banks over consumers. It’s not difficult to see the devil dancing on Wall Street, but the presence of holy water in politics at all is impossible to imagine. Would that we could imagine it.)

These references to the holy grail and holy water are particularly inept because the word holy, like the word sacred, has little purchase in our culture (pun intended), though some religious institutions are clearly not averse to material wealth.

Also on the public stage, people often debase language in the ways they insult their fellow humans and the animal kingdom. Examples:

(Insert the name of any rival) _______ is an ANIMAL! (All humans are animals, so the aspersion cast here on animals is an insult to all of us. It is not an enemy’s animal nature that is the problem, even and especially if that person is a dictator. And we can only wish that all people in love with power still had some connection to their animal life, in which case they would not be dropping bombs on their fellow humans and wiping out as well the habitats of other species.)

(Same name)________ is a BUTCHER! (An “animal” is butchering? Who? What? Animals, including humans, kill for food, but non-human animals don’t “butcher” or store in excess of what they need.)

The truck driver was an animal! (This refers to a mass murder carried out by a person driving a truck into a crowd of people … conjures a non-human animal driving a truck.)

Even while I was compiling this portfolio of insults to animals (I repeat: all humans are animals), there came the widely criticized reference to “animals” crossing the U. S. southern border (creating the “necessity” of a wall): animals that steal, murder, rape, and deal in drugs (non-human animals generally don’t do any of these things. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw,” as the poet has it, but the fighting and throat-tearing is related to obtaining a “necessary” meal or to the “necessary” need to hold personal territory).

Okay, I get it. The reference to people as animals is meant to convey that some bad people are sub-human and deserve to be removed from among all the good folks with good genes who plunder and waste our world, destroy its habitats, exploit its people, practice trophy hunting and genocide, and who feel constantly threatened and victimized by the “bad” people, aka animals.

C. G. Jung addresses the way we speak disparagingly of people “behaving like animals.” Yet in nature the animal is a well-behaved citizen. It is pious, it follows the path with great regularity, it does nothing extravagant. Only man is extravagant. So if you assimilate the nature of the animal you become a peculiarly law-abiding citizen, you go very slowly, and you become very reasonable in your ways, inasmuch as you can afford it. (The Earth Has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life, ed. Meredith Sabini, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008, p. 170.)

Let me add another recently observed attempt at metaphor: We will put new steel into the spine of our country. (A country doesn’t have a spine, and if the writer meant to refer collectively to our citizens, humans with a steel spine are no longer humans or humane. Robots are another matter).

According to Jared Diamond, it was with guns, germs and steel that Europeans set out to conquer the world half a millennium ago (see Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997). One result is that now, we go on distancing ourselves from nature as we plunder the land for resources to make one gadget after another until there is little room left for growth of anything human or even alive.

David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous, pp. 116-7) reminds us of a condition we have left far behind: In indigenous, oral cultures, nature itself is articulate; it speaks. The human voice in an oral culture is always to some extent participant with the voices of the wolves, wind, and waves—participant, that is, with the encompassing discourse of an animate earth. There is no element of the landscape that is definitively void of expressive resonance and power: any movement may be a gesture, any sound may be a voice, a meaningful utterance.

How do we in this generation measure our success? What will we leave behind to take the place of what we have lost? There is sufficient reason for adding arts and humanities to all education, especially business and law and journalism. Instead of imagining that we may campaign in poetry, but we have to govern in prose, let’s consider how we might benefit from arts education, where words matter, a discipline in which people learn to read poetry and prose not as different but as mutually creative ways of carrying landscape, animal life, soul, and imagination through words into the world.

Here is how poet Drew Dellinger asks the question in an excerpt from his poem “hieroglyphic stairway”: