October 6, 2014
Greetings from beckoning white space,
Most of us have had the experience where we hear a song and
it sticks in our head, the music rolling around in amidst the synapses,
snatches of lyrics and rhythm appearing unbidden and then dipping away only to
resurface when we are trying to think of something else.
I am a writer, and I have the same experience with words. I
hear one that is interesting, and it becomes tattooed where I have to see
it. I can try using other words to push
it away but I know better.
The attraction is heightened when I don’t know the meaning
of the word. Sometimes I will avoid
looking the word up just so I can enjoy the shape and sound of it for its own
esthetic, without being muddled up with a practical application.
Yesterday I heard someone use this word; bucolic. I like the way it feels when I say it.
I have an image of the definition, not one of those third
grade ‘use it in a sentence’ things. A
man standing inside a stone wall, leaning on a rake, talking with a couple
passing by on the dirt road. Geese fly
low announcing a change, the sun setting over bronze fields behind them. Bucolic.
It reminded me of a word that might not exist. Like ‘broccolic’, which I think describes
someone who is gifted at growing things.
I might have this confused with what causes vegetarian babies to cry. This
might be a digression.
There are a slurry of words that regularly bubble up to see
if I need them in a sentence. They hang
around on the periphery of my conscious like out of work actors at a backstage
door, desperately optimistic.
I don’t write them down because I don’t need to; they roam
around between the practical workhorse words that I think all day, appearing
like friends at the back fence.
Mellifluous. Cacophony. Akimbo. Penumbra. Loquacious. Penultimate.
Onomatopoeia.
There are some words that have a foreign-familiarity to me,
some from the Highlands of Scotland, others from the fires of First Nation peoples. Scunner, bahookie, bairn, bedabun, odayin. No place to fit them in lunch conversation or
an email to the service department. So
they hover, lingering at the end of sentences, where other words, the regulars,
have their place.
I love these words, and their more pedestrian cousins that
fill in the space between the subject and the participles which I often
dangle. Some mornings when the passion
meets opportunity, I mix and knead them into a shape that means something. Sometimes not.
All of us marshal our favorite words, our ‘go-to’
adjectives, the automatic adverbs, the nouns that come as a reflex. We communicate all day within the ease of our
native tongue, sharing ideas, describing events, giving orders, responding to questions. Those automatic words are almost invisible to
us; it’s easy to take them for granted. Maybe
that’s no great crime, after all there are always more words.
Perhaps. Last week I
watched a woman struggle to speak, searching for a word, her face a mask of
confusion and fear. And then relief as the
word formed and she said it. She is
recovering from something, perhaps a stroke, and she knows the words are there,
but they have sifted into a place she can’t quite reach. These common, ordinary words we can take for
granted.
It dawned on me that the reason I have these other peculiar
words waiting to spice my ordinary pedantic mutterings, is to make me fully
appreciate the color and depth and richness of the language I have been
given. Made me smile just to think of
that.
I am scripturient. I
am a writer. When I wake on Monday
morning, and on most mornings, the words are already swirling, hovering, lined
up like jets over O’Hare. I don’t always
take the time to harness them or arrange them, but I acknowledge them. That’s our relationship, one which I hope
never to lose, and I won’t as long as I honor it.
There are mornings I scurry behind the words, as if herding
grasshoppers, and get to shape them, even for a moment, into a form that
communicates something larger than the letters themselves. Some mornings it is a deep thought, or a
memory that must be shared, or describing a bucolic scene for no other reason than
the pleasure of imagining.
Some mornings writing is a catch and release activity. Gather the words in and hold them long enough
to look at them, feel their texture and life, and then rinse them back in the
ice cold flow where they will grow and play and come back again.
Hope this finds you casting,
David
Copyright © 2014 David Smith
No comments:
Post a Comment