Love-Letter to Words
This is a love-letter to words. William Golding spoke of the power of words and the role of the novelist: ‘I almost prefer the word craftsman, like one of the old fashioned ship builders who conceived the build of the boat in their mind, and after they had touched every single piece that went into the boat […] they knew it inch by inch […] I think the novelist is very much like that’. The author knows the book ‘inch by inch’: he handles every clause as the shipbuilder touches every bolt.
Very few writers handle personal expression as deftly as wordsmith Emily Dickinson, who distils intense emotion into her poems through a balance of restraint and brimming feeling. I want to begin with her short poem ‘A Word’:
A Word
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
Words are spoken but they hang in the air, as if caught by the atmosphere. Words ring out, resound, they sting. Words exchanged fiercely through hot tears simmer until they become muted, forgotten, their meaning exhausted. Words breathe and evolve like living things. In lockdown words have enjoyed a more powerful status as being, at one point, the only things that could be exchanged. Words are elastic; they bend meaning. Like notes, each word sounds itself distinctly but changes colour when placed alongside others. They are loaded, for want of a better word. Playful. We eat our words. We want the final word.
Donald Trump is agonisingly dismissive of the weaponry of his words, and lacks the sensitivity of discerning that we are held accountable for our words just as much as our deeds. Trump’s own voracious vocabulary has been documented: words which form his unique lexicon include ‘huge’, ‘bigly’, ‘fire and fury’ ‘believe me’ and, my favourite, ‘covfefe’. Scanning Trump’s tweets reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass (1871) when Alice encounters a loquacious Humpty Dumpty. ‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less”’.
But words are weapons, and the people who say them - or recently - even think them are held accountable for the power they contain. In her article Let’s not expand ‘hate crime’ even further Times columnist Clare Foges warns of the Orwellian society we are evolving into as ‘thought-crime’ is becoming a real offence. It is only fair that we can be reprimanded for the words we speak - but for the words we think? As George Orwell states in 1984 (1949), the government’s censorship of thinking marks the end of freedom because it can only result in constrictions even upon the language by which thought is policed. ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten […] Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller’. A dramatic example maybe, but many have observed that the sensational world in which we live seems plucked from 20th century dystopian fiction. That ‘free-thought’ even exists as a phrase but now has unrelenting traction surely should warn our ‘woke’ society that zealous and rather unselective demands to control society risk going too far. At the very least, the questionable veracity of our world leaders and the big-brother restrictions on speech delineate how important words are - and yet we often treat them as easily expendable nothings. They are all the more significant as catalysts of protest: my word against yours. My point can be perfectly summarised in the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.
We have an intimate relationship with words because they are how we navigate the world from our very beginnings. Consider Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) stumbling over the syllables in his full name, leaving him with his own unique and pithy variant: ‘So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip’. Words are owned: ‘you took the words out of my mouth’. They are our beginning and our end; when the dust settles, words are often the only things left behind. Poet John Keats’ epitaph reads: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. It is poignant that words suggestive of the brevity of life and the fleeting nature of fame endure in stone. Words bridge a gap - as indicated here - across time, but also across space: through letters. Words tangle themselves on sheets of discarded pages: think of all the words un-uttered and unread but written that lie gathering dust between pages of notebooks and unopened letters. It is interesting to speculate on the words which never arrived, due to a misplaced note, or a sudden change in conversation. Or worse, think of the words that did arrive but were ‘Seen: 19:02’. Tess Durbeyfield’s letter to Angel is a point of personal agony - the thought of Tess’s words bristling underneath a wedge of carpet is enough to turn any English student pale. Let’s not forget the unassuming words which are embroiled in mystery such as Citizen Kane’s final word: ‘Rosebud’.
The handwritten letter, in particular, creates a space in which the private truth of self manifests. Words help illustrate the detours of feeling, whilst our handwriting is a vehicle for revealing our ‘inmost’ parts. Lorettann Devlin-Gascard noted that a signature - the self, penned - is a form of individual and revealing art. ‘Michelangelo’s [signature] exhibits power through the forceful application and release of pressure; Toulouse Lautrec embellished his line with animated repetitions; Matisse’s line is lucid and flowing, yet determined and controlled’. A small but pertinent example of this can be found in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974) in which the protagonist ‘learns’ and adopts another man’s handwriting, effectively becoming a typographical thief. Handwriting embodies unconscious expression: it makes our own narratives malleable.
When there are no words, we turn to poetry, in which meaning is cradled in gaps and spaces between words just as much as within the words themselves. When there are no words, we invent them. John Milton invented many words to capture the dimensions of his thought: ‘impassive’, ‘Satanic’, ‘exhilarating’, ‘terrific’ and ‘extravagance’. When we want to be, we can be quite ingenious. Milton and Herman Melville are two writers in particular whose language often seems taut with the intensity of the images they capture. Remarkably, Milton wrote Paradise Lost when he was blind. The words were his sight: the colours and forms were almost rendered physical by his speaking of them. Whilst Milton stretched to the heavens, Melville reached down to the depths: when writing he had to ‘dive down’, as if recovering the silted words raw from the doldrums of inspiration. Melville’s salvaging of ideas is emblematic of lethologica - the temporary inability to retrieve from memory, when a word is on the tip of one’s tongue. When remembered, it seems as if the words have been snatched from the air.
Words are celestial, as demonstrated by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage when commissioned by Northumberland National Park’s Sill Art Programme to write six poems inspired by the landscape. The poems can only be accessed from an app at different locations in the national park. Armitage spoke of the project: ‘I really like the idea of them being ephemeral things in the sense that they have no presence as text. But I hope they’ll endure. I suppose they’ll last as long as the technology lasts but I like the idea of them being out there, like airwaves’. Words are the pathway, the means of spooning one’s soul and offering it to the outside world. As John Donne said, ‘to know and feel all this and not have the words to express it makes a human a grave of his own thoughts’.
And with that, I give the last word to Pauli Murray:
Words
We are spendthrifts with words,
We squander them,
Toss them like pennies in the air–
Arrogant words,
Angry words,
Cruel words,
Comradely words,
Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear.
But the slowly wrought words of love
and the thunderous words of heartbreak–
Those we hoard.
Written by Esther Bancroft
A recent graduate of Bristol university, Esther has returned to the pen to write a little bit about a little bit of everything. When not staring at a screen trying to be creative, she likes to buy books without reading them and paint pictures of the sea - which is her healthy obsession.