The love of language
When I speak of joy, it is that emotion best represented by an 8-month-old puppy whose people have just returned to the house, his entire rear swinging back and forth from the force of his tail wagging, his voice erupting in whines and small yelps, and his need to get his face as close to the face of his people overpowering all training to the contrary. That is joy.
Joy is a fragile thing and can’t coexist with anti-joy. The puppy in full joy at the return of his people will tuck tail and run for cover at the sound of a firecracker or a dish breaking. Joy and anti-joy do not coexist. I use anti-joy because there can be many things that kill joy or prevent it from thriving, such as fear or depression. And some things that might dampen joy won’t always kill it. I can feel sorrow at the loss of a loved one and still experience joy. Anti-joy, however, kills it.
I am fortunate in that I have multiple sources of joy now. Once I removed the source of anti-joy from my life and allowed myself to give in to joy, more joy followed. It is something akin to learning to love again after betrayal or a broken heart. To do this I had to trust myself to let go of control. Remember that puppy? He looks a bit ridiculous. Everyone knows exactly how he feels. All his protective boundaries are breached. He’s out of control. As a child that was easy, but as an adult that’s a scary place to be at first, and it’s easiest, though maybe not best, to go through that alone or with trusted people. I happened upon it when I was alone, so no one saw my tail wagging or heard my whines or had to keep me from kissing them. Regretfully. I rarely display joy in that manner now because it has become a companion to me. Move to the adult dog, just as joyous to see his owner but more inclined to roll on his back, wag, and grin.
I have been in love with the written word all my remembered life. Novels, plays, poems, song lyrics, notes from my people, emails, texts: these works of art, lovingly crafted, fall on my mind and heart like rain in the desert. I chose to teach high school English (20 years was enough) because of this love, and the joy of igniting that love in others continues to bring me joy even though I don’t do it for a career anymore. It is the way that language captures that human condition and transfers it from one to another that makes it so joyous to me. Every day, I encounter a phrase, a paragraph, or an entire work with language so pregnant with depth, so ripe with meaning that I stand taller and smile, my eyes brimming with tears. I could never see or hear another word, yet still experience the joy of language because I have so many of these committed to memory.
As a child, I found joy with the written word because of my parents. On Christmas Eve, each family member chose a different passage or poem to read in front of the fire. We picked from the Bible and books like Favorite Poems Old and New. “They shall mount up with wings as eagles” felt like caramel in my mouth and a warm blanket in my head. Mount up with wings is pleasing to say and to read. We camped in the summer months in our small trailer and after dinner was cleaned up and a game of cards finished, we’d read poetry to one another. “Sturdy and staunch he stands” creates a silent sob in me, which triggers my joy because it connects me to humanity. “Between the dark and the daylight” is so delightful to say and conjures up rich images. Read “gitche gumee” and then say it, right now. Let the joy of it bubble up inside of you.
It is both the meaning of the words that brings such joy AND the words themselves, the tactile experience from “sturdy and staunch he stands” of creating the st in my mouth and moving from au to e. I often went to bed with “Sarah Cynthia Stout/Would not take the garbage out” on my tongue and in my mind. With such puppy joy inside of me, it often took me two hours to fall asleep.
For half of my career as a teacher, anti-joy was my constant companion, so joy came in fits and starts and always when I was teaching literature. I’m sure my students mocked me for my enthusiasm over “a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to greatness” and “I aimed my pebble but myself.” I combined the words of others in my own spoken word, always focusing on whatever we were studying or had studied, to show students the relevancy of those past words. I don’t do this anywhere other than the classroom. My friends and family don’t want the teacher when they are with me. Now that joy is my constant companion, I don’t do that much. I’m content to let them scroll like a newsfeed through my head as I go about my day.
For part of my career in education, I taught students for which English was an additional language and got to experience great joy when they conquered synonyms and began to comprehend the complexities of English, rolling like, respect, esteem, admire, and dig around in their heads and trying each out in turn. Even more fun was hate, abhor, detest, despise, loathe. When I choose my words for impact, that same joy leaps out at me every single day.
It may seem that what I’m really saying is that teaching is the source of joy. It was, but joy of the written word is a more ancient joy in terms of the history of my life. As I said it is more ubiquitous.
In the morning, we ask each other if we slept well in my family, and this question always brings “sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,/ The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath…” to my mind. I keep it to myself and roll the words around in my head as I make beds, pack lunches and check homework. They nourish me. “The raveled sleave of care” is a gorgeous phrase, so dense with imagery that I can almost pick the threads and pull apart the stitching of the sleeve, and knowing those words, saying them in my head or under my breath, applying them to my life and remembering the bloody business they reference create my joy.
When I’m reminded by any number of family members or former housemates that I’m grumpy in the mornings, I protest. I’m embarrassed. I’m also thinking that “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow”. The beauty of this phrase and the balm that it provides helps me carry joy through the day. The ambiguity of “wake to sleep” tickles my grey matter. Does he mean that he wakes so that he can go back to sleep or that the life he has when he is awake is dreamlike or less like reality and more like sleep? I often feel like I’m in a half-sleep state for the first few hours of the morning and wonder if this is what he woke to. The conversation that comes from just this line, whether it be with a class of high school students or with my dishwasher is sublime.
My children don’t find things easily. They understand that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” They take it as a personal insult if I can’t find what they have lost. I’m good at finding things, but I’d like them to learn that “so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” I didn’t know Mary Oliver until a friend shared One Art with me in my mid 30’s. We live on different continents and are busy with life now, but she will always be dear to me because she brought the joy of these words into my life. One of the most fundamental elements of the human condition is loss. We need help coping with it, and language like this helps me cope. I lost her but can wallow in that losing thanks to language. And if I need to do something other than master loss, I can “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I imagine saying this to my own father someday. I imagine Dylan Thomas writing beside his sick father. I imagine my sons saying it to me. “Rage, rage…” Rage is a glorious word to say in my head. When I need to immerse myself in loss I know that “to weep is to make less the depth of grief” and do not feel joy at that moment but in reflection feel the joy because the written word ties me to humanity. “Depth of grief” is as sensuous a phrase as folding together marshmallow cream and chocolate chips to make fudge. It’s joyous to say or hear.
I talk to myself, and my husband teases me about it, “Have a good chat?” he often asks when he finds me muttering to the dishwasher or washing machine. Often I’m saying ‘if it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well/ It were done quickly,” but he doesn’t need to know everything. Shakespeare’s words are so delicious that I feed on them with relish. It’s often Macbeth because I taught it three times a day for eight years, but I am not a snob about the beauty of language. It gives me as much joy to hear, “If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?” as it does to read “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”.
Curse the phonetic nightmare that is English but cherish the richness of its vocabulary stolen from so many other rich languages. I marvel at the magic of language, spoken or written. I’m on a journey with my autistic child to unravel the mystery of language and it has made me more aware of what a joy it is to have language. I have my own language, which can be powerful at times, but because of the written word I have LANGUAGE. My “cup runneth over.”
When my brain gets soggy and unable to hold what it has spent a lifetime of absorbing, I will lose the recall of language, but I will always have the written word and like the aged dog, I will wag my tail and jump in circles in my heart.
Joy is a fragile thing and can’t coexist with anti-joy. The puppy in full joy at the return of his people will tuck tail and run for cover at the sound of a firecracker or a dish breaking. Joy and anti-joy do not coexist. I use anti-joy because there can be many things that kill joy or prevent it from thriving, such as fear or depression. And some things that might dampen joy won’t always kill it. I can feel sorrow at the loss of a loved one and still experience joy. Anti-joy, however, kills it.
I am fortunate in that I have multiple sources of joy now. Once I removed the source of anti-joy from my life and allowed myself to give in to joy, more joy followed. It is something akin to learning to love again after betrayal or a broken heart. To do this I had to trust myself to let go of control. Remember that puppy? He looks a bit ridiculous. Everyone knows exactly how he feels. All his protective boundaries are breached. He’s out of control. As a child that was easy, but as an adult that’s a scary place to be at first, and it’s easiest, though maybe not best, to go through that alone or with trusted people. I happened upon it when I was alone, so no one saw my tail wagging or heard my whines or had to keep me from kissing them. Regretfully. I rarely display joy in that manner now because it has become a companion to me. Move to the adult dog, just as joyous to see his owner but more inclined to roll on his back, wag, and grin.
I have been in love with the written word all my remembered life. Novels, plays, poems, song lyrics, notes from my people, emails, texts: these works of art, lovingly crafted, fall on my mind and heart like rain in the desert. I chose to teach high school English (20 years was enough) because of this love, and the joy of igniting that love in others continues to bring me joy even though I don’t do it for a career anymore. It is the way that language captures that human condition and transfers it from one to another that makes it so joyous to me. Every day, I encounter a phrase, a paragraph, or an entire work with language so pregnant with depth, so ripe with meaning that I stand taller and smile, my eyes brimming with tears. I could never see or hear another word, yet still experience the joy of language because I have so many of these committed to memory.
As a child, I found joy with the written word because of my parents. On Christmas Eve, each family member chose a different passage or poem to read in front of the fire. We picked from the Bible and books like Favorite Poems Old and New. “They shall mount up with wings as eagles” felt like caramel in my mouth and a warm blanket in my head. Mount up with wings is pleasing to say and to read. We camped in the summer months in our small trailer and after dinner was cleaned up and a game of cards finished, we’d read poetry to one another. “Sturdy and staunch he stands” creates a silent sob in me, which triggers my joy because it connects me to humanity. “Between the dark and the daylight” is so delightful to say and conjures up rich images. Read “gitche gumee” and then say it, right now. Let the joy of it bubble up inside of you.
It is both the meaning of the words that brings such joy AND the words themselves, the tactile experience from “sturdy and staunch he stands” of creating the st in my mouth and moving from au to e. I often went to bed with “Sarah Cynthia Stout/Would not take the garbage out” on my tongue and in my mind. With such puppy joy inside of me, it often took me two hours to fall asleep.
For half of my career as a teacher, anti-joy was my constant companion, so joy came in fits and starts and always when I was teaching literature. I’m sure my students mocked me for my enthusiasm over “a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to greatness” and “I aimed my pebble but myself.” I combined the words of others in my own spoken word, always focusing on whatever we were studying or had studied, to show students the relevancy of those past words. I don’t do this anywhere other than the classroom. My friends and family don’t want the teacher when they are with me. Now that joy is my constant companion, I don’t do that much. I’m content to let them scroll like a newsfeed through my head as I go about my day.
For part of my career in education, I taught students for which English was an additional language and got to experience great joy when they conquered synonyms and began to comprehend the complexities of English, rolling like, respect, esteem, admire, and dig around in their heads and trying each out in turn. Even more fun was hate, abhor, detest, despise, loathe. When I choose my words for impact, that same joy leaps out at me every single day.
It may seem that what I’m really saying is that teaching is the source of joy. It was, but joy of the written word is a more ancient joy in terms of the history of my life. As I said it is more ubiquitous.
In the morning, we ask each other if we slept well in my family, and this question always brings “sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,/ The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath…” to my mind. I keep it to myself and roll the words around in my head as I make beds, pack lunches and check homework. They nourish me. “The raveled sleave of care” is a gorgeous phrase, so dense with imagery that I can almost pick the threads and pull apart the stitching of the sleeve, and knowing those words, saying them in my head or under my breath, applying them to my life and remembering the bloody business they reference create my joy.
When I’m reminded by any number of family members or former housemates that I’m grumpy in the mornings, I protest. I’m embarrassed. I’m also thinking that “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow”. The beauty of this phrase and the balm that it provides helps me carry joy through the day. The ambiguity of “wake to sleep” tickles my grey matter. Does he mean that he wakes so that he can go back to sleep or that the life he has when he is awake is dreamlike or less like reality and more like sleep? I often feel like I’m in a half-sleep state for the first few hours of the morning and wonder if this is what he woke to. The conversation that comes from just this line, whether it be with a class of high school students or with my dishwasher is sublime.
My children don’t find things easily. They understand that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” They take it as a personal insult if I can’t find what they have lost. I’m good at finding things, but I’d like them to learn that “so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” I didn’t know Mary Oliver until a friend shared One Art with me in my mid 30’s. We live on different continents and are busy with life now, but she will always be dear to me because she brought the joy of these words into my life. One of the most fundamental elements of the human condition is loss. We need help coping with it, and language like this helps me cope. I lost her but can wallow in that losing thanks to language. And if I need to do something other than master loss, I can “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I imagine saying this to my own father someday. I imagine Dylan Thomas writing beside his sick father. I imagine my sons saying it to me. “Rage, rage…” Rage is a glorious word to say in my head. When I need to immerse myself in loss I know that “to weep is to make less the depth of grief” and do not feel joy at that moment but in reflection feel the joy because the written word ties me to humanity. “Depth of grief” is as sensuous a phrase as folding together marshmallow cream and chocolate chips to make fudge. It’s joyous to say or hear.
I talk to myself, and my husband teases me about it, “Have a good chat?” he often asks when he finds me muttering to the dishwasher or washing machine. Often I’m saying ‘if it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well/ It were done quickly,” but he doesn’t need to know everything. Shakespeare’s words are so delicious that I feed on them with relish. It’s often Macbeth because I taught it three times a day for eight years, but I am not a snob about the beauty of language. It gives me as much joy to hear, “If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?” as it does to read “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”.
Curse the phonetic nightmare that is English but cherish the richness of its vocabulary stolen from so many other rich languages. I marvel at the magic of language, spoken or written. I’m on a journey with my autistic child to unravel the mystery of language and it has made me more aware of what a joy it is to have language. I have my own language, which can be powerful at times, but because of the written word I have LANGUAGE. My “cup runneth over.”
When my brain gets soggy and unable to hold what it has spent a lifetime of absorbing, I will lose the recall of language, but I will always have the written word and like the aged dog, I will wag my tail and jump in circles in my heart.