What did you say?

Words

“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,

God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words

get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according

to which nation. French has no word for home,

and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people

in northern India is dying out because their ancient

tongue has no word for endearment. I dream of lost

vocabularies that might express some of what

we no longer can...”

Jack Gilbert (“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”)

I am only now discovering the poetry of Jack Gilbert, and I feel like I've been impoverished all my life for not having known of it. In this poem about the incapacity of language to describe love in its fullness, he lays out a challenge that almost every one of us has encountered in our lives. How do we express in words what we are feeling about almost anything? Our feelings carry the history of all that has come before; the words eliminate almost all of it. I'm reading the book, All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, set in World War II. The letters written to and from soldiers and their loved ones are blacked out to the point of making almost no sense. I remember reading letters that my father wrote home from the Pacific front—words were literally cut from pages. And as strange as that seems, our spoken language is similarly full of holes.

In All the Light We Cannot See, the girl protagonist is blind. She describes her world by the sounds she hears and the colors evoked inside her head. In Jack Gilbert's poem, he says, “My love is a hundred pitchers of honey.” His joy is, “...the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.” We so want to communicate what we know to be true, and yet, words let us down in the end. And not only let us down, but are subject to misinterpretation by anyone who does not share our history. All the nuances of meaning come into play—the expression on our faces, our body language, can make a simple statement into an entirely different suggestion. Isn't it interesting that we have evolved in this way?

It seems that birds don't have trouble communicating. Or dogs. The echoing calls that whales send to their pod-mates across the oceans, everyone seems to understand. But we human beings are destined to be misunderstood from place to place, dialect to dialect, and culture to culture. Which is why it's important to give it our best shot. To try to say what we mean as clearly as possible and to communicate our deeper mysteries with our eyes, our hearts and our open hands.

                                                         In the Spirit,

                                                             Jane