Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
WORDS WORDS WORDS
At
their very best, words are a very lame means of conveying experience, physical
reality and mental states. This is certainly true when the words are wielded by
people like you and me. But it is true even when words are wielded by the likes
of Dante, Goethe, Emily Dickinson or Baudelaire.
How
trite even the best chosen words sound before reality – the thing itself. Or
how bombastic. Or how inappropriate.
But
more than anything, how inadequate.
The
toothache is throbbing, destroying your soul, nagging, making your jaw
feverish, making you incapable of thinking of anything else, absorbing your
whole being. “Oh God, it hurts”, you say, inadequately, before moving to a more
authentic response – the howl of an animal. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
The
sun is an hour up, the day is fine and there is a beautiful cloudless sky to
the horizon, clear and pale and blue as a silk robe. You try to find words that
will convey that sense of the sublime, but all that come out are the fustian
truisms of old Romantic poetry or phrases rendered trite by overuse in
publicity campaigns. Sublime? Awesome? Divine? Curse it – there is no word to
convey this experience that elevates your heart, for all have been claimed for
frequent trivialising usage.
And
now try to find the right words for love or sexual experience or both. You will
be stumped into cliché. Perhaps because before something intense and
meaningful, the best response is silence.
I
trudge through yet another volume of modern poetry, filled with self-referencing
irony, ostentatious references to trashy pop culture, and a clever-dick sort of
game-playing whereby the poet tries to persuade us that he is above anything as
trite as having real feelings. Why this common malaise in modern poetry? Is it
an extreme sense of the inadequacy of language, and the fear of lapsing into cliché
when dealing with the essential and serious things of life, and real feelings?
Words
are inadequate.
Words
are inadequate.
Words
are inadequate.
I
see something intense and beautiful, three weeks before you have a chance to
read this. My daughter embracing her newborn son, two hours after he left the
womb. I have no words adequate to the image itself. It is beyond words.