The Life-Giving Power of Words

In my last blog entry, I wrote at length about the loss of someone who'd once been very dear to me and whose death I found out about in the worst possible way. It took awhile before I realized that writing that entry had helped me feel a little better. As the days passed since then, I came to appreciate the power that words have to keep not only a person's memory alive, but also his or her essence. Somehow, writing the person's name and then reading and rereading it gives more revivifies the memory, almost as though I could pen or speak J. alive again by just those simple acts.

Of course, it doesn't work that way. But I think back to the biblical passage which reads "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." (John 1:14) Aside from the mystical and supernatural connotations of that passage beloved by Christians, the very idea that a word can create life is profound. And I often wonder if it has to do with the fact that some scientists believe that we do indeed create our own realities once we give them all names or speak them into existence in our minds, thus imparting life and immediacy to them. 

Oh, if it were only that easy to conjure up a lost loved by simply speaking his or her name! It's probably best that we can't, because there is no telling how far in the wrong direction such a power could take us. So I'll content myself with writing about those I've loved and lost and seeing them come to life on my computer screen or on a journal page.

There's another aspect of this process that also amazes me and that's when I go through old letters and cards and find the actual handwriting of someone I loved and who is not longer with me. It struck me particularly hard once when I found an old letter my mother had written me many years ago. Seeing her handwriting gave me a sensation that she was very close by, as if no time had passed since her passing and she was still readily available to me. 

There is so much of a person's spirit present in the words they etched out on paper, which now remains a testimony that yes, they really had existed once. And if the handwriting experts are right and no two people's handwriting styles ever match, then all the more reason to see a person in their writing. Those same experts also claim that much can be known about a person based on their particular writing style, which only adds to the belief that there is a sort of sacredness to anyone's handwriting, particularly if they are no longer with us. 

Creative writing is an art form by which we communicate in ways that are more elaborate and emotion-laden than, say, strict business writing or other types of formal communiques such as property deeds, office memos, or legal notices. And once again, there it is, the implication that, by writing, we can indeed create something, make it real and believable, make it felt. So that when I wrote about J. last week, I was in fact re-creating him for my own benefit without even realizing that I was doing just that. It was only later that I realized how much better I'd felt while I was setting down the timeline of our friendship and the years we spent together. Not only did that action being it all back to me, but I also got the sense that it had never really ended and that I could it going just by writing about it from time to time. If, by writing about it as well as about other people and things from my past that I've lost, I can continue to comfort myself until the time comes when I myself will leave this world, after which it will not longer be an issue. 

If there is indeed an afterlife and we will be, as so many believe (and as I like to believe) able to look up those loved ones, I'll be quite busy hunting up all those who've gone before me and who left vast empty spaces where their presences once were. 

In any case, I like the idea of having the ability to create merely with words. Maybe I can't reproduce the exact scenarios of particularly happy times or those individuals who once added substance to my life. But I can still derive some joy from watching them come to life again on my computer screen or on a journal page. 

And that will have to do. 

 

After a Journey

That title also happens to head one of my favorite poems written by Thomas Hardy. In it, he reminisces about, and immortalizes, his final years with his wife before her death and laments that he could have cherished their moments together more while they were taking place.


My title sums up the end of a different type of journey, however, namely, the finishing of another book. And now I am enjoying the calm but richly full feeling of fulfilment and that accompanies the completion of any accomplishment. It strikes me, though, that no journey, be it literal or metaphorical, ever really ends, for there is never an ultimate destination beyond which we can no longer move. All roads lead somewhere, but they also all lead back to where they started, opening up even more possibilities on all sides.


So now, I stand here at the end of this long walk, seeing lots more road ahead of me, as well as all the different other directions I might have headed off in. For writing, like roads, is never final. There is never a "last word," or a true "The End." Words are audible and visual forms of energy. And if words should ever fail us, like the energy that enables the flower or the tree to mesmerize us, they won't die but simply lie in wait for the next traveler upon which to attach themselves.


Like a cat moving along through underbrush unwittingly gathering seeds and other bits of potential new plants, I move along gathering ideas. For now, I will pause and take stock, assess and reevaluate. And then, before too much more time elapses, I will pick up my walking stick and set out anew to see what awaits me there along the many secret paths which are, as long as I am able to travel them, all mine and mine alone.


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Release the River

Working at an assisted living facility awhile back provided me with the opportunity to view life and its intricacies through the eyes of elderly people who were simply living out their final years as comfortably as possible. One man, who wasn't as old as the typical assisted living resident is but who had issues that warranted round-the-clock monitoring, told me something interesting not long before we parted ways. He said, "You see far, and you feel deeply." Later, when I thought about it, I realized that he had never had very much to go on to be able to form that opinion of me. And I was, needless to say, touched by his spot assessment of me.


I don't think there is a writer alive who could do what we do if he or she did not "see far and feel deeply." Writing is as public a display of emotion as is standing on a street corner screaming or crying or on a building ledge getting ready to jump. While it certainly is a more quiet and a less overtly violent endeavor, it is no less deep and no less sincere.


I will go out on a limb here as far as to say that pulling words from our brains is sometimes, if not usually, physically painful. It certainly can be draining, as is evidenced by anyone who has seen a writer push himself or herself back from a desk in sheer exhaustion. Writing is risky business, especially once the dam breaks and the words come tumbling out, not to be contained. We have no choice but to allow them to cascade down, as there is no hope of damming them up again until they've spent themselves and are nothing more than a trickle. And then, even if we do manage to block its path with a rock or a branch, whatever seeps into the ground is lost forever.


Or is it?


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An Awesome Mandate

There are as many metaphors for words as there are stars in the sky. No, that's not quite right. But sometimes it seems that way. For are they not individual units of building materials, from which larger edifices can be constructed, larger shapes fashioned? Words, ideas in themselves, could be said to pave a path toward other more complex ideas...Or, words can be pieces of lumber used to support the weight of an ever-expanding story...It occurs to me, too, that words could be likened to the stones in a rock wall, going nowhere and everywhere at once, leading to magical places and things, but without giving away too many of their secrets.


Is that, then, the writer's job, to link those building units into something recognizable and thought-provoking, intriguing and, hopefully, inspiring? Thus, are writers not builders as well as word-linkers, or jewelry-makers, joining bright baubles together...or weavers, intertwining thoughts into larger tapestries? And are not words as organic as the minerals that flow up from the soil through a tree's roots and gives it life and vigor and longevity?


Words ARE eternal...once spoken, they cannot be unspoken...once written, cannot be unwritten but merely destroyed or refashioned, through the vestiges of them that remain in the minds of those who remember such things...And are not stories the things we all build through all our lives, and that await the teller or the chronicler to render them eternal?


An awesome mandate that...


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Heart Wrenching

The words come hard sometimes, like pulling weeds that just refuse to part with their roots or their small seemingly inconsequential places in this world. I dig down deep below my words, below their roots, and still, I am not at the end, I am not at the place where they began. That would take shrinking myself down to the size of a verbal microbe and plunging into the deepest recesses of my memory whose many doors are no longer all open to me. It means digging up rocks whose large ends are always the most deeply buried, teasing me from the top, saying "We're small...you can dig us up," until I try and find that, the deeper I go, the bigger the rock. And then I abandon the effort in disgust and walk away.


Words are like that, and the ideas they organize themselves into...rocks whose small ends show until I've broken a sweat digging, only to find that the big end, and sometimes the gem hiding inside, are too deep, and there is no getting at them, and so I must let nature, and my life, continue to pile even more experiences and memories on top of them, leaving me no choice but to move on.


But couldn't I get at them from the side, I wonder, dig down through the softer soil and then horizontally to the gem? I could, but that might mean ignoring those small seemingly insignificant words that are closer to the surface and that beckon less ostentatiously or lie there awaiting the sun's touch to glint their meaning to me. I might miss them, though, while I dig, blinded by the sweat in my eyes, failing to see the pebbles of greater meaning tumbling into the hole, gone forever.


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The Kaleidoscope Effect

Sometimes, a writer's thoughts, mine anyway, tumble about like the pieces of colored plastic inside a kaleidoscope. No matter how often I turn the end of the tube, the shards never regroup into exactly the same configuration, and my mind's eye must adjust to the new image and what it implies.

They're not like snowflakes, over which I have no control, nature sending water droplets down from the clouds through a swath of cold air where they crystallize and fall to earth as something we must bend our backs to. No, it's not like that at all. For the colored bits ask nothing more of me than to try to make something of them. And rather than my back bending, my mind must bend around them in as many directions as possible until it begins to recognize a pattern, a way to make sense of it all.

The trick is not to try to achieve any particular pattern but to let it assume its own, and then comes the deciphering, the translating, the refashioning from random shapes to words to coherent sentences that take the small incongruous pieces from inconsequential matter to ideas loaded with meaning. It's no small feat, this, which is why the writer's work can be as demanding and draining as the moving of stones or the hefting of tree trunks. Those colored pieces are heavy, which is the greatest irony of all.

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Reading to Write

There was a time when I read whatever I could get my hands on simply for the sake of reading...to absorb information, expand my body of knowledge, and travel to places that I couldn't otherwise afford to visit physically. At one point, I started keeping a written record of the books I'd read, and sometimes, I averaged between four to five a month, and some months less. This isn't nearly as fast a pace as some are able to maintain; and recently, as my eyesight ages along with the rest of me, it has slowed even more. And after staring at this computer screen almost all day and nearly every day, sometimes I can't even do any reading beyond what I've done here.




When I do read now, though, I find that I am reading as much to improve my writing skills as simply to absorb knowledge. I have also come to the realization that learning how to write through reading happens subliminally. As my mind scans and processes words, sentences and paragraphs, it is also storing them all away for future reference, not from an informational perspective but from a purely  structural viewpoint. I have, in other words (pun intended), learned without even knowing I was HOW to write, how to craft sentences and paragraphs, as well as how to assemble them as so many puzzle pieces into a coherent account, be it fictional or not. All of that stored information is now resurfacing to my consciousness where I can make ready use of it to move ahead with fiction writing. I no longer need to refer back to my mental writing guide files and "search" for how to construct a meaningful sentence or which word to choose to replace one that just doesn't move me.




From that I have deduced that all those years I spent reading were not for naught. For I am reaping their benefits now through my own work. So if I had any advice to give an aspiring writer, it would be to READ, READ, and READ. And when you're ready to put those first few words down, you may be surprised to find that it will be a lot easier than you thought.


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Getting Into Gear

Some days, there seems to be no going forward at all. There is, in fact, no movement at all...not going forward, no going back, nothing. Just a standing still, an infuriating incapacitating lack of movement that could easily set the stage for stagnation, and then the ultimate--death. Not in a physical or biological sense, but death nonetheless, of an idea, a possibility, the permanent blocking of a path that had not that long ago seemed to open and unobstructed.




Yet here I am, stopped dead my tracks, unable to take another step forward. And I call to mind the words a math professor once used to describe the peculiar habit I had back then of coming to a screeching halt when a problem presented itself that I could not solve.




"It's like you come to a tree," he said, "and you stop. Instead of moving around it and continuing, you stay behind the tree, looking around it, but afraid to go on."




Well, in terms of math, that fear was very real. It was an algebra class, and I'd never even got the gist of fractions and decimals in grade school, so I had no business even dabbling in anything beyond basic math. And that fear? Well, it was of failing, of course, because if I wasn't certain of anything else, I was positive that only failure lay at the end of any mathematical journey I might undertake. And I haven't been proven wrong in that theory yet.




But words? What do I have to fear from words? Plenty. That they won't come out sounding right, that I'll have to rearrange them until they do, and then, when will I know I've succeeded? Or maybe I'll think they flow well and adequately convey my meaning, but how can I be sure?




The truth? I can't. I can only trust that my years of crafting sentences and building them into paragraphs will work, and that others will want to read them. Because at its most fundamental level, writing isn't about hoping people will read my stories and like them. It's about reading my life and seeing me at my most exposed and hoping they'll understand and not think me too ridiculous.




As most serious writers know, writing isn't simply the act of stringing words together into pretty necklaces that we hope will sell. It's about stepping out into broad daylight wearing all our faults and our foibles imprinted on a sandwich board for all the world to see. And for many of us, those boards are large and very heavy and sometimes hard to carry all day, every day. But we do.




Because we must.


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What Stories Are Made Of

Words are magical things. In them reside all our experiences, our thoughts, ideas, hopes, dreams, fears, and joys. In other words (pun intended), "words" sum up who we are. And there isn't a single word in any language that cannot stand on its own without needing to be embellished by others. All words began as sounds, and a sound can convey a great deal of meaning and emotion without any explanation at all.


We take words so much for granted. For in the course of a single day, we read, shape our thoughts, hear, or speak millions of them without giving a single thought to the role that each one of them plays in that process. And any writer knows that any piece of writing begins with a single idea, and that idea can be reduced to a single word. For even the most seemingly inconsequential word has meaning and purpose, on its own and when used with others, and not just nouns, verbs and adjectives. Articles, conjunctions, and prepositions all imply something by their very nature and how they are used in sentences. And even when stated alone, a single article--the, for example--has more to say than is intially apparent.


At its most fundamental, we know that "the" is an article. By itself, it means nothing, or does it? For the moment we say it, once, twice, three times, we realize that it DOES say something by implication. "The" immediately implies the need for another word, but what is that word? For starters, the choice of whatever word it implies is left entirely to the speaker or the writer. Thus, the word "the" opens up a possibility, an outcome, the existence of an object that the writer or speaker will eventually elaborate upon. From that point on, whatever new word that is associated with "the" will assign it a whole new meaning and purpose.


Now let's take a very familiar noun: cat. As soon as we hear, say, or write the word, we know instantly what we're referring to, for the word's basic meaning unstructs as to its attributes. So right away, we know we're not dealing with a dog, an elephant, or a snake. So that shifts our focus from all other creatures and onto a cat. Then, our minds take over, and we start remembering what we know about cats, which in some cases is more or less than others do. But we all know something, and that is what we bring to our understanding of the word "cat."


The natural question that follows is thus, "What about the cat?" This is where the author's or speaker's mind kicks in and starts attributing characteristics to the cat, and that is how ideas come together, through an immutable law of attraction. In order to grow in meaning, a single word must attract others or die. But it's not like a tree absorbing nutrients from the soil. It's more like one snowflake attracting others until it is no longer a single flake but an entire snow bank that has to be shovelled. Or to use a more fitting analogy--one building block is relatively useless unless others are added to it, which ultimately results in some sort of structure.


That is what writing is--starting with one word, one idea, and then adding others to it until it eventually takes on a life of its own as an entirely different entity from the one that gave it life. And in that way, writing is also a metaphor for everything that exists in this world that got its start in the very same way.


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