Some Recent Events In The Language Zoo

Consciousness acts as an internal and subjective screen, which is blurred and distorted at times by the shadows of an imaginary cage. Routine, incuriosity, obedience, insecurity, lack of imagination are the chains that keep us in place. This isn't anything new. I think Rilke did a better job illustrating this with his panther, the animal turning in circles, over and over again, “the movement of its powerful and supple steps resembling a ritual dance around a center where a powerful will remains paralyzed.” I remember seeing a civet cat at the zoo behaving the same way. There were no bars. The animal was behind glass. There had been some effort to provide an environment of some assumed familiarity to the animal, vines, branches, woodchips, mulch, but this was no apparent interest to the cat, whose frantic pacing occurred close to the glass wall. The energy was so intensely frustrated, so deeply neurotic, it was painful to watch. I marvel at Rilke’s poem, which is in itself a panther, a muscularity of spirit trapped in a cage of words.

Words are acculturating things. I don’t know where they come from, how they first arrived, the sounds our simian ancestors made that somehow, weirdly, began to assume meaning, the power to convey images and associations. I’m bet it was fun. Everyone rolling in the dirt with laughter. I want to get back to that point. Like they did for a brief time in Zurich during Dada. Then, inevitably, as the words evolved and matured they assumed the stature of norms. They helped create laws. They became scripture, ceremonies, rituals, chants, religions and beliefs. Consciousness became structured. It became a house. But still, there was that tendency, that glorious penchant to drift, morph like clouds into reveries of pregnant irrelevance.

I’ve often thought what it would be like to think without words. Maybe it’s a circumstance somewhat akin to following Ikea instructions for assembling a desk or a coffee table. Skipping the verbal instructions and studying the pictures, the screws and parts. Or rock climbing. Figuring out where to put your feet and hands when you’re 500 feet above the ground on a rock wall. You’re probably not going to be mulling over a soliloquy from Hamlet or King Lear, or wooing granite with a feeling invocation of ivory vowels and effervescing prestidigitations of verbal acuity. They’ll be whirling in your mind as you plummet to the ground. 

In the spring of 1974, I took a class in James Joyce at San José State. It was mind-blowing, a game changer. Ulyssess rocked me silly into an intoxication with the English language that was still blazing among my neurons a year or so later when I got a job as a messenger-driver in a hospital in Seattle. It was a highly social job since I had a daily route in which I visited a number of offices during the day. I dated one of the women who worked in one of the offices. I took her to the Red Robin on Eastlake, which has now gone, replaced by an apartment complex. It was a casual restaurant that served hamburgers and fish and chips and also had a bar. At some point in our conversation, and rather unprompted by anything I’d been espousing at the table, she asked me if I intended to put people down by using such big words all the time. I was stunned. No, of course not, I said, as my chances of getting laid came flaming down like a Sopwith Camel from the sky over France in WWI. I really had no idea that people were reacting that way to my continuing intoxications with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I felt chagrined and embarrassed. The date was essentially just an ambush. I returned to work a much quieter, and sadder, man.

My dalliance with literature became a private affair. In some ways good, but in many ways bad. I’d wrongly assumed that the liberation I’d found in poetry ran parallel to other people’s experience. This is a big mistake in the United States. Polysyllabic words can get you punched in the face. I’ve been slammed into a Christmas tree, withered to the ground by looks of such hostility I felt more sympathy for the pained expression of the person I’d accidentally abused with a savagely eloquent expression. It’s important to remember: people hate their jobs. They don’t need a carnival sideshow of useless language complicating their day. There’s a reason people hate lawyers. They hate writers and poets even more.

And so I write. I feel safe to do so in a room with no one else around to feed me a fist sandwich. There are small tribes of people, à la the encampments in François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, that love the written word so much they’ve memorized entire novels, whole volumes, caressing the words as they utter them in the isolate air. I still remember Bill Gate’s gloating prediction in the 1990s that computers would render books nearly extinct early in the 21^st century. I hoped he would be proven wrong, that bookstores and libraries would rally to the cause and fan the flames and make a supremely heroic effort to keep book culture alive, a vibrant alternative running parallel to the brain-rotting addictions of the internet and social media. This did not happen. By the end of the noughts, bookstores had become eviscerated. They often had more T-shirts and coffee mugs on display than books, or shelf-loads devoted to manga while a philosophy section might consist of 12 or 13 books. Libraires, meanwhile, have had their budgets so brutally slashed that their collections are as moldy and undernourished as a poorly maintained mushroom cellar.

What effect has this had on consciousness? I can’t speak for other people. I don’t know what it looks like in their heads. I only know what comes out of their mouths.

I do know that since Covid censorship has returned, eating away at free speech like a cancer. This has been compounded – exponentiated – by the genocide in Gaza. In England, I could be arrested for using the word genocide in public. And in my personal life, nothing ends a conversation faster, or induces more nervous, fidgety, frightened and confused looks, then the use of that terrible word. I’ve lost long-standing friendships. I feel every bit as muzzled and shamed as when I began asking questions about the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines.

Consciousness has been shrinking. Conversations have grown stilted. Small talk has long replaced the rare, now-and-again joy of sometimes finding a fellow word-juggler at a social gathering, or those wine-infused jousts and debates over a dinner table that would sometimes go long into the night and leave you feeling pleasantly jostled and shaken into new vistas, new perspectives, your mind dilated like a night-blooming moonflower.

There’s a part of me, thank God, that feels separate from the world. When it comes to language, and my own practice of language, I’m not in a zoo. I’m in a wilderness. I’m in a mode of exploration. Because it’s endless. Boundless. This is the luxury of privacy. Language is primarily a social medium. That’s what it’s for: to connect. To strengthen ties. Poets work in solitude. This makes them dangerous. Language endures their perversions, their sorcery, and in return gives them the genius and agility to unlock the cages and let the panther mind roam free in open air.