Treading water in a sea of seeming

Sea Storms in Cantanzaro by Nicholas Gemini

This post may seem out of step with this site’s “wilderness” or “environmental” character. But it’s a post urging more responsible behavior in the sphere of language, especially on the internet, where rhetorical global climate change seems to be raising the temperature of social media sites to the level of frog-boiling. To my mind, the quality of a language environment and the condition of the natural world connect intimately. Successful changes in environmental policy result from carefully designed language that takes into account past, present, and future well being. Conversely, poor behavior toward the physical world only succeeds through unsustainable reasoning and often bullying rhetoric–that is, it forces itself on its audience, because it can’t otherwise connect with them. So here we go.

The title of this post comes from the novel 2666 by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. The full quote is, “Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.” It’s a complex metaphor that…well, kinda expresses something a lot of us do when, in conversation, we plunge into the fluid realm of metaphor–especially in our online conversations, where anonymity and the here/not-here nature of virtual presence make many of us bold.

But metaphors. Metaphors are great, right? And all-purpose. A clever metaphor can carry the battle in an argument, thus proving the supremacy of razor wit over club-tongued lunacy. The winner takes home the Truth Booty, cuz, you know, booty is truth, truth booty. Agreed?

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WIZ’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration begins!

Light’s rise sparks bright blooms:
birdsong, fields of it, vining–
spring’s first green flourish.

These mornings, I step outside my back door to hear the hush of winter thrown off by a clamor of birdsong–the crackle of starlings, jazzy riffs of purple house finches, a lonely two-syllable call from a flycatcher,   screeches and churrings of magpies, ravens’ gravelly croaks, a woodpecker drumming a juniper tree, jangling songs of meadowlarks outshouting everyone.   Quite stunning, this send-off of the season of low, cold light.   And I can’t help but detect in the intertwining of different avian dialects the bloom of flowery beauty and signature fragrances of meaning.

The language of the birds, or the green language, is the mythical, magical language of wisdom and divine insight thought to pass between birds and those humans with ears to hear the music of the cosmos with which birdsong is thought to be impregnated.   Some traditions equate la langue verte with the adamic or perfect language.   Many folks might consider any relation between birdsong and human utterances and comprehension illusory.   But if you listen closely, you will hear chirps in the language of many species ranging from rodents (prairie dogs’ alarm calls sound bird-ish, and the noisy grasshopper mouse chirrups constantly) to cats (chirps and trills) to amphibians (our Woodhouse toads pip at us) to insects to puppies to people–especially babies.   My nearly 19-year-old disabled daughter, who can understand more words than she can say, chirps, hoots, and trills in response to questions and other words of address.   After nearly two decades of studying her bird-like, tonal language, I think I can rightly claim that I’ve gained from it deep, magical insight–including into the quiddity of human expression.   Because of my experience with her and what I think I hear in the language of birds and other animals and insects, I’ve begun to wonder if, rather than acting as the basic phoneme of   a foreign language spoken by creatures with which we think ourselves to have little in common, the chirp might just lie at the root of human expression.

Whatever else it’s said to be, the mythical language of the birds is highly poetic, layered with multiple strata of meaning, playful, punful, sliding, gliding, beguiling to the ear when performed aloud, and, when conveyed in written interchange, deeply engaging of the mind’s inner ear.

For WIZ’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff and Celebration, let’s see if we can outshine the birds in their spring ceremonies.   Human language can be just as green and gorgeous, just as textured and as alluring as the language of the birds.   And when it comes to the opening of new prospects and possibilities, human language can have no rival.   Even the language of the birds lags behind the best effects of the best human language: opening-the-possibilities acts of authentic creation.   Poetry, with its multifaceted, many-leveled effects and metaphoric prowess–its strength for getting across–can create, so to speak, more world.   As John D. Niles says in Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Narrative, “It is through such symbolic mental activities [as storytelling and poetry] that people have gained the ability to create themselves as human beings and thereby transform the world of nature into shapes not known before.”

So this Spring Poetry Runoff, let’s go green in our language.   I don’t mean Green, as in supportive of social or political movements touting environmental protection.   In some cases, that language is the least green of all.   I mean let’s go green, as in producing living, doing, being language that acts to open possibilities by virtue of its creative élan.   I mean let’s give out words that don’t just describe experience, they create experience, providing raw materials that others can recombine for their own narrative needs, thus altering, here and there, world and worlds.   Referencing John Miles Foley, Niles   calls this cosmoplastic, or “world-building” energy of human language, “wordpower.”

During this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration, we’ll not only be running the poetry contest with prizes in the Most Popular Vote Award and Admin Award categories but also an open-invitation haiku chain (a developing tradition on WIZ), a non-competing category for those poets wishing to participate in the Spring Poetry Runoff just for fun, the Runoff Rerun (re-publishing of one of last year’s poems), and other activities.

Hope you join in.   It’s spring.   Let’s sing it up.

To review submission deadlines, rules, voting procedures, and prizes, go here.

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Photo of singing western meadowlark by Alan Vernon.

Get out there!

I don’t like to tell people what to do.   In fact, except for my kids, who lack imagination where performing necessary tasks is concerned, I’ve come to  dislike it extremely.    Well, even then.   But I’ve been thinking lately that Mormons  appear to be  beeline people, traveling in more or less straight lines between this or that field of responsibility and the home hive.   Work, home, school, home, temple, home, ward house, home, stake house, home, temple, home, Walmart— home, thank goodness!    

Is  Mormonism  an indoor culture?    

Whether  it is  or not, Earth Day is coming up April 22, less than  one week away.   If at all possible, I hope folks try to get outside, day or night, and  have a good look around.   And  consider taking  the kids.   Even if it’s backyard exploration or a half-hour jaunt to the local park.   Do a little bird-watching— populations are migrating right now, you might see something surprising.   No need to step very far out of your comfort zone, and please, don’t take unnecessary risks.   Keep it simple and close, if that’s your speed.   It’s all call of the wild.

The world’s  extraordinary, even when strange,  even  where it isn’t as beautiful as it used to be,  and it stands in needs of us.    Mormons.   Not to save it, but to abide with it, to wind ourselves deeper into its braid.      To change simply by witnessing, to be changed.   It’s the nature of spirituality to rise to the surface at the least opportunity.

So try?   Even for a few minutes.   Stop between buildings.    Wind down the car window.   Think about God’s taffy pull with  light, stretching it into  being, shuffling land and sea, granting earth permission to  sprout grass,  sprinkling stars around the sun and moon, invoking the waters to bring forth life, shaping animals upon their bones, and seeing it all as good.

It is good.   Even the seemingly bad  reflects glints  of good.

Get out and see for yourself.    I’ll be reporting on  my Earth Day activities, so if something cool happens to you while you’re out,  you’ll be able to post  about it  in the comments.

Like I said, not to tell people what to do (shudder), but to suggest a possibility.      People can’t have too many possibilities.