A Woman Clothed in Words (9 page)

Even to this day the strawberries that grow and flourish in gardens are never quite as sweet and delicious as those that grow secretly and shyly in the forest, waiting for the children to pick them and make their midsummer feasts amongst the trees.

The Child as Mother to the Woman

“As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”

– Alexander Pope,
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,
1735

There is perhaps only one thing surprising about Pope’s childhood ease with rhyme and rhythm and that is that he should be at all surprised by it. Does not every child look upwards and mouth the words
sky, by, die,
and don’t these words appear to her perfectly ordinary, exciting and infinitely sad?

And I will
tell
how the
bell fell.
It
fell
from a
chair.
And
where
is the
chair
from which the
bell fell?
How did it
dare
to fall from the
chair,
and is it
fair
or simply an
affair
at which we all
stare
because it is
there?
And doesn’t all this explain the moment, the actual and transcendent reality?

The rhyme, the song and the dance are after all the child’s
first play with her world and her language. These are the first understanding of the rhythms of the planet, the beat of the heart, the drum of the feet on the earth, the sound of her own blood rushing through her with a murmur like the sea’s as she lies on her pillow afraid now of the sound of her own being. She’s afraid and excited by her own breath which comes and goes so evenly as she sleeps, so quickly and jerkily as she runs and dances in her dream. Is the stitch in her side the pain exacted for her understanding of the world? The giddy fit as she twists in the swing, the fall to the ground, are these the causes of or the payment for the clarity of her inward seeing?

Now and then she becomes preoccupied with the passing of time.
Sunday, Monday, Solomon Grundy… In April first hear his trill, in July away I fly.
None of us can be surprised at all this for such is the power of our first rhymes, our first poems. They are counting games, naming games, skipping songs. And so to Blake: “Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time, / Who countest the steps of the Sun…”

I once had a conversation with a woman who thought rhymes unsuitable for the sophisticated ears of her twentieth-century daughters. She had in fact rewritten Mother Goose for her little ones without the rhymes and rhythms which she judged offensive to the poetic times we live in. I have always thought of this as one of the worst crimes committed against childhood and the innocent ear.

Not for me those prose poems of the nursery. I’m grateful for Mother Goose as she was first written and of course for things like Sunday School hymns: “All things bright and beautiful / All creatures great and small / All things wise and wonderful…” Later came psalms and canticles – “All ye works of the Lord… Sun and Moon praise ye the Lord” – and lewd rhymes full of hilarious
tarts
and
knobs,
that my brothers brought home from school.

From there back to Blake: “O Rose, thou art sick! / The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm…” From there to James Joyce: “Lean out of the window, / Goldenhair, / I hear you singing / A merry air. // My book was closed; / I read no more, / Watching the fire dance / On the floor…”

All this before the child herself can read or write. She can only recite her poems and remember them by the rhymed couplets placed here and there as signposts amongst a field of words. At age five the little gold-rimmed granny glasses are placed upon the reluctant nose. Now the easy task of learning to read, the hard and weary task of learning to write, the sad knowledge that these written poems are dull indeed compared to the earlier spoken ones. The book of innocence has been closed. The book of experience has been opened. “Lean out of the window, / Goldenhair, / I hear you singing / A merry air /…Singing and singing / A merry air...”

(1987)

Essay on language

“I was in a printing house in hell and saw the method by which
knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.”

– William Blake,
A Memorable Fancy

Somewhere else I have written on the possibility, which appears to me every day as more of a probability, that a written language existed before humans could form words in their minds and utter them as sounds. This will not surprise anyone. Of course there was such a language. Many languages in fact. Systems of gesture, systems of drawings and symbols scratched in sand or painted on rock. And of course these pre-languages influenced the later spoken ones. This is not difficult to prove, for there still live on the planet today peoples whose spoken language is a secret one and whose only communication with other tribes, even those in the vicinity, is in just such nonspeech: the gesture, the scratched message, the special arrangement of sticks and pebbles, yes, even the smoke signal. All this is common knowledge.

My own first experience of such a language was in the mysterious chalkmarks left by gypsies on our gatepost at home. What could these mean? We dared not rub them off, for this, we were sure, would bring us the worst of bad luck. Did they mean we were a soft touch and that, having understood the signal, more and more gypsies would appear to sell us clothespegs and baskets and tell our fortunes? This was an exciting prospect for us children. But those crosses and circles might also signify that the gypsies hadn’t liked the reception they got: the dog had growled at them: the food was grudgingly given. We had an uncle who had a book which was supposed to explain everything, but when it came to translation he could not make head or tail of any of the chalklines. He suggested, and I have believed it ever since, that the gypsies, not wanting to be caught out, changed their signals every so often; it would seem a very sensible thing to do. If I knew a gypsy well enough I would ask if this is so. But then why would she answer truthfully to a nosy question like that?

When I write of a pre-speech language I am not, of course, referring to any of these somewhat makeshift wordless methods of passing on information. On the contrary I want to advance the idea, perhaps I should say I want to speculate on the idea, that these scratches, symbols and gestures are merely the remnants of a once highly complex and sophisticated language that, after the gift of suitable throats and mouths, has been lost to us forever in favour of the spoken word, or at least has dwindled to the fading traces we now see of it. I am speaking of a language unspoken, one that did not contain words as we know then but all the same had its own sophisticated grammatical structure, a language which could express every nuance of human emotion, which could describe the inner as well as the outer landscape. This could be, perhaps was, a language which in its flowering would produce its own literature, its own stories and drama, and in which could be written poems so delicate in their implications that our own efforts would appear crude beside those of these distant ancestors of ours.

Indeed those ancestors must have been very distant, for I think of all this as beginning while humankind was still cradled in Mother Africa, in the time before the great migrations which have taken us all to the ends of the earth and back. This is why I am referring to that forgotten language in the singular. From such a language, of course, the blind would have been excluded. Just as in the long years of our illiteracy the deaf must have been excluded from our spoken word.

A what-if story, you say, a long walk down the lane of foolish speculation? Not quite, for this is in fact the point from which I took off on this journey, which I tend to think of as in some ways a pilgrimage.

For some years now I have had a friend, a poet, who has consistently brought me her interesting and indeed extraordinary poems. Written in a language she could not hear very well, they yet showed a great perception of the rhythm of English as well as its many assonances and its unfortunately few rhymes. These were poems of ideas, poems of imagination. This young woman had that rarest of gifts, poetic insight. Things were hard for her but the struggle, I thought, was good. Per ardua ad astra, and so on.

About a year ago she began not so much to write as to perform quite different poems. Some of these had the same ideas as her verbal poems but these were expressed in a non-verbal language – American Sign Language. Her gestures were passionate and forceful, I felt abashed that I could not read her hands. This experience was obviously important to her – to me it was a revelation. Here at last was what I was seeking for, a non-verbal language. The ultimate perhaps in ideogrammatic expression.

I would like to be able to say that I went right out and learned this new and powerful way of communicating. For lack of a teacher I did not. I still hope one day to do so. I did however have a vision of a world in which perhaps every one of us could become free from the restraints of the word. If we could all learn our mother tongue and besides that a non-
verbal language such as asl wouldn’t we be able to communicate with each other around the planet with a certain degree of ease?

There remains, of course the problem of a script. Perhaps my friend the deaf poet could help us there. What we would
need is an ideogrammatic script something like Chinese characters, one that would lend itself to a Braille-like embossing technique.

But can we hope that literature, even poetry, could be expressed in such a script? We can never be sure of that. Yet every written language, and every oral language too, has so far been able to produce its own stories, poems and liturgies. There is more danger by far that over the centuries and millennia one of these languages would triumph over the other and we would be left once more with one mode of communication. Which would be the victor, the wordless expression of ideas? The naming mode of the verbal language? I suppose that in spite of my interest in the non-verbal, the ideogrammatic, if I had to make the choice I would do what my ancestors did and choose the Word made manifest in the mouth.

The Thin Pale Man

(In the city smoke rises

from the hulking concrete

horizon is huddled with it

sky yellowish as snow

dirty as february

•

and the sound is broken

with stopping and starting exhaust

K says clouds but can

there be clouds in such a sky

I say K says

we just passed him

going the other way

•

across the street she says

the thin pale man bluebottle

bearded I ask perhaps

she answers absently

•

not yet she says perhaps

she says one day

•

what’s all the fuss

in winnipeg in winter

surely fifty poets pass by

at least that many in an afternoon

not like this one she says

his book has made a buzz

a living fly in winter

•

unexpected and annoying

wave wave she says before

he’s gone ah well

he’ll be back he’ll

be back)

~~~

the women are sturdy and strong

sun glints on their skin

they let down their hair

and smell of honey in the night

the light down on their arms

glows palely under the moon

•

rooster crows the sun

the page tells me

and it’s day again

all this light he says

all this cold cold light
the shunning

•

... the sky over the trees grew red

•

(the words of the book melt into the head

you have to listen)

•

curling at its edges

like paper the yellowing moon

•

what’s written on a paper plate

words at the edge of dreaming

and the dream is desperate

•

if this is such a dream

how can I believe

the strawberries

falling into the cupped hand

those women with the mien

of earthangels

•

how can I believe the

history of terrors

grounded in believing

watching the sun dappling the horses

the moon whitening the trees

~~~

(after the reading

we arrive at the house