Lately I’ve been thinking about canyons. Nine years ago my wife and I rode sturdy mules down the Bright Angel Trail onto the floor of the Grand Canyon, experiencing its glory with all five of our senses. Hardly sentimental, my thoughts these days tend to be abstract and maybe even philosophical. What, for instance, makes a canyon a canyon, the towering walls or the gaping hole stretching between them?
Most people are too busy with work and family to fret about the essence of a natural wonder, but I can’t hoe my garden or cut winter firewood without thinking about language and the words we use to express our ideas. My brain may have been primed by a recent OSHER class I took on Postmodern Critical Theory, but this malady began long before that. How could it not when the American political scene runs so hot with blustering speech? People use words (think of fascism, treason, indoctrination and critical race theory) like blunt clubs in a game without rules or referees. When I see a news clip on television from a political speech, I want someone in the crowd to blow a whistle and insist on a clear definition for a word a speaker just used.
Of course, the maddening thing about language is that it is completely made up, and people are free to use words however they like. I’ve learned to ignore the absurdity of the saying “I could care less” because there is never any ambiguity about meaning, even with a critical word missing. My father taught me when I was very young that the phrase running the gauntlet contains an error in diction. “The word is gantlet,” he’d remind me over and over as if I were the one making the mistake. He died many years ago, having gained no ground in that battle, but not before I could show him where Thoreau misuses the word in Walden.
Joining the word police can be awkward if you have a taste for irony or poetry. With both, words are in play, irony turning on a contradiction between what you expect and what you get, where words often mean the opposite of what they appear to say. Poetry is more ambitious in the way it bends language and form, heaping meaning onto words and images.
“The words are maps” Adrienne Rich explains in a line of her poem Diving into the Wreck, a reminder to the reader to be patient about the poem’s meaning. Sure, there are flippers and a mask, also a ladder and oxygen, but early in the poem it becomes clear that this is a metaphorical dive, not into the sea so much as into the subconscious.
Everyone knows that poetry plays loose with linear thought and with logic, and for some, this play can be unnerving. “Why can’t they just say what they mean?” is their ringing complaint, words eerily similar to what I’ve said about the blustering speech of politics. Could there be a point of agreement here between unlikely allies? Probably not; more likely what we have is a knotty paradox. T.S. Eliot throws his own voice into the speaker of his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock when he has him lament, “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” Prufrock would never win my vote for any office, but at least he tries to be clear. Political speech is deliberately vague and evasive, and these days it appeals not to our taste for truth or beauty, but to our festering outrage. This needs to change.
As I take up another armload of firewood, I know that the Grand Canyon is more than an empty space, more than surrounding walls; anyone who has stood at the South Rim and tried to capture with a camera or words what it is understands what I mean. Language may be a rough tool, but it is all we have. We need to use it deliberately and with care, and when it doesn’t work and we are misunderstood or misquoted, we need to start in again with better words.