I love words. I love words, a multitude of them, the way a lifelong bachelor can never decide between his cool blonde, his spicy red, his velvet brunette, or his blade edge black. I love the friction and sizzle that an unexpected pairing of words emit. I always instinctively sensed the corporeal energy produced by language, but was unable to fully comprehend what I was sensing until I read an interview of poet Naomi Shihab Nye who explained her experience of language like this:
The older I get…the more I think energy is everything. If we have it, feel connected to it, we are rich. If we don’t have it, we are forever searching. High school students frequently say that emotion is the key to life..but the older I get the more that key, that source of all living, seems to be energy. Energy comes from many places including juxtaposition and contradictory things, elements, experiences, impulses coming together. The energy that comes from rubbing one image up against another in poems is quite surprising and majestic, and I think our brains are desperate for that energy.
Language is generous. It doesn’t ask us to be loyal or forsake the pleasure of one beautiful phrase because we’re smitten by another. Today I want the hard drinking, tin can poverty of Bukowski, and tomorrow I may need Neruda’s Latin American tumult and flame. Today I might crave magical realism, tomorrow I’ll want Steinbeck and his dry tear-stained American earth. Within a particular book, each passage has the potential to turn my world on its head, spinning me head over heels in love, countless times (see photo above).
Language is powerful. It has the ability to create universes, real or imagined, within the dark tunnels of our mind, to set off a battlefield of firing synapses. Language is pleasure. It’s the bacchanalia we indulge in without repercussion, a smorgasbord for our hungry minds.
A few days ago I saw this:
This business concept allows clients to select a favorite passage which is then printed and applied to their wall of choice. Literary decor; throw pillows and a quote. The thought is enticing, especially for someone like me who prefers the warmth of books and language to a wool afghan. I wanted to love the idea, but I could not.
In that split second of terror at the stop light (how does one choose?!), I was schooled in the ways of the eternal bachelor. Because how could we possibly be asked to choose just one? Charles Simic’s Orphan Factory, the book I’ve been spending my time with lately, is just one example of a book full of beauties that turn my head with each turn of the page. Here are a few:
If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.
After a while, I listened only to the silence deepen, the night continue to hold its breath.
The experience of being eludes language…the advantage of the poetic image is that it preserves the wordless.
Like poetry, humor is subversive.
The night sky loves only the solitary ones. To the one sitting in a corner with his face to the wall, it offers its own secret invitation on the breath of the night wind. When he finds himself in the desert or on the mountaintop, he will want immediately to confide himself to the sky. Oh the things we would all say to the stars in the sky if we found ourselves alone in a lifeboat at sea.
Perhaps bachelors are onto something. Perhaps they are our true romantic poets who understand that the experience and appreciation of one inherently leads to and enhances the experience and appreciation of another. So I refuse to emblazon my walls and live happily ever after with just one. My first confession: I’m an eternal lingual bachelorette. My second confession: I dogear my library books…please don’t tell.
Do you have a word, a phrase, a poem, or passage that you love more than any other? That guides you or comforts you or drums your heart with pleasure every time you read it? A passage that you could wake up to every morning and share a sink with?
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Another juicy plum of a find in Simic’s Orphan Factory is a poem he discovered during his earliest years in New York. I imagine Simic holding onto it like a carefully wrapped piece of secret chocolate stashed in a cupboard, taking a satisfying nibble every once in a while.
For pleasure, in every incarnation.
The Peasant Declares his Love by Emile Roumer
High-yellow of my heart, with breasts like tangerines
you taste better to me than eggplant stuffed with crab…
