What We Can Put Into Words

Not all thoughts come in words. Let’s get that straight, right away. Thoughts can be images. Thoughts can be feelings of relatedness among things. Thoughts can be body sensation complexes. Thoughts can be music.

Still, when we ask people what they are thinking about, the response usually comes as words. Which reminds me, I would love if I were to ask someone what they’re thinking about and the reply came in the form of a drawing. I’d like more relationships like that in my life. Or a song. Or a dance. I guess if we’re really paying attention to life it’s always a song and dance. Right now, I’m translating that thought into words, but I’m wondering what it would be like to translate it into other kinds of experience. And thus it goes.

That’s why writing always feels a little like dancing.

I’ve lately begun to notice that I’m using a borrowed language. Yes, it’s true it’s a language that I borrowed so long ago and have used so frequently since then that I often forget that I borrowed it in the first place, that I am constantly required to give it back, and that after such long usage it cannot be returned in the same condition in which I borrowed it. Borrow a pair of shoes and they will become yours after a while, if you take enough steps in them. That’s just the nature of things. Borrowing a well-worn pair of shoes is not recommended, however, because of what it might do to your gait and posture as a walker. I find this thought unsettling, because, for sure, I borrowed a language with plenty of wear on it before it came to me.

I’m still living with the effects of that borrowing on my being. Is it any surprise, then, that I became a cobbler of words?

Of course, this borrowing happened in discrete stages. For example, not too long ago as I made a left turn into a shopping center in Ann Arbor, I remarked to my companion: “When I was a child I saw a VW Bug floating in that parking lot once. My mother described the weather event we had just experienced as a ‘cloudburst.’ That’s the first time I remember hearing the word.”

And I found the word strangely evocative. I found the experience that I now termed “a cloudburst” to be shocking, dramatic, exhilarating. It was a summer afternoon. I was probably five or six years old.

Along these same lines, to this day I can picture my older brother explaining to me the difference between ‘implore’ and ‘deplore,’ and I recall how, upon hearing his explanation, I went outside the house and there, on a little informal cut-through between the front porch and the garage door, crossing the flower bed along the margins of which my mother nearly always planted sweet alyssum, I encoded his distinction between these two words, committing them to memory. I couldn’t have been more than about seven at the time.

Unrelated except that I just visited that flowerbed in my memory, I even invented a fanciful distinction between ‘alyssum’ and ‘sweet alyssum’. I thought: “For me, ‘sweet alyssum’ will refer only to the purple-flowered ones.”

Even then, as a young child, I knew I was making that up. I tried presenting this as a valid distinction to a couple other people, but it seemed wrong to me to do so. However, that’s how I wanted it to be. So I resolved, until this moment, to keep the whole thing to myself. But that’s what it was for me. The purple ones smelled different, somehow. Or it seemed they did.

So I wanted their name to be special.

All of this is just a reminder of the general truth that children have their own intensely private experience of language. To them it’s not old, it’s new. That’s probably a big part of the reason why, as Art Linkletter famously observed, “Kids say the darnedest things.” They’re living close to their own emerging newness. And so can we.

Over time, “Let me try to put it into words” became something of an obsession of mine. And even now, well… You can see what’s going on here, right? I assume it’s kind of obvious.

Still, obvious as it is, that doesn’t diminish the mystery, not in the slightest. What are we really saying when we say “Can you put it into words?” What’s the “it” in that sentence, before it is even spoken? Even more, where is the “into”? And how, how, HOW does the “putting into” part of putting things into words happen?

Then, after we’ve “put something into” words, how do we pull “it” back out again? And is it the same then, or different? If different, what changed? It? Us?

These are the questions in which I live a big part of my life, with the delightful irony being that the questions are themselves just another something “put into words.” I’m still feeling for that something. And I’m still feeling for the words.

So if I say to you, “Yesterday is almost always two days ago lately,” do you get that? Because here I am, cobbling words again. Making them better fit how I’m feeling. Making them less borrowed, more mine. Making them new.

I’d like to thank you for trying them on. We’re always borrowing these kinds of things from one another anyhow, so why not? Take these words out for a little walk. Or maybe wear them like a hat. Wrap them about you like a toga or a colorful sari. See how they feel as you move in them. And whatever words you use, and whatever you put into them, see if you can make them new again, just for you.