1.
I’m in love with my niece. She turned one not so long ago. She is now, slowly but surely, entering language. I loved her the moment she was born, but love takes a new shape, something more distinctive, once it can hang upon the hooks of language.
With each of the young people in my lives (I also have two nephews), this has always been a remarkable experience, even though I have experienced it at some distance. Language appeared in both boys quite differently: how it sounded, in which situations it first became articulate, how it was connected to so many other fundamentals of life—sleep, song, food, the growth of teeth, the ability to walk, vision, dreaming, the toys, faces, books that first drew their interest, the ability to make marks (in paint and other media), control of body, control of others. (I commit a small sacrilege here, I fear, even sharing these.) Charlie, 7, is an artist, and recently he started drawing parodies of Star Wars characters out of the names he made for them: Boo Boo Fett, who is always injuring himself, Darth Vender, a walking vending machine that sells bad food, Luke Hightalker who sounds like he just inhaled helium, and so on, a whole cavalcade of characters. Mack, 10, has an uncannily large vocabulary and has had one since he was 18 months, maybe. We tried to keep a family Google Doc with some of his “witticisms,” my favorite of which reads like a Zen koan from The Blue Cliff Record:
(At dinner, after Granne had given him a 4:00 cookie treat): “the cookie spoiled your appetite.” Mack: “No! That cookie was my appetite.”
These and so many other shared, petite observations of their various “ways with words” are a precious currency in my family, and perhaps especially for me. Living at a greater distance from my family than the other members, who see each other almost daily, these glimpses into the subtleties of these growing souls through their language form, along with photographs, some of my most intimate knowledge of their individuality, their way of being in the world.
So much character is shown and shaped here, but not in any fatalistic sense that would make our lives decidable by the random accidents of early childhood. Some people mistakenly attribute such a view to psychoanalysis, but anyone who attends to the manifold complexity of an individual’s mode of inhabiting language, as psychoanalysis does obsessively in the clinic, listening intently to that style so intimately imbued throughout our speech that we can call it character, could only hear in that more binding necessity than creative possibility through a failure to listen. Each child’s entry into language is a beautiful and weird witness to the process of individualization, but that process can never be made into a scientific predictor of personality or any other attempt to capture in a concept a whole person.
And already Marian has her ways too, ways we can see her.
Tonight, on a very brief call with my niece, where she bounced a baw, and was delighted at her mother’s sound effect (boingee! boingee!), it was clear that she tottered (a little literally) on the precipice between word and sound. But there was no fear—she was an acrobat. She could give and respond to both word and sound, sound and word (boing! bounce! baw! bounce!) without worry about the distinction that we must, or at least we do, make. This was even more clear when I made a mistake, hearing a sound she made as down as my sister carried her down the stairs to dinner. Because she then asked her to say down, and in a singularly unique way, she pronounced the word, in her deepest baby register, very differently to what I had heard. “DOWH.” We are going down.
It is never more obvious how inadequate letters are than when trying to transcribe the early words of a child. Reader, you had to be there.
2.
Today in a class on argumentation, I stumbled through a lecture on rhetoric. It is the topic I am most qualified to speak on, and it always ends up being an area where I feel most inarticulate. It’s much easier to speak about things that still appear to me as knowledge, things I’ve learned. But those things which have passed into the background of habit, our second nature, are not easy to put back into words. They are a poor medium here: they mean both too much and too little.
My object was to try to distinguish rhetoric’s approach to argumentation from some others—dialectic, advocacy, logic, propaganda, and so on. But all of these to me appear in their rhetorical dimension. I cannot not see it that way. The best I can do is point to something like an axiom: All truth is based in language, all language is based in meaning, the first meanings are metaphors. And I try to find illustrations of this in all sorts of places — I think of Nietzsche, Vico, and Burke. Nietzsche’s essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense” where he describes how all language is a “mobile army of metaphors,” Burke’s essay on the four master tropes. And Vico’s weird myth of the beginning of language in thunder. The first people, who he calls Cyclops, don’t come into language through words, and not even through speech, but through hearing. The storm, with its thunder and lightning, seems like an angry voice. If there is anger in a voice, there must be a person with that voice. And it is angry at me! Oh, what have I done! God speaks: his meaning is obscure. I must find a way to appease God. Language and religion are born at once, together.
The uncertainty of the Cyclops about the reason for the sky’s anger is the basic condition of all emergence into language. The basis of language is ambiguity, not clarity. Clarity is an achievement, and for that reason it is always artificial. Dictionaries are modern documents, digests of lexicographical research into the usage of terms. But we treat them as if they were lawgivers, telling us what words ought to mean rather than their best guess at what words do mean.
The better example is my niece’s DOWH, which is like Quine’s “gavagai” in that its reference can’t be specified by placing it in a system of formal oppositions. There is no lexicon yet that will delimit the edges of a word by the meaning of another word. Our early words take on a whole range of meanings at once. What does DOWH mean? Well, it means more than our English “down.” It might be the feeling of being carried, the approach of mealtime (ooh!), a way of getting over the residual fear of moving down the steps, the staccato rhythm of that walk, it might be onomatopoetic, a kind of longer vowel that feels like the time of going down the stairs. It might have all sorts of other associations that her mother and father, her grandmother and grandfather could tell us, having heard her say it more often. And even more associations, which are hers alone, which she doesn’t intend to communicate but which aren’t secrets either. The word glows with its sound that points to the shared world that is beginning to come into view. But now is that beautiful moment, where it is not fully shared yet. Marian’s word is still her own, and unlike Vico’s Cyclops, she is not alone in trying to find its meaning.
3.
Until recently, I had no special love of jigsaw puzzles. They seemed tedious to me: difficult and unrewarding. I already knew what the image was! I now think this is a naive attitude, and have come to appreciate this slow emergence of an image in pieces so much more. This is in no small part because my girlfriend (and her sister) are talented jigsaw solvers, but also connoisseurs. Some puzzles, it turns out, are better than others.
The first puzzle I did that I truly enjoyed was not one of the fancy ones, but it was still better than what I was used to. Its image was a painting I love, Bruegel’s The Great Tower of Babel. Bruegel’s work fares well in jigsaws for obvious reasons. His miniature details give interest (and direction!) while you compose an anticipated whole. But this feeling of slowly putting it together also rhymed, in a singsong way, with the construction of the Tower itself. Here we see a parade of labor, mechanical, exacting, technical, and all in process, the work perhaps a bit more than half done. But it has also taken so long that the elements have begun to erode the facade, and the structure is so tall and wide that workers on different sections may experience different weather. What holds it all together, its plan, is in the common language of the builders.
The story, as you know, of course turns, when God punishes these people for their hubris, giving them different tongues, making cooperation impossible. But this image, before the disaster, is a beautifully detailed reminder to our technological age that what holds together our increasingly technical world is that discovery of childhood, language, and all the slippery, indecent, ridiculous, and dangerous ambiguities that necessarily accompany it.
4.
On the first day of all my public speaking classes, I give them three prompts to speak on, from which they can choose:
What is your earliest memory?
Tell us about a time you were speechless.
The third I always leave open to chance, my own free association. I like to begin with these for many reasons, but not least because a months-long practice of speech should begin with some memory of infancy, whether literal or figurative. Our inability to speak is something we bring into speech in these stories, and so show the paradox of where we speak from.
People often say they can’t remember their earliest memory, but the first one they remember is…
5.
Even before language (and perhaps even after it) we have a voice. Here something of us emerges that is in language but not of it, both aids and resists its empire. Our voices identify us, for better or worse.
But the delight my niece took in her voice, in her mother’s—do we lose all this as adults? Is your way of speaking, how words turn upon your tongue, how you fall silent, where your accent comes out, the words you turn to uncommonly often, your preferences for certain images (which all poets have), your hesitation on certain letters, certain words whose pronunciation you remain unsure of (after all these years…), all those odd phrases you picked up from all those odd people in your life, your affectations, the way your thinking changes when you switch between languages, dialects, tones, the unmistakable breaking of your voice when you try to speak of those difficult things, those tender things, your rhythm, your lack of rhythm, how your speed picks up when you are back home, or perhaps, for you, when you finally leave, the way certain names have a stain upon them, of longing, loss, or loathing, how you cannot hide your feelings fully there, or anywhere, since your voice has long travelled in the path of your feeling, it has learned those habits, it betrays you, and it is you, more than your limbs, for when that is lost we do not lose the person, but when communication is lost, life is already a memory even as it lives on—are these all not meaningful, in fact, too meaningful, to the point that we worry what our voice and our manner of speaking may “say” beyond what we wish to say? And do you not still have that delight in some little relic of baby talk, of babble, in sound itself, the pleasure to know you can make others hear it as meaning, as word, but also as yours (your meaning, your word), because the word touches their hearing in your voice? Are you afraid to speak before crowds? Before anyone? Did the shame (for what reason you do not know, no one knows) keep you not only from speaking but from saying, saying something that you ought to have said, needed to say, wished you had, and now you live in the echo of the unsaid, an echo that nevertheless returns in your voice? It is difficult, sometimes, to hear your own voice, to listen to it, not as we normally hear it (conducted through bone, through our faces, only partially through the air, and in the image of ourselves, integrated into our bodies and the stories we tell about our bodies in time, stories we call lives or selves) but in a recording, in the medium where we hear what others hear. Are you still able to hear, as an infant does, your voice as a sound, as a noise, as music, as part of what makes up your hearing, and not only as you, not narrowed to the image in a mirror, not a reflection of thought, but a surprising thing, a pet never fully tamed, that wild, if mild, creature that you are responsible for, picking up its shit, feeding it, and which brings you company in your solitude? But does it—do you let it? Are you embarrassed even at the thought of reading aloud—reading this aloud? Have you, once come into language, forgotten that you are both guest and host, and that you must entertain yourself, for perhaps you are entertaining angels?
The (ooh!) really got me.