The Pause | Into word and sound and original belonging...

Dear friends,

I am a lover of words.

Now we arrive at a place I mentioned weeks ago: this book’s connections between intelligence and consciousness and our belonging to the natural world at a cellular level — and the way words we use all the time have carried all of this long after civilization forgot. Words have kept it fresh in us waiting to be rejoined, re-membered.

A first reawakening to this was planted in me a few years ago by the naturalist and journalist, Michael McCarthy, who wrote a wonderful book called The Moth Snowstorm. The natural world, he points out, is where most of our metaphors and similes come from. It is where we learned sound and eventually speech. It remains, he said — and these words hold a sense of homecoming — "a resting place for our psyches."

In this chapter called “Talking to Strangers,” James Bridle kindles a joy in onomatopoeia, words that sound like what they are evoking, and reminds me they are everywhere and as old as time. And Bridle collects personal fascinations and stories of present places where we can still directly see how the non-human world has inspired and taught us literally to talk, literally to sing: the linguistic communing of herders with herds; a brown bird with a pink beak called the honeyguide that proactively collaborates with the Yao people of Niassa and may have contributed to the evolution of our brains; the sounds of the throat singers of Tuva and of the Australian aboriginal songlines; and the joik of the Sami Peoples of northern Europe: “the world singing through the singer.”

Like the songlines of Australian aboriginal peoples, which document a landscape in part to map and traverse it safely, the Tuvan songs are an enacted cultural record of a lived relationship with the Earth.In northern Europe, the joik of the Sámi peoples, the continent's oldest continuous musical tradition, is also considered to be a gift from the land. In return, joikers sing the land and its inhabitants: each song represents a particular person or place – or rather, it enacts it. To speakphilologically, the verb ‘to joik’ in the Sámi languages is transitive: one does not joik about a place, one joiks it directly. The result is that songs about the land, animals and plants contain the sounds of those things directly too: the call of the raven, the cry of the wolf, the wind in the forest, or the running of the sea. When sung in this way, the joik is an expression of the land itself: the world singing through the singer.This notion is far closer to our contemporary understanding of the world as a densely interconnected organic network, a web of intertwined beings and phenomena, than any nineteenth-century philologist's parsimonious account of word roots and phonemes. (Bridle 149)

p. 149

I am a lover of languages. I speak two and dabble in more.

Now I stop to ponder how I’ve applied a modern eye to the differences in languages that fascinate me — marveled at their distinctive grammars and musics. Now the universe of language human and non-human comes into relief for me as ecosystem — tributaries, webs of kinship and flowing routes and meanings that evolved and continue to grow and evolve — a linguistic tree of life.

I find an unexpected grief in the move we made in my mother tongue and others I know with some intimacy, away from the pictographic — languages built around characters which more directly refer to the thing being spoken of. Thus, language became part of our separation — our estrangement — from the natural world: “The phonetic alphabet … substituted images of the world with images of language itself ...” (p. 151).

But here is a passage from Ways of Being that has kept me walking through recent days — and my vocabulary, and my sentences — alert to what has been lost, yet remains to be seen and re-integrated into my love of language as stuff of possibility, relationship, mystery, life:

Nonetheless, there remain traces of the natural world in human language; indeed, the natural world continues to haunt, infiltrate, evoke and shape the computational. And this is true of the characters that make up the phonetic alphabet, which I am typing now, into a machine.Aleph, the first letter of the Semitic alphabet, was written (A symbol is depicted here in the text. The symbol shown is shaped like a less-than sign with a vertical line down the center.). Aleph is also the ancient Hebrew word for *ox', which the letter depicts as a head with horns. It is also related to the Egyptian hieroglyph of that animal. Rotated, it became this letter: A. Likewise, our letter M is derived from Semitic letter mem. The Hebrew word for water', mem was drawn as alittle wave: (A symbol is depicted here in the text. The symbol shown is shaped like the waveform of the letter 'w' with a tail shaped like that of the letter 'y'.). The letter O, made into a vowel by the Greek scribes,comes from the letter ayin, meaning ‘eye', while Q derives from the letter qoth, which also means 'monkey'. The tail of this 'q' is a vestigial monkey tail. Traces of animals, of waves, of bodily parts, exist within text, within the kernel of this machine. My computer speaks bow-wow. (Bridle 152)

p. 152

I am a lover of the form of words that is poetry.

I’m curious about where poetry comes from in us, what it works in us, why it rises up in societies when official language fails and can feel at times as necessary as food and air. Now I wonder: is one of poetry’s gifts to us that it is a bridge back to the original impulses of language in becoming, belonging, and homecoming in the natural world? It walks us at least halfway back, over and over again, with its insistence on words that evoke and shine and make music and pictures and metaphors that strike bone deep.

The estrangement of language from its origins in human interaction with the natural world reaches its apotheosis in computer technology, Bridle notes. Yet “the Cloud,” in which so much of modern life is now mysteriously stored, is but a new representation of our old impulse to make metaphor and meaning from natural elements: “... the Cloud evokes the weather. In naming it, we seek not mastery, but accommodation with forces greater than ourselves.”

A curiosity: are emojis and digital shorthand reinventions of onomatopoeia and pictographic language? As in the ever-present hahaha?

Words make worlds, the ancient rabbis said. From the Genesis story to the aboriginal songlines, naming is understood to be a powerful, creative act that literally helps bring things into being. And Bridle has much to say in this chapter and the next about the massive effects of English as the first given universal language of the Internet, and the way the language and meaning of code has been interpreted and implemented in a very specific, narrowing way. The western culture of mastery found its way into the creation of the Internet. But it didn’t have to be this way and it doesn’t have to stay that way. More on that next Saturday.

Before then, please join us this coming Tuesday at a special launch event for the US publication of Poetry Unbound THE BOOK. That's Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 5pm CT (find more timezones in the invitation). Our wonderful Pádraig Ó Tuama will be joined by special guest Lorna Goodison, former Poet Laureate of Jamaica. And you'll meet some of the gifted humans behind Poetry Unbound — including Gautam Srikishan, who both produces and composes the exquisite music.

I leave you for now with these poetic final paragraphs:

When we speak, we take in the atmosphere and expel it again; we ingest the world and make it resonate. By speaking, we partake in the world, and the world partakes of us. This is true, also, of other forms of speech: the cry of birds, the scratching of crickets, the wind in the trees, the rumble of stone.Speech exists between bodies and beings; it has no place, no use, in a universe of inanimate objects. Speaking presumes hearing: by speaking, we acknowledge and animate the personhood of the listener. We make each other into persons; we transform things into beings. Speaking to others, then, is how we begin to make a more-than-human world. (Bridle 173)

p. 173

Love,

Krista

DECEMBER

TUESDAY

Poetry Unbound Book Launch Party
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
3 pm PT / 5 pm CT / 6 pm ET

Help us welcome the arrival of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World onto American bookshelves. Come celebrate everything that’s made Poetry Unbound what it’s been over the years — including you.

RSVP

“An Ecology of Intelligence”
A collection emerging from a practice of contemplative/conversational reading alongside James Bridle's Ways of Being – with episodes added throughout this autumn.

Revist this week:

Michael McCarthy

Listen on: Spotify

Poetry Unbound
Monday
“Norse Saga”
Dan Vera

When you move to a new place, everything seems different. Hell’s not hot anymore; it’s freezing. A poem of strangeness and wonder.

Friday
“small talk or in my hand galaxies”
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

On the day you wake to a broken window in your car, what do you do? And what happens when the woman repairing that window offers a glimpse of something new?

Listen on:
Apple | Google | Spotify | Our Website

Thanks to all who wrote in this week or tagged us on socials. Krista and our team have so enjoyed reading your reflections, and will surface a few each Saturday, right here. Notes lightly edited for length and clarity.

From David:
As I read and reread Ways of Being, I considered the matter of “survival of the fittest” at some length. In my way of seeing this lens through which we have viewed the world, there is a degree of fear of death in that view. Yes, we all, wild or “civilized,” must consume other things to survive, and it seems to me that that consumption is viewed with fear. Will I be consumed?

But a valuable way of seeing this process in life is one of recycling and repurposing. Given that this world is a closed container (save for a small amount of extraterrestrial matter that rains down upon us all), all that is here has always been here in one form or another. It is all matter that is transforming from one state or construct to another. Rather than seeing things from a point of view that resists this process and sees it as one of destruction, we might be wiser to see our place in it all as one of shifting, one of serving the needs of others, one of cooperation within systems, one of simple transformation — and thereby seeing ourselves in relationship rather than competition with all things.

For myself, there is a sense of great purpose in my existence when I employ this view. I am served by others and I serve others. We are all nested in a system that has worked for millions of years. We just need to rethink our place in it all.

From Rob:
When I read this quotation from Bridle's book, “The truth is always stranger, more lively and more expansive than anything we can compute,” I immediately heard John O'Donohue's voice in my mind: “... the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach.” I also recalled Danial Kahneman saying something similar, though this one I had to look up: “... the deep truth is that the world is much more uncertain than we feel it is.”

From Peggy:
Everyone at On Being must be realizing that the 20-year archive is a conglomeration of conversations that, seen from this vantage point, comprise a veritable mycorrhizal network, each conversation linked to all the others. How delightful this discovery is!

The subject of time is of endless fascination to me, as well. Bridle’s thoughts reminded me of a chapter in Ross Gay’s new book, Inciting Joy, in which he considers our contemporary relationship to the bludgeon that is time as a vestige of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism.

From Marcella:
What I personally love about the idea of endosymbiosis is how it reframes our relationship to the “environment,” which no longer is something external that we want to care for, but it is us, we are it. After I understood this, environmental activism became something completely different for me; it has been revolutionary.

Illustrations by Lucy Sherston

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