When words become bare, assumed or untested, they fail as tools of communication and humanity. Poet David Whyte returns their integrity.
What does the word anger mean? What does it mean to you? What does it mean to me? What happens if we use the same word but intend utterly different things? How vast is the resulting chasm of understanding between us? What if we were to align on a singular meaning, or at least discuss our divergent meanings in language that held - even nurtured - both our intentions?
The supple elasticity of language is a core endeavor of human invention. We push the boundaries of speech to say the unsayable, to cross that which divides us. To communicate and commune. Changing language is a bold act of humanity in which many of us take part without knowing it.
For those exhausted and worn with this endeavor, I see and hear you well and would like to off up Consolations, a collection of prose from David Whyte (born November 2, 1955). Whyte is a contemporary British poet of Yorkshire and Irish heritage whose hopeful explorations of language kiss our heads like the bright sun and prick the conscious like a south-traveling wind.
Heartbreak is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight. Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life.
This collection pulls words back from their overly laden meanings and resuscitates them to simplicity so we might nod along in understanding.
Ground is what lies beneath our feet. It is the place where we already stand; a state of recognition, the place or the circumstances to which we belong whether we wish to or not. It is what holds and supports us, but also what we do not want to be true; it challenges us, physically or psychologically, irrespective of our hoped-for needs. It is the living, underlying foundation that tells us what we are, where we are, what season we are in, and what, no matter what we wish in the abstract, is about to happen in our body, in the world, or in the conversation between the two.
These feelings and terms are familiar enough—heartbreak, genius, confession, touch—yet Whyte renders them anew. He approaches them literally and conceptually.
Japanese maple at RHS Wisley. Trained as a marine biologist and naturalist, Whyte instills physical, natural, and even primal attributes to things. Like American poet Wendell Berry, who has spent a life farming, Whyte's writing is rooted outside the contemporary and cosmetic context and is, thus, easy to enter.
His definition of confession as a "stripping away of protection" echoes Catholic activist Dorothy Day's belief about both confession and writing, that they were both in the act of "giving oneself away," complex yet fundamental for the soul.
Confession is a stripping away of protection, the telling of a truth that might once have seemed like a humiliation, become suddenly a gateway, an entrance to solid ground. To confess is to declare oneself ready for a more courageous road, one in which a previously defended identity might not only be shorn away but be seen to be irrelevant, a distraction, a working delusion that kept us busy over the years and held us unaccountable to the real question.
Like Japanese author Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, who believed beauty emanated from our daily and worldly needs and necessities, Whyte writes in Consolations that poetry originates in "the conversational nature of reality."
Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and mesh together for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating, human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing.
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, who, nearing death, wrote life essays - this same privilege that Whyte refers to, entitled "Gratitude." His papers radiated energy. "I am now face to face with dying, but I am not finished with living," Sacks confessed.
Expended tulip. The reclamation of words is quite common now. (Read more from Mark Strand, Denise Levertov, and Dani Shapiro). Words are collected, owned, held close to the chest, ready to battle, and express our innermost sensitivities.
Language is a contemporary sword; it can easily be what sets us apart. And yet, I prefer to see language as what American novelist Marilynne Robinson called a "grand collaboration."
"We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself. We can and do make small and tedious lives as we sail through the cosmos on our uncannily lovely planet, and this is surely remarkable. But we do so much else besides. For example, we make language. A language is a grand collaboration."
Again, we return to this profoundly human need to improve and refine communication. Whyte's reclamation, like Robinson's, is pure healing and generosity. Which returns us to anger; what is anger to you, to me?
What about this definition:
Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family, and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect, and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.
What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body's incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of understanding. What we name as anger is only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life.
What a beautiful consideration: anger as a vulnerability, a measure of incapability to maintain unspeakable pain and care.
Sussex field, fallow. T. S. Eliot once wrote that fellow poet Marianne Moore "expanded language" with her imaginative verse. To affect language thus, not just use it to convey meaning but to extend it to that which is unsayable, is the remarkable gift of Consolations.
