Feed Me to the Forest

“Language is a City”

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone”. Given my vernacular, I can only really express this through English, but it’s to my understanding that this is the most exemplary language of all to convey such a message. At its barest levels, English has no rules. Every single rule of spelling and grammar has a finely-print asterisk next to it, every punctuation has more usefulness (and simultaneously uselessness, depending on the writer) than the mind could ever comprehend. Verbs become nouns, nouns become verbs, and adjectives adjust them all into completely different creatures. Tonality and purpose of writing is manifested through words, rather than through voice, causing all the more confusion and disarray to arise. Moreover, all of these fantastic and diverse words aren’t even of English’s own invention: the vast majority were borrowed from the Latin languages, or derived from Germanic, or plucked from Japanese, Arabic, Afrikaans, Russian, or any of the other thousands of languages that have lived and died alongside it. The English language proposes to its speakers an unconquerable challenge of deciphering which of the twenty definitions a single word could be holding (and the answer is never necessarily just one) while never once having the consistency from one writer to the next, or even one writing to the next. This paragraph has infinite possible reiterations just be inserting or removing various punctuation marks, and could in fact be saying something completely different than what is at the surface. This reads to mean that all of this chaos and disorder is confusing and impossible, right?
But that’s not it at all. There’s the tricky part. There’s a beauty in the language; there’s a sort of incomprehensible majesty in the arrangement of all of this chaos to create a coherent vision. English is a challenging sort of task with which one approaches however they are best equipped. Here arises Mister Emerson’s assertion: each person brings something new to the table when they set themselves down and write. Each person forms new ideas, new concepts as to how the language should be best tackled. Some do away with all but the barest essentials, and thus emerges poet greats such as e.e. cummings; whereas others meander about with punctuation like dear Dickenson; still others prefer to delve deep into allegorical masterpieces of imagery and fantasy, tickling away at the Orwells and Nabokovs inside each person’s minds. And even still others enjoy the pontifications of elevating their exasperating dictatorial handing of the vernacular with which they accustom themselves so profusely and intimately. And that’s all well and good, really. Really. Because, as Emerson says, each person contributes to the construction of the city just one stone—and there in lies the beauty. Stone. Close your eyes and think of that word over in your mind. Turn it over, hand to hand, bound it up and down a bit and get a feel for its weight. Feel the coarseness, the smoothness, perhaps? of what lies in your palms. Feel it morph beneath your fingertips as you get a tighter grasp on what a stone is. What color is it? does it smell? is it heavy for its size? light? does it hurt your hands? or is it slick and smoothed by river waters?

See, each stone—for each moment of time and for each person—is completely different. It’s up to the whim of your mind, and where it is at a moment’s notice. Where your life lead you before and where it’s perceived to lead you in the future. What you want to say and how that intertwines with that continuum of past and future to slide slyly to this rambunctious time called ‘present’, where the possibilities are infinite. Our pasts are determined, our futures are inevitably linked to the past, but our present, our present is a gift, because it is neither, and yet becomes both in good time. What we do today becomes past tomorrow, and that past creates the future precedent, or the future abhorrence to repetition, depending on how you feel about it now. The present. The stone. The stone’s in our minds, folks, and the mind is the greatest and most skilled craftsman on the entire planet. It’s a stonemason, an architect, an interior designer, a mechanic, a poor old schmuck pouring concrete in the midwest heat so that it can become cracked and brittled by the midwest cold so he can do it all again next year. It’s everyone and it’s nobody. It’s you, and you alone, and you throw it to the whim of the infinite future yous to lie ahead. And they all have that same mind. They’ll take anything you say and twist and contort it into something else. They’ll be doing exactly what I’m doing here with Emerson now. Who possibly knew what Emerson meant when he said ‘stone’ instead of ‘brick’? Well, I do. And you do. And he did. And my son will. Will it all be the same thing? Probably not. Does that matter? Not at all. That’s the beauty of the English language.