Idioms

Jan 26, 2010 17:55



Nothing can be truly communicated in words, and yet everything must be. Words are loaded with history, that nightmare from which we are trying to awake, prior memories, thoughts and ideas that taint what anyone is trying to say before they even finish saying it for you. And yet somehow your words move me, seem to do something to me physically. I can feel them in my stomach. But perhaps our being around language for so long has deadened it for us. Think of idioms. Trite phrases used to communicate a particular idea, already prefabricated: "My emotions are like a rollercoaster" "You can't have your cake and eat it, too" "Time flies by" "Dead as a doornail." I can use them to talk to you, but it's risky, you already have heard them before, they enter you as if subconsciously, their permutations in meaning smoothed over with time, like rocks found in a riverbed. They're all ways to pigeonhole the infinite multivariousness of human experience, condense all feelings down to one "rollercoaster" and no more, etc. We do this not just in language, but in every social gesture. Metaphors have been stamped out for us in the way we view the world: "the tree of knowledge" "the road to success" "climbing the social ladder." Over time, a certain similarity is found between two concepts and though at first this pairing is novel, over time it becomes stale, yet invincible in its own way, already predetermining our thought structures. All languages are hand-me-down languages, giving us a code that was made long before we were born to use to translate the seemingly ineffable experience of life, the numinous feelings that flee toward the edge of words. Perhaps that's the ultimate paradox of language: every word has already been said, its definition already defined, all its concept webs already mapped out, and yet it is given to us as the only way to define our "selves": the very thing that we use to demonstrate the very uniqueness of our identity, its very suchness, is something that's not ours at all...we inhabit or perhaps are trapped in a language that was manufactured long ago out of efficiency, ease of understanding, and then we are born and it's all forced upon us - this will be how you express yourself and there's no other way. But there is another way.

Maybe all good art strives to destroy the metaphors that have been already created for us. Kafka says that a great book should shatter the icy sea inside of us like an axe. This iced-over sea is the dead metaphors that litter our existence, making each new moment seem like something that's come before even though it's never existed in this universe before and never will again. The purpose of poetry especially is to unhinge these metaphors at their root, come up with new and unexpected combinations of words to communicate universal human experience. To say something that's never been heard before, crisp, pure, and immaculate, without any baggage or preconceptions to sully its meaning. To defamiliarize the landscape of the mundane, as if it was never experienced before and we didn't know the right idioms to apply to it and never will and everything is strange and fresh, its cocoon of dead metaphors torn off forever.

"Study of Two Pears" - Wallace Stevens

I
Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

IV
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.

V
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.

VI
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
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