Languish in the Anguish of Language

I remember the moment when I realized that language wasn’t a real thing. Well, clearly it was a thing, but it wasn’t an inherent feature of existence like mountains, wind or pumas. It was manmade, and it was flawed. This realization, which occurred to me while doodling in my notebook during my Rebels in Literature elective my senior year of high school, threw me for quite a loop.

I grew up with a true reverence for language. In fact, it had been my best friend as a child, and had gotten me through some pretty tough times. I had been taught Hebrew for six years at my elementary school, but none of it stuck. I had been taking Spanish for just as long, but that had no bearing on my actual life because it involved tests and grades and such. It didn’t connect to my sincere self or my actual understanding of reality. The English language, with all of its little tricks and traps, was my most ardent ally. My most trusted and treasured tool. And suddenly, as Mr. Mullin yammered on about Hubert Selby Jr.’s ability to blend stream of consciousness with spontaneous prose, I realized that it was a mere mirage. All of it. I raised my hand, he called on me, I blushed and offered an idea.

My parents were both teachers, so books were a pretty big part of my life growing up. They were also both hippies, so the titles of these books were often followed by names that sounded like the Indian restaurants we would sometimes go to in the East Village. As a child, I was enamored with stories more than pictures, characters more than stories, and sounds more than characters. I didn’t see a difference between Dr. Seuss and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; all I knew was that I loved the way they played with the sounds and implications of words. This infatuation soon blended seamlessly into an unparalleled fascination with hip-hop lyricism, as rap music was the first genre of music I was exposed to as a child, and growing up in Manhattan in the 1980s set me up for a lifelong matrimony with this art form.

Words. Audile texture. Meaning. I was hungry to learn everything I could about proper applications of language, so that I could begin my apprenticeship of how to do it wrong as soon as possible. “A student’s chances for success in school and in later life may be related to mastery of standard English.”1To me, the collection of shapes known as the alphabet was an angelic assemblage of laws, my 26 Commandments, an unwavering faction of facts that was responsible for my ability to effectively communicate with the world. Some kids were obsessed with trucks or kittens. I loved letters.

As a city kid, I wasn’t exposed to many animals, and my only interest in them usually had to do with language. I really didn’t understand how animals were capable of communicating with their limited amount of sounds. One of the first things most kids seemed to learn about animals was the noises they made. “The cow says, ‘Moo’,” I was told. The first time I was close enough to hear the various tones and pitches that emerged from a cow’s mouth, I decided that no, they certainly did not say moo. Moo? Not even close. Even worse was that adults claimed that a pig said, “Oink.” Oink? Nobody said oink. Pigs grunted a guttural declaration of their being. There was no oink. In fact, there was a lot that didn’t make sense about language, and I needed answers. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Ba-Ba-Blacksheep and The Alphabet were all the same song, just with different words. People cooked bacon, and baked cookies, but it seemed like they should have been cooking cookies, and baking bacon. Flammable and inflammable were somehow synonyms. Something was amiss.

I aimed to gain control of this environment of mine called the world, for achieving a sense of safety was my ultimate goal as a youngster growing up in Manhattan. I quickly learned that there was a coveted realm called “getting what I want”, and I could gain access to this carefully guarded wonderland by simply placing certain words in a particular order, and expressing them with an ample amount of conviction to the right person at the right time. Lying. I viewed myself as a Robin Hood of sorts, language being my bow, untruths my arrows, and reality being that which I stole from the rich and gave to myself, he who was sorely lacking on the receiving end of truth.

I lied because I felt I was being lied to. I recognized that adults constantly misled children regarding topics that spanned levels of significance, ranging from the existence of Santa Clause to fibs of pacification such as “You did a great job!” or “We’re almost there”, or the always effective “I don’t know.”

If everyone was lying, and I was the only one who wasn’t, I was providing myself with a pretty serious handicap. As my first attempt at deception, I often pretended to be asleep, simply in order to experience what it was like to have my parents think one thing about me when it was in fact the exact opposite that was the case. Lying in bed while lying in bed. I didn’t even need language for that trick, and it seemed to work on my mom every time.

My only grandparent who lived to meet me was my mom’s mom, and she died when I was three. Prior to her passing, she suffered a debilitating stroke, restricting her active vocabulary to literally one word: ‘Wonderful’. I don’t remember her, but I do remember being warned that the only word she could say was ‘wonderful’, so I shouldn’t be alarmed if our conversations felt a bit odd. I can only imagine what it was like for me to experience my only understanding of a grandparent in the form of a mythical legend monster whose only viable expression to the world was the word ‘wonderful’.

My parents were both Jewish, and were both second generation Americans, as their grandparents had come from Poland and Russia. Puns were everywhere in my life, as they were deeply entrenched in Jewish culture, mostly as attempts at humor. Similarly, rap music seemed to be reliant upon puns, a connection I picked up on quickly. The appreciation of language that rappers obviously employed was a dynamic bridge for me to build towards the medium in general. As much as I grew to venerate figures such as Plato and Emerson, the power of the spoken word revealed itself to me mostly through the lyrical dexterity of 1980s hip-hop. “All human linguistic systems—spoken, signed, and written—are fundamentally regular. The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African American vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang,’ ‘mutant,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘defective,’ ‘ungrammatical,’ or ‘broken English’ are incorrect and demeaning.” 2

I began to craft my own rap songs when I was eight, but mostly I wrote to manage my emotions. I experienced a fair amount of trauma and tragedy as a child, and it was with words that I was able to not only sort out my actual feelings, but also present false emotions (like simply being okay) as a survival tool. I wrote relentlessly and fearlessly, allowing my hand to wear itself out, but forbidding my eyes to review the result of my emotional expulsion. I hunted my mind’s fortunes through writing, and the incessant self-examination strengthened my disposition. Every time I introduced the tip of a pen to the face of a piece of paper, dragging the instrument around and leaving a trail of absurdly odd shapes that represented noises that my mind made, I felt somewhat at ease.

I remember, as a teenager, having a hard time understanding how any form of art other than writing could be viewed as a means of expression. I figured that language was the tool with which humans were meant to express themselves, and weird modes like dance and sculpture clearly were devoid of such an engine. If I drew a picture of a couch, it was a couch. How was that expressive? I might as well just write the word ‘couch’ on some canvas and frame it. It took me a while to realize that all art was actually the same, and that expression wasn’t something that we did in one particular manner, but was simply something that happened at all times, whether we intended to be effusive or not. All forms of life could be interpreted as communicative; everything could be perceived as an instance of articulation.

Mr. Mullin saw my raised hand, called on me, and I said, “Language isn’t a thing. Words and phrases are simply methods for representing ideas, like musical notes, architectural designs or photographs. A written word is the same as a painted image, and the spoken phrase is the same as a crooned tune. Ideas are amorphous and boundless, and we use language in the same ways that we use all symbolic forms of art, simply as the most accessible denotation we can find to share these ideas with one another. Every word is nothing more than a code, and while sharing ideas, using language as our vehicle, our hope is that the recipient of our utterances has the same understanding of what the codes mean as we do. Perception is universally personal, and we all regard every feature of sensory awareness in our own way.”

He smiled and said, “Yes, but what about Selby’s intentional neglect of punctuation?” I too smiled, and replied, “Ah, um, ok I’ll do the reading next time, sorry.”

References

1. Christian, D. (1997), Vernacular dialects in U.S. schools.

2. (1997)LSA resolution on the Oakland “Ebonics” issue from www.linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics/lsa-ebonics.html