Language and the weight of knowledge

Yesterday I found myself thinking about weight; the weight of what we specifically bring (and cannot help but bring) to our reading of texts. Our heads are full of language, and what we know and understand that language to mean, all the associations that we have built up over the years pertaining to specific words and phrases. Say the word house for example and you will be able to conjure up an image of a house – but that image will be different for everyone. It may be an icon or a childish rendition of a house, or it may be a specific house – the house you live in, your childhood home, the house of a friend or lover, or a house that you admire. For me it is the house across the street from mine – an image I see everyday from my living room window, so it is firmly etched on my mind, but I live on a terraced street in a city, so that house comes attached to another house - it is hard to think of one without seeing the other. We each bring our own memories and associations (our own baggage) to that one simple word – house.

I found myself wondering what would it be like to not bring this burden (if it is a burden) of knowledge to the reading of a poem or text? Would it make the words seem fresher, newer? Would we glean a deeper or greater meaning from the text? Does our store of language, meaning, images and understanding weigh the writing down and skew the intended meaning? Or does what we bring to the table add something positive to the writing, taking the meaning beyond the page?

Yesterday morning I was reading a poem by Rosemarie Waldrop. The second line of the poem contained the phrase “with pieces of torn underwear.” Even though the full line was “A clothesline with pieces of torn underwear, reflected in a puddle.” My mind zoomed in on the phrase “pieces of torn underwear” and I proceeded to apply to it all the connotations I have built up around such an image: crime novels I have read, TV series and films I have watched and news stories that I have heard over the years. My mind immediately began wondering (picturing even) how the underwear might have been torn and it concluded it could have been rape and possibly also murder. Of course there could be a hundred other reasons for torn underwear. And you might also wonder why I wasn’t also wondering why they were pegged onto the line and not on the floor or in the bin – in fact I did pay attention to this, but not before my mind had done the whole torn underwear dance I just described. So you see I brought the weight of all the things I have heard, read, seen and understood to this one simple (if loaded) phrase. My mind would not allow me to simply read it for what it was – pieces of torn underwear on a line, reflected in a puddle. Is this meandering of the mind a burden or a blessing? I couldn’t quite decide. But as my artist friend pointed out, it is knowledge and experience that enables us to understand written language (or language at all) in the first place – and without it the text would be meaningless to us.  So maybe it is a blessing after all – and this post is meaningless…

Some thoughts on Re-reading Books

'When I re-read The Rainbow I had thought I might discover, like a flower pressed between the pages, the dried remains of my younger self preserved within it.' (Geoff Dyer - Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence) 

This quote encapsulates for me why sometimes re-reading an old favourite can sometimes be a little disappointing. Haven't we all had that experience of going back to book or film that we loved when we were younger or that really resonated with us, only to discover that it just isn't as good as we remember or worse still that it leaves us cold? How much we enjoy a book isn't just about the quality of writing, or the way the story engages us (the readers) - it is about the experiences that we as readers bring to the reading of each particular story - our state of mind, our life circumstances, our past experiences etc. 

It makes sense that we respond to texts differently at different points in our lives - after all our life experience at sixteen-years-old is going to be vastly different to our life experience in our forties - and what seemed new and exciting to us as teenagers may seem like stale and hackneyed ideas to us as adults, or things that seemed plausible may seem less so. But I think also that Dyer has nit the nail on the head - when I re-read a book there is almost certainly an element of wanting to re-capture the original feelings it engendered in me - whether these are recognition, fear, excitement or whatever, and part of that desire might also be yearning to re-experience what it is like to be a younger version of myself. Of course this is next to impossible - unless you have amnesia you can't read a book you have already read and expect to have the same reactions to it as the first time you read it. We can only really experience something for the first time once, so on subsequent readings we will not only be bringing the life experiences that we have accumulated since the reading, but also our memories and thoughts (both conscious and subconscious) of the book to the reading experience. 

Of course that doesn't mean that we shouldn't re-read books or that we won't enjoy re-visiting novels that we have already read. Often a re-reading of a book can be enjoyable in a different way to the first reading, it can remind us how we felt when we first read it, and, perhaps more importantly, it can lead us to a deeper understanding of the text.

Hearing Poetry

"We listen to a text with numerous ears...Every text has its foreign accents, its strangenesses, and these act like signals, attracting our attention. These strangenesses are our cue. We aren't looking for the author as much as what made the author take the particular path they took, write what they wrote. We're looking for the secret of creation, the same process of creation each one of us is constantly involved with in the process of our lives. Texts are the witnesses of our proceeding. The text opens up a path which is already ours and yet not altogether ours."

Cixous, Hélène, “Conversations” in Seller, Susan, (ed.) Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous, (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988)

Into the Dust

The placing of the lettering on the dusty ground was especially effective - it made it look like it had been there for some time. I still prefer photographs where you see a fragment of the text rather than the entire thing. I like the mystery of it and am beginning to feel that the content of the text is actually not that important. The text exixts as a gesture of communication and it can add to our understanding of what we are seeing. In trying to work out what the text is saying the viewer is interacting with the work and they may add their own words as they try and work out what the text might be have been missed off of the edges of the photograph.

Recycling Day

This is part of a poem that I collaged onto boxes that had been put out for recycling. To use the whole poem seemed too much, it would have made the image too busy. I tried the image in black and white but actually I think that I like the slightly cropped colour version better. I was trying to write in response to the situation so that the poem related more to the context in which it was placed whilst (hopefully) standing up as a poem in its own right. I still feeel that the text is somehow seperate to the background and I am wondering if I should try writing on objects and leaving them ouside for a few days to weather them.

Visual Poetry

I got a great gadget this week that makes embossed letters on plastic tape and I started playing around with the idea of using it to make visual poetry. This is my first attempt so it isn't all that great but I can already see that there is great potential in the idea. This one isn't really a proper poem - just something that I came up with on the spur of the moment that was in keeping with the wall on which it is displayed. The problem for me with this piece is that the text seems too removed from the wall that it is displayed on I really wanted it to look more as if it belonged there. However that is very hard to acheive and maybe I am approaching it the wrong way. Maybe I should make the alienation of the text from the medium it is placed in more an integral part of the piece.