Wild language

I've discovered the work of Scott Russell Sanders this year, and I've been slowly making my way through his many fine books. Like Wendell Berry, he's rooted in the soil and culture of the American midwest, and his writing dwells on the importance of knowing the language of our local landscape, wherever that may be, town and country alike: its weather and waterways, its flora and fauna, it's more-than-human history, its stories and folklore.

"The challenge for any writer," he says, "is to be faithful at once to your vision and your place, to the truth you have laboriously found and the people this truth might serve. In order to work, I must withdraw into solitude, must close my door against the world, close my mind against the day's news. But unless the writing returns me to the life of family, friends, and neighbors with renewed energy and insight, then it has failed. My writing is an invitation to community, an exploration of what connects to one another and to the earth.

"I love words," Saunders continues, "yet I love the world more. I do not think of language as thread for a private game of cat's cradle, but as a web flung out, attaching me to the creation. Of course the medium is constantly debased. Television, advertising, government, and schools have so cheapened or inflated language that many writers doubt whether it can still be used in the search for understanding. But knowledge has never been handed to us like pebbles or potatoes; we have always had to dig it up for ourselves. All of culture, writing included, is a struggle over how we should imagine our lives. 

"Stories are containers in which we carry some of those imaginings. They are the pots and bowls and baskets we use for preserving and sharing our discoveries. Whether in fiction, film, poetry, drama, or essays, stories tell about human character and action, and the consequences of character and action; by making stories and reading them, we are testing ways of being human. It seems idle to protest, as many critics do, that stories are artificial, since everything we make is shot through with artifice. To protest that experience is scattered, not gathered neatly as in stories, is no more than to say that seeds and berries are scattered, not gathered as in the bowl we have filled for supper.

"Without venturing into metaphysics, where I would soon get lost, I need to declare that I believe literature is more than self-regarding play. It gestures beyond itself to the universal, of which you and I are vanishingly small parts. The moves in writing are not abstract, like those in algebra or chess, for words cannot be unhooked from the world. They come freighted with memory and feeling. Linguists describe our ordinary speech as 'natural' language, to distinguish it from the formal codes of mathematics or computers or logic. The label is appropriate, a reminder that everyday language is wild; no one defines or controls it. You can never force words to mean only and exactly what you wish them to mean, for they escape every trap you lay for them.

"Insofar as my writing is important, it gains that importance from what I am witness to. I have written from the outset with a pressing awareness of the world's barbarities -- the bombing of cities, the oppression of the poor, extinction of species, exhaustion of soil, pollution of water and air, murder, genocide, racism, war. If I stubbornly believe that nature is resilient, love is potent, that humankind may be truly kind, I do so in the face of this cruelty and waste. Without denying evil, literature ought to reduce the amount of suffering, in however small a degree, and not only human suffering but that of all creatures. Although we cannot live without causing harm, we could cause much less harm than we presently do.

"The desire to articulate a shared world is the root impulse of literature as it is of science. Individual scientists, like writers, may be cutthroat competitors, out for their own glory; but science itself, the great cathedral of ideas slowly rising, is a common enterprise. Perhaps the symbol for literature should be a rambling library, to which each of us adds a line, a page, a few books. Whether one is a scientist or a writer, the universe outshines those of us who glimpse a bit of it and report on what we see....

"My steady desire has been to wake up, not to sleepwalk through this brief miraculous life."

Words: The passage above is from "Letter to a Reader," an essay in Writing from the Center by Scott Russell Saunders (University of Indiana Press, 1995), which is probably my favorite of his books (if I had to choose). The poem tucked into the picture captions is by Denise Levertov (1923-1997), from O Taste and See (New Directions, 1964). All rights reserved by Scott Saunders and the Levertov estate. Pictures: An autumn walk on the village Commons on a golden and misty morning. Previous Scott Saunders posts: "Down by the Riverside," "The Blessing of Otters,"  The Common Life," and "Opening to the Other."