language
"Use your words" they tell us. As if that's the secret to everything. As if our words are that precise and surgical. As if they're something sharp, direct, and cutting.
"We think because we have words, not the other way around", Madeleine L'Engle says. She says that "The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually."
She may be right. That may be true. But it doesn't feel that way to me.
Most days, language feels like a blunt object. Like blunt force trauma. Like the one tool that sees everything in the world as something that needs to be hammered into place.
Glendy Vanderah says that despite all the linguistic cunning and advancement of the evolving human brain "We're still apes trying to express our thoughts with grunts". With whoops, and shouts, and hollers. All the while "most of what we want to communicate stays locked" away.
When I stand at my work bench and make collages, when I move through colors and textures, and shapes, I'm reminded that language isn't the first language we learned to speak. We used to spread our hands, our hearts, and our stories in paint and pigments across stone surfaces, as a way of communicating, as a way of understanding, as a way of coming to terms with our place in the world. And we did it long before we had words.
Some days it's hard for me to write. Most of them, actually. Some days it's even harder still for me to speak.
It's not because I have nothing to say. But because language is too inadequate of a medium to say everything that I need.
P.S. ICAD - Day 115 - 117
P.P.S. Words in Bloom posted a stunning poem recently. There was a particular line that hit me in such a poignant and palpable way.
It inspired me to make this:
P.P.P.S - I received notice that the pieces below were accepted into an upcoming exhibit put on by Studios At 5663 in Pinellas Park, Florida:
Por suerte, el collage es una forma de expresarse sin necesidad de palabras, ni idiomas.
One of my kids will sometimes grunt rather than speak and I use that phrase…use your words. But words can be imprecise and perhaps a grunt expresses angst in a better way 😂. But, you words get are lovely as is the art. Congrats on the acceptances!