You ever lost a job? You ever been “let go”, or “not needed any longer” or “fired” or “down-sized.” It is not fun. I’d like to recommend you read a blog from (http://architectofthejungle.wordpress.com/) which describes the writer’s emotional turmoil to her husband having been “down-sized.” And in her description, she demonstrates her skillful artistry with words which is my real focus here. She uses imagery that evokes experience. Words can readily “denote” in which they merely convey information but only in a prosaic fashion. And prose certainly has its place in language. But when you run across someone who can write with artistry, he/she plies wizardry and can evoke from the depths of your heart an experience which is an essential part of words being, “fitly spoken.”

When she heard the words “down-sized” fall from her husband’s lips, she reported she felt, “as if I’ve been plunged into a dream state, sucked in through the lips of a horrible word. I’ve never thought of words as capable of gobbling me up, but some of them are just that gruesome, just that hungry.” She then writes of the fear of disappearing, “entirely into the belly of this most hideous modern verb.” And she describes how this emotional experience resonated with the whole of her life and she realized that in some fashion she had been living only on the periphery of life, noting “to this day, I hadn’t known (a truth) that only lived in my head. How could I have known it (this truth) yet to make its (truth’s) heroic descent into the whole me? I couldn’t have known….I feel the truth had entered an undiscovered region.” (Note: I have deliberately edited selectively here to make my point about words and truth. Please read her blog to get the context.)

Now part of me wanted to ask, “Now how in the hell can a mere world like ‘down-size” create such a tumult in someone’s heart?” Sure, it is a scary notion as no one likes losing his/her job or having one’s spouse suffer the misfortune. But, to be “sucked in through the lips of the word “down-size”???? And, how in the hell could you even come up with the notion of disappearing “into the belly” of any damn word???? And, how could this anguish lead to a descent into “the whole of me” and “what in the hell is ‘the whole of me’”? The “whole of me” why, shit, I am just me, there is no “whole of me” other than just me. Why not just say, “This really rattled my cage!” Or, “Gosh, this upset me.”

But, she was being a gifted writer and she used words and images which conveyed nuances which just grabbed me, much like she had been grabbed by her husband’s experience. Her words “evoked” an experience with me which is what good writing will do. A simple narrative merely narrates and gives report but a “word fitly spoken,” a dynamic, vital, breathing word will always evoke and penetrate the heart. (I heard someone quote Kafka last night in a movie, “Literature is the axe that cracks the frozen sea inside.)
And we all need to be “sucked through the lips” of a word or words every now and then. If we listen, and if we read and read carefully, we will learn things which that “giant sucking sound” has to offer.
Let me share a little bit about T. S. Eliot and his awareness of this compelling, chaotic beauty of language:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(From Burnt Norton in The Four Quartets)