Another one of my “girlfriends” has shaken me out of my literary doldrum! One of them, Emily Dickinson, often does this but this morning a contemporary girlfriend, Julia Kristeva, has intervened. Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born linguist and psychoanalyst, educated in France and now practicing in Paris. Upon awakening, for some reason I plucked from my bedside bookshelf, “Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia” and opened it to a bookmark from earlier readings and found the following observation:
Once solitude has been named, we are less alone if words succeed in infiltrating the spasm of tears—provided they can find an addressee for an overflow of sorrow that had up to then shied away from words.
Or as George Eliot put it in the 19th century, “Speak words which give shape to our anguish…”
Oh, the power of language! I now realize that in my early youth when I discovered language I had found my home, a sacred domain which provided an haven from the morass of poverty and incest of my culture. And in my clinical training and practice I often witnessed the power of words being discovered by my clients…often with my facilitation…allowing them to “name the demons” that were haunting them. Leonardo Da Vinci realized this power of language in 15th century Italy, telling us:
O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. Leonardo da Vinci, from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.
literary lew 