Word Magic

For David Abram and the Others

To see one’s home place told through the lens of a practiced photographer is quite something. With gratitude to Blake Blechner (blakeblechner.com) for sharing his craft with us.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

South Wind tickles Hickory’ thousand leaflets, setting long, strong arms into pleasured motion. Squashes reach furry tendrils in all directions, turning last year’s feed yard into a sea of green. Sheep laze the hot day in the shade of an old field division, where saplings historically found refuge from the mower’s hungry teeth. Left to its own devices, a hickory nut knows how to make a forest. This Farm is criscrossed with old hedgerows—those wind-breaking and shade-laying marvels. In the depths of winter, they bless us by quelling the gale. These days, they cast a cooling spell.

The feed-yard-become-squash patch beside the writing cabin was my response to a drought of epic proportion; one year ago, the fields began turning the type of sickly pale green that you expect to see in drying hay. The wells hovered dangerously close to empty. Purchased hay and a neighbor’s water tanker would end up keeping the cattle alive through summer’s dusty end. By the looks of it, a well-aged layer cake of poo and waste hay makes potent squash food.

“Watch what you say about the weather,” I heard Dakota poet Layli Long Soldier¹ say once, remembering her grandmother’s warning. “Speak poorly of winter cold and you might get bitten.” It can be hard to imagine that we’re being listened to so attentively by the powers that be—the real ones, at least. The translation of such a warning into this Orwellian moment is a bit chilling, no?

It can be hard to imagine that we shape the world each time we choose to speak, or not to speak—that we are dreadfully, and exquisitely consequential. Noticing that possibility again—the unsettling return of agency that awaits us on the tip of our tongues—sits at the center of the story I’ve just written into a book manuscript. Handling food as a gift appears to amplify its trembling aliveness, to part the curtain on the ripple of consequence that trails in its wake. We transform a pound of ground beef into a gift simply by calling it so. Remarkable word magic. “Eight dollars” and “free beef” do completely different things to our capacities of eye and ear, heart and mind. It’s not that one set of words is better or worse than another; they simply give rise to different patterns of behavior.

Given the state of the world, it does seem that we could use a little bit of helpful word magic. That’s what I’ve attempted in the book.

Two and a half weeks ago we’d seen storm after storm; the grand finale dropped an inch and a half in ten minutes. We call those gully washers. The shallow well below the Feast barn was full to the top. Low patches of pasture had become ephemeral swamps. Two days ago, that same well hit bottom—such was the drying heat that settled upon this place and didn’t leave. No more than a sprinkle to cut the dust in that time. If it weren’t for the new well drilled here last winter we’d be hauling water again. To the tenacious drill team, and the folks who chipped in to cover the bill, I raise my glass. If you’re reading this, please know that the water I’m drinking is sweet with your kindness.

I am writing this newsletter as a prayer for rain. When I’m finished, I will read it aloud so that all of the listening ears mentioned in the opening paragraph can hear it. I am writing it to you, but everything that I’m saying is for them. The recording will be spirited to your ears on the digital winds—the same ones that might get you in trouble if you speak out of turn.

David Abram² boldly asserts that we didn’t stop practicing animism when we left the forest and field for the sidewalk and the grocery store aisle. We merely transferred our sensory allegiance from the surrounding landscape to other, more exclusively-human forms of magic. His exploration of the consequence of phonetic literacy on the human capacity for sensorial intimacy is chilling. And yet he wrote his observations and concerns down into a book. (It’s called The Spell of the Sensuous, by the way, and I can’t recommend it more highly) He ultimately addresses this irony. We’re not supposed to abandon the written word. We are supposed to rehydrate it. Reanimate it. Remember that it was born in a specific place and time. That it has an origin story, as do the people of the book who carried the written word around the globe as a sort of disguised weapon. In his book, David discusses the consequence of the non-consensual conversion to literacy.

It’s not that writing is good or bad. Rather, it can be helpful to learn a bit about the water we’re swimming in. Which can feel awfully fetid these days. It can be helpful to remember that we live within a cultural membrane that, out of necessity, only allows certain bits of sensory information to reach us. The old stories often refer to all the other bits, the ones that don’t make it through the culture sieve, as the Otherworld. It can be helpful, and humbling, to remember that most of Life lies out beyond our ability to capture or comprehend it. It can be helpful to leave room for mystery.

Thunderstorms are predicted later this evening, which might amount to drops on dust or a drought-breaking gully washer. Thank God we haven’t figured out how to control that mystery.

Perhaps that’s why we talk about the weather so darn much. Because, while we stopped talking about God in mixed company, deep down we still long to be humbled—to be able to see ourselves as participants in a larger story. The moment we imagine that we’re being listened to by other-than-human ears, every bit of ordinary speech suddenly becomes some sort of prayer. I remember the “oh shit” moment I experienced when I let that possibility sink in. The poet I mentioned earlier had a funny story about this as well. As a kid, she remembers whining to the grownups around her, “All we do is pray, pray, pray.” Couldn’t we just imagine ourselves as inconsequential? Talk about whatever we want? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier?

I have a sense that we tried it, and it did prove easier for a while. But the loneliness of the story eventually caught up with us. One day we woke up to discover that the teenagers don’t see much worth living for. That’s the working title of my friend and mentor Dougald Hine’s new book manuscript: A World Worth Living For: Regrowing a Culture of Beauty, Meaning and Care After the Age of Limitlessness. Dougald has just sent me a draft to look over, as he mentions his visit here to the Farm in one of the chapters. He’d like to make sure his telling chimes close to what I experienced. I am very, very excited to pull up a seat around Dougald’s story fire. The man has a way with words. I will send out details on A World Worth Living For’s publication date when I hear them.

I can hear the wind picking up outside, even over the fan that’s keeping me from running sweat into the computer keypad. I think it’s time to turn the fan off and speak this prayer out loud. I’ll have word for you next week as to what happened.

With love,

Adam

1. The Freedom of Real Apologies, On Being with Krista Tippett.

2. This newsletter was inspired by the following passage from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World:

“The more prevalent view of language, at least since the scientific revolution, and still assumed in some manner by most linguists today, considers any language to be a set of arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon words, or “signs,” linked by a purely formal system of syntactic and grammatical rules. Language, in this view, is rather like a code; it is a way of representing actual things and events in the perceived world, but has not internal, nonarbitrary connection to that world, and hence is readily separable from it.

If we agree with Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that active speech is the generative core of all language, how can we possibly account for the overwhelming prevalence of a view that considers language to be an ideal or formal system readily detachable from the material act of speaking? Merleau-Ponty suggests that such a view could only arise at a time when the fresh creation of meaning has become a rare occurrence, a time when people commonly speak in conventional, ready-made ways “which demand from us no real effort of expression, and…demand from our listeners no real effort of comprehension”—at a time, in short, when meaning has become impoverished.”