The Right Word

On prayers answered and unanswered. Researching interpretation, translation and the Word.

I begin every morning with prayer, and this morning my particular prayer was that I complete the final draft of an essay so my friends can proof it. However…

My husband gives me books.

As I was finishing my coffee, my husband plopped this down in front of me and said, “I think you’d like this.” And walked away.

He’s been watching me for over a month as I struggle to get to the final draft of an essay about what is it like living in the estuary of multiple languages. For me, languages have come together at different points of my life like rivers at a confluence, becoming a highway between two distant places, two cultures, or even just two ways of thinking. People connect with each other through words, but sometimes it can feel like I am working against the current when I am thrown into the waters of a new language.

So in my writing, it seemed like I was caught in this perpetual doom loop called over researching. The problem is that I’ve really been enjoying all my books. I get so much pleasure from reading an eloquent and concise encapsulation of an unwieldy concept.

A pile of just some of the many, many books I have accumulated over the past two months.

I was so happy yesterday to see that Ted Gioia had mentioned the book at the top of this stack: George Steiner’s Real Presences. Steiner is actually more well known for the book just below it, After Babel, which is about translation. I highly recommend both books.

But now, thanks to the love of my life, I have this new book right in front of me, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas R Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander. And so one of my many prayers, that I complete this friggin’ essay, is thrown off because the authors explore a number of subjects that interlace with so much of what I have been writing about.

There is this one section where Hofstadter and Sander talk about the idea that so many of the concepts that we care so deeply about lack names or tidy labels.¹ They use Tony Hoagland’s “There Is No Word” to illustrate their point, and I have been dwelling on this part of the poem for more than a few moments:

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) 

In Real Presences, Steiner touches upon the Judaic prohibition on the enunciation of “the Name of the Name.” He writes, “Once spoken, this name passes into the contingent limitlessness of linguistic play, be it rhetorical, metaphoric or deconstructive. In natural and unbounded discourse God has no demonstrable lodging.”²

The question is, Is it even possible to contain the creator of the universe in one word? I suppose that the answer is no, but that we have no choice but to try because there is so much that we need in order to live and we cannot get these needs met unless we ask. In order to ask, we need to use words.

By way of analogy, I have story. As some of you know, I have an autistic son who came very late into speaking. When he was three he was placed in a classroom for non-verbal students where he was taught ASL, but he was also encouraged to speak.

Most mornings I dropped him off in tears: his and mine. I have to admit that before I had children I was the type of person who cried easily. After I had children I cried even easier. There were some mornings where my husband took our child to school. One day, as he was leaving he heard our son’s voice cry out behind the slowly shutting door: Daddy! This was the first time that my husband ever heard his name out of the mouth of our son, and so he ran back in and held him. Teachers had a harder time getting him to leave, but what better way could we reinforce our son to say Daddy again?

Our Father who art in heaven… The incipit is an invocation. We are taught to cry out to God in our need, and He will come to us. 

I have prayed and prayed for this essay to cross the finish line. But that is not the most important thing I have prayed for over the past few months. Indeed, some things have finally settled in other realms—things that have constituted long emergences. And now, I have time and space to write but I don’t have long so, if you are the praying type, please pray that I can get through some of the last big things I have on my plate, including this one essay.

And if you have anything you would like me to pray for just send me a message.

Again, thank you for reading. Pax et bonum.

1. Hofstadter, Douglas R and Emmanuel Sander. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Basic Books, 2013. pg 132.

2. Steiner, George. Real Presences. University of Chicago Press, 1991. pg 57.