How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Word

If my study in Modernist and Postmodernist poetics had to be broken down to something singularly broad enough to cover most aspects of my research, I would say that I have spent the better part of the last few years considering the use of words. Although I have committed to this study primarily from the perspective of poetic uses of words, much of this thinking inevitably transgressed into how I perceived and understood the world beyond the artificialities of poetry.

Words, as I saw them, were largely meaningless, malleable and plastic things, only given significance by the circumstances of their use in various, always changing cultural, societal and formal contexts. The word, then, carries no weight but what the subjective individual decides to ascribe to it. It waits patiently as an essentially empty thing to be imbued with some meaning ultimately rendered utterly nebulous in its dependency on the constantly shifting both internal and external situations in which it is used.

I became arrogant enough to believe that words are merely sounds that give shape to the things that inundate our consciousness day-to-day. A ‘tree’ is a ‘tree,’ only because we know that thing to be a ‘tree.’ That feeling of ‘guilt’ is only known as ‘guilt’ because we have assigned to it the signifier ‘guilt.’ Even then, what is a ‘tree’ or ‘guilt’ to me, is something marginally, maybe completely, different to someone else depending on their personal history and association with these words and the sensations they provoke. Because of this inconstancy, I assumed they meant nothing.

They provide us the means to communicate, but in their communicative use—the constant back-and-forth of dialogical exchange—persistently shed their intended meaning. What was meant in their initial delivery becomes partially, or totally, tarnished in being received and processed. We are capable of understanding one another, but never as we completely intend.

Progressively, I emptied them of their importance so that they were little more than freely flowing vessels stripped of their ostensible need to carry anything definite. They were just letters and noises that performed a machine-like role that gave some sense to the world, but captured none of its subjective emotionality. They were an embodiment of societal functionality and little else.

I believed more in the sensual aspects of my world that I thought actually carried some 'real' weight. A sensual aspect that, in its internal solidity and co-dependent companionship with the self-consciousness, couldn’t be shared by words, the impoverished nature of which would ensure the sensation would be lost in transmission.

However, I have come to realize that this is an idealised perception of words that abstracts them from the very reality we all dwell within—that I had, in turn, tried to abstract them from—where they do carry an enormous amount of significance beyond their plastic design. Indeed, their very plasticity is the essential component of their weight: the flexible aspect that makes them so easy to obsess over and capture our perpetual mental motion as we try to make sense of things.

It dawned on me that what can be said in a great many circumstances, one person to another, is not empty and meaningless, but transformatively rich, rising above the superficiality of the noises we make that deliver words. These words lodge themselves into memory and emotion and will not become unstuck: words both communicate and become the sensual and emotional world; and no matter how you try to manipulate and remake them as empty signifiers, their sound and delivery have the capacity to consume you because they are you.

They are not temporary and empty shapes of letters and sounds we make. What is uttered cannot be passed off as belonging only to a moment’s superficiality. They transcend their communicative use.  What is said, one person to another, becomes awfully difficult at times to be passed off as meaningless—as words being words—when what is said is the very memory in which we circulate and have to process ourselves.

Be careful with how you use them. They’ll often be all you have left.