Just foxing around

How language makes you feel

Right, this will be even draftier than last week’s post. I will speculate about … literary genres: despite the fact that, aside from writing poetry, philosophy and some limited prose, I have little expertise on the matter; to air an idea about the difference between linguistic celebration and communication somebody else must have had before me, but since I don’t know, I’ll just put it out there; and to invite ideas in the comments on how we can become more alert to questions of genre, so not just to what we say, but how we say things and in what, well, proto-literary manner.

Essentially, I will be just foxing around — inspired by my lovely neighbours.

My younger self considered to stop talking. For real. Yet it was the year before I graduated high school and I could see that this choice wouldn’t exactly further my goal of getting out of school. So, I fantasised: What if every human had only a limited, annual contingent of words to use? Wouldn’t people choose their words much more carefully?

I probably felt the need to regiment word and language use because I was, and I guess still am, a bit sensitive to how language makes me feel. And there is more to that than just not using “bad words”. I’d rather someone gives me one bad word they really mean than a barrage of words I can’t place that suffocate and disorient me.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about: stories, fables, myths.¹ Trying to understand how people use these to organise and articulate their thoughts and feelings brought me back to that old concern of mine: how language makes me feel.

Celebration vs. communication

Language doesn’t just make me feel good or bad, loved or hated, appreciated or ridiculed, dumb or smart. It also allows me to feel. When I find a new word, it can allow me to feel more accurately. I can fall in love with words and be more loving as a result. I think. Using language more precisely helps me think more clearly, to appreciate the world with more nuance. Being alert to the difference in linguistic capabilities, human or otherwise, helps me consider how different the world can feel to different beings. God, I am no philosopher of language and actually have little patience for the subject my brilliant partner can loose himself in. But I want to say: Language use has not just an effect on people, it effects different states of mind in people.

When I am in the poetic state of mind, I need options. I need the thrill of multiple meanings. I jump on a new shiny word like a fox cub on a pine cone. I deeply enjoy myself. If (big if!) I manage to arrange words in such a fashion into a poem that that spirit, that playful processing, that tentative crafting of sense, invites other people to consider my findings, I am happy, at ease. It feels like a little celebration. When it’s my poetry, I just happen to be the convener. When somebody else’s poetry does that for me, I appreciate it. Poems bring out the colours of life, add depth to the dark, brilliance to the light. Perhaps they are truest to life when they shimmer with more than one meaning.

Prose is … still life, but perhaps more still life. I impose the order of a full sentence. I abide by rules. My meaning making is not transgressive, if anything, I just ever so gently push boundaries of thought. I make sure not to lose myself in the play. I am Mama fox, chewing the mouse. I have a white tip on my tail and make sure my readers can follow. And when I read stories, a good story does half of the thinking for me. I feel stories are not there to celebrate but to communicate. Here, this is the meaning, the moral of it. This is what you take away, not more, not less.²

Philosophy, eventually, is the big picture. It would be a poetic exaggeration to say that doing philosophy feels like fighting for my life. But it certainly feels like a fight for, or over, the ideas and beliefs that are allowed to survive in the space I share with other people. Now, this is communion, too, but in a much less anarchic and celebratory fashion I know from poetry. A philosophical text is solemn, sober — a sentence drunk with poetic meaning is usually shown the door. Perhaps things were different in the past, but if you have ever seen a philosophy paper through review, I think you get what I mean. You discipline your mind, you fence off meaning, you tame your wilder ideas. And, believe it or not, I am the last to be against discipline. I think it is of the essence! And I actually do not like philosophy that sounds like poetry. Heidegger makes me feel mad (and bad).³

So? If there is this difference in how literary genres can make you feel, what does that mean? Perhaps awareness is enough. Surely we need all genres, But perhaps we could also try to live more poetically⁴ before we trap and wrap every live idea with our narrative and philosophical desires.

One Ted, three foxes

Once there was a fox who met a young human who was going to become a famous British poet: Ted Hughes. The fox did what foxes do and radiated fascination, so much so that his image printed itself into the deepest folds of that human’s mind.

At some point in the 1950s, Ted had long forgotten about the encounter with his fox #1, he sat down and wrote a poem: about a fox that occurred to him in a dream — fox #2.

The thought fox — this poem is a marvellous literary creation. The thought fox really comes to life, does she not? Ted masterfully employs language to great poetic effect. He plays with surprise, suspense, veracity, sensuality. Fox #2 and all that Ted has chosen the fox can stand for is alive.

But for Ted, this wasn't enough. For whichever reason, perhaps some half-decent pay, he decided to write a collection of stories, just-so stories in fact, about how a range of animals came to be the animals they are today. The collection is called “How the Whale Became and Other Stories”, first published in 1963. The story about the fox features a generic fox, Slylooking, and a generic dog, Foursquare, and how they vie for the best spot in a world arranged by humans. The two can’t agree on who is going to become who and Man gets impatient, threatens to favour a bird over both of them — can you imagine. The two are alarmed and ask the hens to decide the matter. The hens agree, and all could be well, were it not for the devious cunning of the fox who contrives a plot against Foursquare, which results in the fox tricking everyone, the rabbit, the chickens, the man, and, of course, the stupid dog. Yet because justice is inherently anthropocentric, Slylooking’s ruse is discovered in the end, and the loyal dog gets the desirable spot, whereas the fox is banished from human land.

Hm. What can I say? Of course, there are lovely little things in that story, because it is written … by Ted Hughes. Like, Foursquare first suggests to ask the cows to decide, after all: “They ponder a great deal.” But overall, I can’t help the urge to cut that short story long — it strikes me as wrong, so disrespectful of any other than human animal perspective. I want to liberate that fox, fox #3, from the trappings of human meaning making. The story just puts me into a very disagreeable state of mind. Of course I know it is written for children, though that makes it even worse. What’s wrong with some veracity and enlivening thinking, aka poetry, for the young?

Bottom line — is it not odd how the same human can write so differently about the fox? I don’t like how Ted makes me feel about fox #3. With fox #2, I am just fine.

Although … as far as I know everybody treats this poem as a poem about writing poetry, not about foxes, and certainly not for foxes. As much as I like Ted’s poem, what I really want to know is how to write poetry to get closer to what’s on fox #1’s mind.

1. I am sure there are important distinctions between these terms; for now, they are all the same to me in that they are neither “just” poetry, nor “clearly” philosophy.

2. Of course, some stories have poetic features. I don’t know what to do or think about these yet.

3. I say this as a poet. The philosopher in me would never say such a thing.

4. My brilliant partner tells me I have to say explicitly that ‘living poetically’ means the opposite of being touchy-feely-woolly with world and language. There, I have said it; a positive account to follow.