Reservations

When your passion becomes your profession, it’s easy to get caught up in the money-mix and forget why you’re working so hard doing the things you’re doing. Between the months of August and May I hang out with Language people, many of whom seem tongue-tied by their linguistically-dominated life’s path. I feel for them. When you love(d) language, I mean feel a deep-down connection with the spoken and written word, it can be difficult to be interested in anything else. This infatuation can be a beautiful thing. You start looking at letters on pages as much as humanly possible (check out the episode of Twilight Zone called “Bookworm,” before dude loses his noodle). 

You wake up excited to see a newspaper, just to glimpse a headline and know that no, while you were sleeping the world did not in fact crumble into illiteracy. You go to sleep with word-ideas in your head (in your more abstract moments you start thinking that maybe the word-ideas are your head); you wonder if any of the word-ideas you’d had during the day will ever take themselves, or you, anywhere (new, different, special?). Words, and their sounds and their meanings and not-meanings, their fullness and emptiness, become everything and nothing at the same time. Language becomes broken tools that you know are broken but that still work to make the most beautiful things you’ve ever experienced.

 And then you have to pay your rent, and buy groceries, and cop more books (for business and sometimes-pleasure), and buy DVR cable boxes, and you think to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could do words all day and dream word-ideas and at the same time make money-stuff?” So you do what you have to do to keep dreaming. You take the copy writing job; you start stocking the shelves at the local bookstore; you take the teaching position; you mail off the submissions with their professional-looking cover letters; you show up on time clean-shaven for the internship. You go all-in on the idea that these words you make can feed you take-out and buy khaki pants and other necessities, at least for a while. And for a while you live the word life.

And then one day you don’t. You don’t open your front door first thing in the morning for fear that the newspaper will have come early. You tell yourself you’ll write the poem idea down later. You eat shitty food and watch the Bravo television network like it’s no big deal. You think maybe shitty food and the Bravo television network could be the next big thing (maybe even bigger than words!). Maybe you could do them all day and still buy khaki pants like old times. Printed words make your eyes hurt (maybe you’ve lost your distance vision from too much reading [maybe there is a metaphor in there somewhere]), colors in nature look like dry watercolor paint kits. You see the Language people you’ve always seen. Maybe they look a little more miserable than the last time you saw them. Maybe they tell you you look a little more miserable than the last time you saw them. You begin spending a significant amount of time on the Internet researching other people’s lives that aren’t as dry-watercolor as yours. You think, “I used to be King Henry VIII (pre-Boleyn), or [insert your favorite rabble-rouser]. Now I’m the local weatherman missing his cues and fucking up the greenscreen forecast over Wisconsin. What happened to me?”

In these trying times, it is important to remember why we as Language people do word-stuff. Like an old married woman who in her pre-batty stages thinks “When I was 18 I looked like Nancy Sinatra. Why did I settle for bald, old Harry with his hemorrhoids?” we need to fall in love with ourselves and the things we’ve created and espoused ourselves to. But how? How do we love again after Bravo television network has told us day after day that love is a sham reserved for drunk plastic surgeons who don’t eat shitty food like we do?

I’m pretty sure chef/traveler/asshole Anthony Bourdain has a better life than me. Even when he is being smug and self-deprecating (which is always), I think he feels things in a way people like me don’t (that is, I think people like me are so critical that we think about most things in a critical way but rarely feel them in a critical way. Liberal pundits push for “critical thinking” in American educational institutions, but where are the teachers of “critical feeling”? Can I take a course in such necessary skills as feeling, or am I doomed to more “practical” academic fare?). In the first essay of his book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Bourdain admits that he is a self-described sensualist. He lives for the pleasurable sensations he receives from his body. He explains how this life of pleasure began when he was 9-years-old and ate a raw oyster for the first time. Something happened in his mouth, and mind, that the chef says changed his expectations of the world forever. Previous to oysters, and perhaps all critically-felt food, life did not mean much to Bourdain. Post-seafood, it was serious, full of potential, and all-business (urgent in a not-anxious way, but in a “Christmas-morning-what-did-Santa-bring-better-hurry-downstairs-and-check” way).

How many Language people would do well to let their (over)active minds travel back to their first word-oysters, to the language that made them realize their lives would be text-based from that word, or sentence, or paragraph forward. There’s no love like first love, and first-language love is often the sweetest for word people. I’ve been contemplating my word-oysters for some time, organizing them chronologically in my mind, each think-session trying to go farther back in my body/mind-history. I can remember two incidents that made me think, at the time, that words were all I ever wanted to do (or maybe could do).

Group-therapy style, I think it’s important for Language people to share the stories of their word-oysters with others; the practice renews the hope that these syllables we write aren’t for nothing, it reminds us that there is love somewhere curled within the ink we spill. Here are the moments that remind me of my love for language and help me make sense of the language-life I now find myself living.

(Enter Scooby-Doo swirly vertical patterns that indicate reverse time travel.)

Word-Oyster #1

My fourth-grade teacher hated my guts. I talked a lot in class (most of it out of turn and stupid-sounding). I thought I was a very smart child and that my voice needed to be heard by everyone. My fourth-grade teacher told me to shut up every day. I rarely listened to her. Sometimes I see her in my hometown and she pretends she doesn’t know who I am. It is very hurtful.

One day, probably in fall (for some reason this season comes to mind), my teacher announced to the class that we would be writing limericks. She read us famous limericks from days gone by. I felt the easy rhythm of the words in my toes and said to myself, “I can do this shit.” And I wrote a ton of limericks. And they were awesome. And they were so awesome my classmates told me to write their limericks for them. And they told me things they loved and I wrote limericks about the things (mainly frogs). I have no memory of what my teacher thought of the limericks (this is probably significant).

Word-Oyster #2

It was several months after the limericks. I was in the school cafeteria wearing a Starter winter coat (one of those that you would pull over your head, with the kangaroo pocket in the front and the big sports logo on the back). Several boys were seated ad a lunch table, talking about what they had done the night before. I recalled that I had seen a music video on television (on a station that I now know is BET). The gaudy men in the video (the men who I now know are the 1990’s R&B group BLACKstreet) were talking in ways that reminded me of limericks. I said to myself, while watching them move around and talk to rhythms, “I like what these men are doing. I would like to be them someday and say limerick-type stuff in front of people. Their limericks make me want to move my fat belly. I would like to say things to music that make people want to move their fat or thin bellies. That would make me feel cool (this feeling of “cool” is probably incredibly significant. People will do almost anything to feel cool [especially when their world makes them feel/tells them they are not cool]).”

The boys at my table had not seen the music video I had seen, nor did they want to talk about moving their bodies in dance-ways to sounds and limericks. They wanted to talk about something else. I felt embarrassed and left out for having seen the music video and for caring about it enough to talk about it in front of other people (these feelings are probably significant).

Language people should think about the words they used to love: the words that made them want to read or listen, the words that made them want to write words that other people would want to read or listen to, the words that made them embarrassed but at the same time feel cool, the words that they were proud of, or ashamed of (or both but didn’t want to admit). These words aren’t as buried in our cold-blooded job-minds as much as we think they are. They can be made to feel fresh again (like aquatic flesh and brine on Bourdain’s memory-tongue). They might be able to help us feel stuff about language that our paychecks (or deadlines, or students, or price tags) have beaten numb. If nothing else, they can remind us that first-word-love existed and can exist again and maybe exists right now inside our frustrated hands and cramped ambitions.