talk talk talk

Now Playing: No one. They're all revising (theoretically).

A certain person has requested another post. Don't have much to say, I'm afraid. I went to the library tonight and found a copy of the Kalevala on a dark shelf in an unlit alcove. I wonder if any of the Native American tribes have epic poetry, and if they put the same weight on words as the Old English poets did. I know they have stories, I just can't find them, aside from the one slim volume that my grandparents gave me ages ago, with odd stories from the Lakota about humanoid animals.

A search on the internet has only turned up gruesome Pawnee religious rites, though one interesting fact is that the Pawnees constructed their longhouses so that they could see the Pleiades through the smokehole. Apparently their life was tied closely to the observance of celestial bodies.

That's a strange phrase: "celestial bodies". If you didn't know much about English, you'd think it meant human bodies that had been modified in some way so that they were "heavenly" or shining or able to fly. Maybe superheroes should be "celestial bodies", not stars, planets, asteroids, and so on. Though of course we have a way of calling people who excel "stars" anyway. Then again, it reminds me of C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" and the Star's daughter at the end. In the world to which Narnia belongs, stars are bodies.

So it's the Kalevala now. I understand, just from reading the introduction, where Tolkien got the other half of his mythology. Middle Earth turns out to be a crossbreed between Old English and Finnish. The Finnish languages and names, even the spelling and pronunciation, have a familiar ring because I've encountered them already in Sindarin and Quendi. The work promises to be heavy reading, perhaps badly translated into Modern English verse, but if I managed to slog through my thick volume of prose Sagas of Icelanders last summer, I can get through this, and the language is much nearer to home, being part of my linguistic heritage thanks to Middle Earth, than the strange Scandinavian names of the characters in the sagas.

I wonder why C.S. Lewis chose to fill the world in which Narnia exists with so much Greek mythology, and Tolkien chose traditions completely different. Ironic, in a way: Narnia seems much younger than Middle Earth, but the versions of Greek legends we have are far older than the versions of Beowulf and the Kalevala. Apparently oral poets were still making songs in Finnish in the fifteenth century A.D., and Beowulf was written down around 800 A.D., long after Ovid and Homer.

I also wonder how these old legends might interplay with postmodern theories about language. It's interesting that in Scandinavian mythology, runes were so important. Odin lost an eye, they say, in order to buy the power to write. For an oral culture one can only imagine how powerful writing would seem. In Beowulf, runes written on a sword cause Hrothgar to unearth a whole new mythic world, sparking one of the tangents so difficult for contemporary readers of Beowulf to endure.

Postmodern poets put such an emphasis on words themselves and on exploring subjective ways to shape meaning. I've heard professors say that the question is, as in the quote from Alice that used to be on the cover of my Wordly Wise books, "Whether you can make words mean so many different things". The difficulty is that their "poetry" so-called makes words meaningless. The quest for meaning makes it disintegrate into strings of words without punctuation or reference point. One of my professors wisely advised a sort of poetry that forces the reader to deal with unusual word combinations but pauses along the way to let the reader get a foothold in the familiar before leaping away again.

Is it possible for legends and oral poetry to have something to contribute to the postmodern confusion over meaning and who has authority to say what word means what? I can agree with the postmodernists, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E people, and all that, that it is good to be aware of words, as one is aware of one's physical surroundings, to be aware of their ranges of meanings. But I don't want to let it flake apart into meaninglessness, discarding the idea that words can have meaning and do, by consensus, have definite meanings, no matter where you are. A cat is still a cat: but the connotations will by necessity be different for every person. I simultaneously think of Mandy and a tiger; Rosemary will probably think, "Unwanted two a.m. serenade", and Elizabeth, on the other side of the Atlantic, "Sneezes and itches."

How does an awareness of words themselves shape stories, communication, everyday life? Textbooks, news flashes, movies, novels?

The problem, of course, is that no one really cares. Or rather: No one is aware that they care. When you start to use a word that means one thing in one place in another place, and the people there don't understand you, you begin to realize that the question of words as embodying a variety of meanings actually does have practical implications for everyday life. It can inhibit communication; it can also provide hours of hilarity, or a new perspective on a serious topic.

So why poetry? Because I think it provides a forum for the most directly self-aware discussion of the question. You can sit down and explore meanings in a poem in ways that would definitely be annoying on BBC news. On the other hand, most people don't have a patience to consider the effect the language of a poem is having on them in this much detail.

But there's hope, in an odd sort of way. Doing a paper on Renaissance English made me realize how similar linguistically our era is to the Renaissance, especially in reference to American English, which apparently has the highest coinage rate. English speakers are drawing in new words, creating new vocabulary, exploring new registers, in ways similar to those used during the Renaissance with its demand for new vocabulary to name new commodities from Europe, exotic creatures from the New World, and new ideas drawn from emerging Classical philosophies and Reformation theology. In some ways, we are in a similar position, forced to come up with new vocabulary for internet and computer technologies, trying to deal with globalization, interacting rapidly with other cultures, and creating new subcultures, each one demanding its own range of vocabulary. The hope comes when you realize that the Renaissance produced some of the greatest modern English authors: Shakespeare, Donne, Milton. Perhaps new linguistic self-awareness will result in a similar flowering....

Ah, well, I'll just keep chasing this particular problem by the tail, round and round. Probably end up in knots.

It's about time for Rachel's e-mail break, which means my laptop will be needed soon.