Falling Into a Language

This is a post about the nature of poetry and language—particularly the sensory immediacy of poetic language, which can bridge the gap between symbolic structures and experience. 

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Each day, I practice Spanish. I translate words, phrases, and sentences from Spanish to English, and vice versa. I match Spanish words with their rough English equivalents, compiling mental flashcards. This is effective for increasing vocabulary but clumsy for verbal communication in the real world … when I want to understand someone or communicate something, and I can’t locate the words. 

But in illuminated moments I understand spoken Spanish directly, without engaging my mental translator. Fogata invokes the orange heat and crackle of a bonfire, acrid smoke mingling with ocean mist. Atardecer—a glowing orb over a wrinkled gray sea. Bolsillo, cocodrilo, árboles, sencillo, semáforo, caguama … each inspires sensory recollections. My friends tell me stories: Me recuerdo la casa de mi abuelita … Mi papá trabajaba en el campo con las palmas. My senses are activated; images arise and sounds roll through my mind. My English falls away, and I apprehend meaning as it manifests in the physical world.  

Meaning making and language learning are processes hardwired into our human brains, and young children intuitively learn language as they interact with the world around them. For a child, words are enmeshed with the experiences of the things they represent—a soft blanket, cold water, a kitten’s rough tongue, the smart of a scraped knee. Language, furthermore, is sensory and embodied: spoken words thrum in the throat, and sound waves cascade upon the ear. Written words create stark visual patterns on the page. The tangible materiality of words amplifies the immediate relationship between language and lived experience. 

For a young child, nothing intervenes between the experience of language and the experience of the world. But as we gain awareness that linguistic symbols are not stand-ins for the material things they represent, we may discover a rift exists between language and lived experience, and this can be felt as a tragic disruption. Because how can one express the most important things about being human in the world—the intangible yet essential things—if words don’t line up exactly with the experience of living?

From this standpoint, language becomes an intermediary between the physical world and the self apprehending it. It is a necessary insertion that orders and explains otherwise bewildering phenomena. Ordered sets of words—narratives and arguments—help us interpret and organize moment-by-moment sensory information. And words serve a further purpose—they build mental structures, erect paradigms, construct the social self. They exert control over a world in flux. In this regard, the development of language is a human survival strategy.

In this process of enforcing control, something essential—something generative and novel—plummets into the abyss. But not every type of language precludes novelty and creative potential. Poetry, for instance, adheres to a different logic. It escapes the cracks rendered by hardened and brittle conventional language use. It exists in the nebulous borderlands between lived experience and symbol, a startling constellation of imagery and music. Poetry employs conventional significations in unconventional combinations, invoking surprising images. It creates form and pattern on a blank page. It embodies elemental rhythms and sounds. We feel it in our bodies. We see it in our minds' eyes. In this way, a poem communicates but refuses to deliver a unifying message, and, in unexpected and delightful moments, conveys more than the totality of its parts. The poem itself becomes a lived experience. 

In his Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Wittgenstein is correct that language, in many instances, is limited. He asserts that certain human experiences cannot be transmitted using ordinary strings of conventional signifiers. But poetry refuses to comply with this assertion—it is anything but silent. Wittgenstein himself suggested that “philosophy really ought only to be written as a form of poetry.” Perhaps he intends to say that poetry leverages conventional signification in innovative ways, giving rise to new meanings and insights. Using words, poetry shouts out to existence and sings the music of the universe.

So how does poetry relate to learning a new language? As with poetry, language learning doesn’t truly occur when ordering words to control meaning. Discovering exact translations is often impossible, and in the effort to do so, meaning may evaporate. Rather, learning a new language is about experiencing the words themselves, intertwined with the experience of the things that they represent. It’s like apprehending music. It’s like stepping into a theater of color and form. You don’t learn a language word by word—you enter the sensory world that the language creates.

I’ve come to feel that falling into a language is like falling into a poem. And falling into a poem is like falling back into the reality of the world.