Language

Or

Why I like words and stuff.



This is going to be a long one. It may even be more than one.
Maybe I’ll split up into different types of language. Written, spoken, emotive, language theory, my love for the lot of it.
Maybe not. Maybe I’ll just do my best to keep the bulk together and try and throw it out at you like shot-putting the entirety of the idea and keeping it’s weight, rather than attempting to get more detail and surface area covered by flicking linguistic playing cards at you from the pack, like an enthused but misguided croupier.

I love language. I love what it can do, what it has done and everything possible. I love it when people use language to express themselves, I love it when you can see further into someone’s (and therefore your own) soul than you could feasibly imagine. I even love it when someone is explaining something deeply personal and then stops mid-sentence, the silence betraying more expression than the words ever could.

There’s a million and one reasons to write this. None of them will help me to fully express how I feel, but hopefully I’ll be able to give a gist. A feel. A certain je ne sais quoi. But I’ve always been a reader. Before I could do it myself, my mother read me stories and books. I always had a book on the go. It started off, I think, with Dr. Suess and Roald Dahl. A way to explain the fantastic, give colour and motion to that which can’t be real. The poetry tied into both of them is fun, emotive and the catalyst any child needs to spark the imagination that lasts them a life time. I’m not going to sit here and say ‘Roald Dahl’s Rhyming Stew was a major influence on all my writing’, because that’s not how it works. Roald Dahl’s books, all of the ones I read, have been a major influence on my life. And yours too. (I’m working on the assumption that everyone who’s reading this read BFG or James and Giant Peach or The Witches or The Twits or Matilda or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you weren’t given them, then go, go now and read them. Revel in the glorious safety of the writing.)

Every book I’ve ever read has contributed. From the Gormenghast trilogy, to the ‘Kill your friends’, to the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. Obviously some have hit home harder than others. That’s partly due to the writing, partly due to the time of my life that I read them and partly due to a fucktonne of other things. But books like 1984 and Brave New World just make me shudder when I read them. The breadth of thought, the depth of the idea and the immeasurable scale of genius that it takes to even begin to comprehend these books are astounding. Aldous Huxley is my favourite writer of all time. He’s (I use present tense when I talk of all writers as their work is infinite and immortal) smarter than I could ever dream of being and his passion for freedom and human beings is beautiful.
"But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
The man talks of love like it’s a fundamental right and I think he couldn’t be more correct.

I would consider myself an idealist. I’m very open-minded, I’d try anything once and I’m always searching for something new. But I have a love, a never-ending desire to find the beauty in things. George Carlin said that inside every cynical person there’s a disappointed idealist. He’s probably correct too, but I don’t want that for myself.
If one has become old and cynical or young and cynical or experience and cynical or ignorant and cynical, then I think there’s something wrong. You’re not looking in the right places. You’ve not discovered what you want from your ideals yet. Idealists don’t deal in fleeting, temporary things, they contemplate concepts and foundations of life and culture and civilisation. Plato’s world of the forms alludes to an eternal nature of all things. Maybe he has a point? What’re all these song-writers talking about when they say love is ever-lasting? Hell, even Diamonds are forever. But the way I see it, Diamonds are a symbol. A logo for the beautiful and the perfectly imperfect.

Let’s take a step back. I foresaw that maybe I’d do this. I’m rushing and getting lost and getting distracted by every thought that passes. I feel like I’m on one of those Tron bikes when I talk about big things like this. I can only give a little bit of time before the next interesting thing comes along and in the end nothing is achieved.
Let me tell you about a friend of mine.
I used to work in a bookshop with her a few years ago. She shall be called Suzie for anonymity’s sake (She didn’t want to stay quiet, she just doesn’t know I’m writing about her at the moment. Maybe she’ll read this). Suzie was a great deal of fun to be around, always laughing and joking, but more than that, she was interesting. She had some whizzy-dizzy other job where she used to go and do comedy and things for telly. I don’t think she was on telly, but she was involved. It was all very exciting for me to see. She is gorgeous, intensely intelligent but was faintly similar to me. We seem to have a crossover and sections of parallelism in big thoughts. Big thoughts like love and home and self and stuff. I have an admission, a confession to make. I’m utterly in love with Suzie. I have been for years. She’s everything I want in a future partner, she’s a role model and she’s an amazing friend. I’ve told her things I haven’t told anyone else ever (I might start saying things here that fall into that category).She once gave me the kindest compliment I’ve ever received, partly due to the content, partially the context and partly due to who it was from: “For what it's worth I think you are an amazing young man… Intelligent, articulate, witty, droll in a good way, talented, sweet, and ballsy as fuck for someone of your age. A bit of shit along the way can only make you a better person, so bring it the fuck on.” That particular kick of serotonin got me started at university and for that I am eternally grateful.

She got married recently to an exceedingly intelligent and lovely man and I played at their wedding and I couldn’t have been happier for the pair of them. It was lovely.
The reason I mention her is because she showed me something that I’ve never noticed before. My love of poetry. We were emailing back and forth, as we did quite a lot before she got married and she alerted me to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot and If I Could Tell You by W.H. Auden. If you haven’t read them you should. Immediately, if you must.
They’re breath-taking. I can barely begin to describe the spectrum of emotion they create, drawing from a deep well of feeling and humanity that I didn’t even realised existed. But that’s when poetry changes from just words on a page to art. Hang-it-on-the-wall-and-admire art. Any creative endeavour can become that for me. But it was only after reading that I really understood that language, music, painting, sculpture, graffiti, books, speeches and anything else can be art. It’s about what it makes you feel.

1984. There are a couple of reasons why 1984 isn’t my favourite book. The first is that it’s scary. It’s desolate, lonely, dystopian and sad.
The next is it has a lot of massive powerful messages that, though I understand, I can’t relate to as I haven’t felt those things. But the thing about 1984 that makes it so powerful is that it brings out all these emotions in people that read the book of loneliness, isolation and injustice on purpose. That’s the entire point. That’s what George Orwell means. He wrote it as a warning, a flash-forward in time to a point that was vaguely foreseeable. And it’s that so-close-to-reality-it’s-frightening that gives the book it’s power. My favourite part of that book is the second appendix though. The second appendix explains ‘Newspeak’. Newspeak scares me. Not a lot scares me. In fact, it’s perfectly acceptable to say that so little scares me I’d fall into the category of fearless. But Newspeak does. Newspeak threatens everything I stand for. Newspeak first enlightened me of what I now know to be the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That’s a big, fancy name for something that may not be fancy but is a pretty big concept. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that if you don’t have the word or ability to say something, then it doesn’t exist. Not only is there no way of describing it to yourself, but you can’t communicate it. Now, the idea that through language someone could determine my thoughts is pretty damn scary. But it makes you wonder about other languages. Do they not have the same thoughts as those who speak English? Do they not have the depth of emotion that I’ve only learnt from reading such poems as mentioned above? I mean, as I stated above, those poems acted like torches in the dark, showing me the caveman pictures on the walls of my soul, so how can someone who doesn’t speak English have the same understanding of self?

But then, the more I think about, the less scared I get. Simply because someone does not speak English, doesn’t mean that they are any less enlightened about the soul or philosophy or logic or physics or anything else that I am. That’s preposterous. The concept of Newspeak contracting our language to a point where love and freedom can’t be expressed is obviously terrifying, but some of the depth we get to with that point doesn’t really add up for me.
I love languages, but that doesn’t just mean the English language. It’s the only one I can speak fluently, but the sound of language is still meaningful. The assonance and alliteration and general flow of French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Ukrainian and anything else is something to wallow and delight in. There is no comparable activity to feeling and understanding meaning from tones and voices and phonics of language. It’s like the aural version of people-watching. And I’m a massive fan of people watching.
There’s a scene in the second Matrix film where Neo and pals take the mystery machine to a lovely restaurant and meet a French fellow. It’s a very clever scene with some interesting ideas but what makes it so very watchable is a line where he reels off a list of French swearwords and says it’s like ‘wiping your arse with silk’ or some such succulent titbit of arrogant French waffle. I’ve already discussed my love of swearing in an earlier post, and frankly I believe it to be an art form. But that’s only one language. It’s reported that there are between 5,000 and 10,000 languages in the world. Imagine the possibilities! The innumerable ways at which to tell someone to fuck off. To go suck a cock. To swear and curse and cuss and blaspheme and anathemise and explete and ojurgate. Bliss.

I like hip-hop. I like beat-poetry. I like spoken word. I love when it’s done well. People I know who’re smarter than I am have written about how hip hop is our modern version of the playwrights and poets of old. Jamie T, Arctic Monkeys, Jay-Z, Tupac, Biggie Smalls, Scroobius Pip, Zach de la Rocha, Andre 3000 and a million other superb lyricists make me smile.
I can’t write lyrics for toffee, something that aggravates me no end because I wish I could be that singer/songwriter type but I just can’t. But the stories and truth expressed by the great lyricists pleases me. It makes my serotonin flow and face contract to something that vaguely resembles a happy and contented face. S’good that, init?

I think you’re starting to understand my love of language. How it makes me feel and how I can’t imagine being without it. Let me leave you with Shakespeare. My love of Shakespeare knows no bounds. I have multiple favourite plays but at the moment, Hamlet holds my heart. I don’t care how cliché is it, but here is why:

HAMLET
Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at
my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
imagination to give them shape, or time to act them
in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.
Where's your father?
OPHELIA
At home, my lord.
HAMLET
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the
fool no where but in's own house. Farewell.
OPHELIA
O, help him, you sweet heavens!
HAMLET
If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for
thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as
snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a
nunnery, go: farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs
marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough
what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go,
and quickly too. Farewell.
OPHELIA
O heavenly powers, restore him!
HAMLET
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God
has given you one face, and you make yourselves
another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and
nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness
your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath
made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages:
those that are married already, all but one, shall
live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a
nunnery, go.

And you thought I’d give you To Be or Not To Be!
Pah, I’m not that cliché you know.