language, again

Now that I'm out of grad school, I have these flashes of understanding about a lot of what I learned and read there, these zaps that feel intimate and personal and real.

Today it is naming. How the word for the thing turns the thing into itself. Without the word, the thing might exist, but unspoken, unwritten, unrecorded--it remains a non-entity. It is the tree falling in the forest without anyone seeing or hearing it.

Which makes silence a kind of faith. And language, if we feel like drawing a binary, a kind of science.

Language can be a disorder. An enabler. Say what you will about how talking heals, but I think many times, it can cripple.

I can go about my day, doing. I can do the odd little things I do. I can behave the way I behave, unspeakingly. And I can believe, unthinkingly, that all is well, in my being, in my world. Or I can, I don't know, scamper to the top of one of my piles and start naming what I see and do. Naming the animals in my care, these creatures of my mind. I discover, in saying the words, that I am "obsessive," "wasteful," "vain," "neurotic," that even my neuroses have neuroses. And now I am a steward, officially, of these postures and conditions, and all the other ones they bring to bear, that wait their turn to be announced, made real.

Because once they are real, they demand things. They demand to be validated, again and again. Patterns form. And what seems to be inevitable might actually be avoidable, if I shut up for two seconds.

Silence can be the good kind of murder, I guess is what I'm getting at.

As an aside, I love what Aase Berg says about language and motherhood and madness.