Words are deeds with consequence

For John Francis Sullivan Jr.

My life really is paying attention to words: how people use them; the rhythms of their speech; and ferreting out circus-barker, pulling-the-wool-over-your-neighbor’s-eyes, con-man talk.

The latter way of speaking is problematic because, as it becomes habituated, it diminishes the happiness of the speaker as well as negatively affects the society he’s living in.

And, when such words reach Orwellian newspeak proportions, the society’s chances of evolving grow dim, having morphed into something it once despised.

How a person talks is who he is. How a society talks is what it is. Words are deeds with consequence.

That’s what the Canadian-born American social psychologist Erving Goffman was trying to get at in his 1956 genius piece of work “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.”

Any training institute set up to help people embrace reflective self-analysis — and using Goffman’s book as a text — would have each person get up before the group and describe how he presents himself to the world — or thinks he does — declaring what words he uses to ensure his needs will be met — and of course saying how he came by the words in the first place.

When I ask people what words they use most, what their vocabulary looks like, I hear in a stunning silence: Wha?!

Of course, as a poet, I pay attention to how I speak all the time. It’s my job, my calling; being a poet is non-stop self-reflective study of the language I use and attentiveness to the words others use to ensure their needs are met.

Often overlooked is the correlation between how well a society does in the meeting of the needs of (all) its members and the happiness quotient of that society. The fewer the needs met, the more disgruntled people there are, the unhappier the society.

When we inventory the words a society uses and examine the content of the message(s) they contain, we get a picture of the collective speech of the society that ultimately is a measure of the ethical and moral depth of its members.

Anyone with half a wit knows certain words offer no path to the future because they’re war-ridden; born of a clinical depression, they spawn dystopian blare-horns whose stock-in-trade is fanning civil conflict in the interest of effecting social-suicide.

William Carlos William, one of America’s greatest poets — a key link in the genealogical tree of American poetry — next in line after Whitman — told poets to pay attention to how people speak every day — to the vernacular — words they use without thinking.

Of course some words raise the happiness quotient of a society, while others tear it down; the difference is in how many people in the society wake up each day and say “Wow, man, gimme some more of what I had yesterday! I can’t wait to get out of bed and greet the day. My work is a calling-in-life come true. I make more money than I need; call me Monsieur Heureux!”

Doctor Williams — he was an M.D. as well as a poet — told poets that, when they come upon vernacular words, to write them down, then decode them, because they are a mirror of the soul of the person saying them as well as the community, group, society, in which they’re being said.

And “words-as-mirror” is not a sociological construct but genetically-based, DNA saying this is a place where the nervous system does not feel threatened so the tongue can lay down all verbally-abusive words as a way to get its needs met.

To minimize making costly (false) moves, all organisms — right down to the amoeba — know documenting every word of daily speech must be beyond reproach; lying or contradicting the Laws of Physics in any way is fatal to personal well-being and the continuity of a caring community.

A GPS does not say turn left when it knows the grocery store you’re looking for is on the right; the system is geared to ease tension, to ensure the traveler reaches his destination without consternation.

And though our poet-doctor did produce an epic poem, “Paterson,” he never turned from the vernacular speech of everyday. As an ethnographer of the streets, he recorded what he saw and heard and felt as he made his rounds to and from his patients’ homes.

In his poem “A Negro Woman,” the vernacular of life bursts forth in a Black woman who’s [original margins adjusted]:

carrying a bunch of marigolds

wrapped
in an old newspaper:
She carries them upright,
bareheaded,

 the bulk
of her thighs
causing her to waddle

 as she walks
looking into
the store window which she passes
on her way.
What is she
but an ambassador 

from another world
a world of pretty marigolds
of two shades
which she announces
not knowing what she does

 other

 than walk the streets
holding the flowers upright
as a torch

 so early in the morning

When we pay attention to words on a regular basis, we soon get a peek into the logic, the ideology underlying them, making it easier to decode the intentions of the message-sender. The trade of the poet is always to be in harmony with the Laws of Physics in finding the freest words available.

And free means speech that comes with no baggage, baggage defined as duplicity, as cheating on what appears before the eyes, as contradicting meanings accepted since the beginning of time; when Cain killed Abel, they called it murder; they said one and one were, and would always be, two.

Thus, in the interest of truth, poetry transcends all political ideologies.

You can see why, therefore, any poet of consequence in the United States was extremely troubled on Jan. 6, 2021 when he saw: (1) a riotous mob breaking and entering the capital of the United States of America and killing policemen and policewomen whose job was to protect America from invasion; and (2) the man who incited the mob — the President of the United States — calling the day a “day of love.” The eyes of every poet alive were blind-sided by such Newspeak that openly defied the Laws of Physics.

The poet therefore — I’ll speak for me — is always searching for the exact words for what appears before the eyes or is felt within, relying on eternally-accepted rules for assessing the weight, size, shape, color, even purpose of a thing. 

If Doc Williams’s Black woman saw what he said about her, she would have thought she was looking in a mirror.

The Hippocratic oath of the poet requires him, her, them, to use the truest, most accurate word to say what appears before the eyes, or is felt within, the seer obligated to wade into the pool of unconsciousness and fish out the only word that exists to address the reality at hand.

On the level of ethics, the First Commandment of the poet is: Thou shalt not distort the life of any one or any thing for the sake of power or money or any other quid-pro-quo: distortion leads to personal unhappiness and enlivens dystopians — hell-bent on destroying the social cohesion of a society — to thrive.

Right now, for me, our poet du jour, well, I feel I’m in ancient Rome as hordes of barbarians are standing at the gates ready to take the city down.

What’s it like for you?