Kris Hemensley (Writer/poet and convenor of Collected Works Bookshop, Melbourne) made a request on facebook this morning as to whether anyone had Issue #6, Winter 1984 of H/EAR (The Merri Creek, Or Nero) magazine. I had a copy because Kris had included several letters that we had written to each other in June and July 1983. Here is an except from one of my letters. I love these little pieces of history...
15 July 1983
Dear Kris,
Today as I sit down to write this, Erin is playing on the floor, papers all around him, the sun is streaming through the window - this all relates in some way to Des Cowley's bits in tHEAtRe (p265-71). I was thinking what do we do with feelings that we can't name - usually we feel something and language is at hand with the word - maybe 'love', but I say it's not really that, so where do we find the language of the heart? Leiris said something like '...to name distinctly is to kill...' This seems to be true when trying to write about emotions. So much of what we feel has been named - becomes an object. I'm not saying what is love? I'm talking about words - how they seem to simplify things. Language places emotions that may not be successfully expressed, into little boxes, correctly labelled so that everyone understands, but the problem is, that often the coined word - like love, once named, seems to have existed prior to the utterance - the feeling did, but the word made it expressible. We are taught correct responses and language for our emotions and appropriate names and labels. I agree with Des, but it is the naming that says it is that, and only that. Poetic language has always seemed somehow closer to the mind and heart. Because words used in a traditional rhetoric point to common meanings, the whole syntax rolls back on itself and supports the sense of what was meant (there must be a more acute way of saying this): I thought, and conjured up all sorts of images, I thought Art, and suddenly saw a picture on the wall and it stayed there. I thought about writing and I was lost for words. Once finding an appropriate word, it does not seem necessary to use all those words that expand and show that it is many other things, though I must admit that many words seem so self explanatory that few words may not seem enough - but contrary to this one word or several words are open to many interpretations...
Love Julie
Elaine Scarry had something to say about this I recall her writing about feelings that leave one speechless and struggling for something to say in On Beauty and Being Just. For me images are more enduring than words; I guess words are often not enough to say what I truly feel. And semantic meaning changes, shifts, and moves around so much that we needed to invent theatre, and a separate language for the bodies that act words out to express those ineffable things about being human that words alone so often fail to contextualize and explain.
ReplyDeleteI must read that book by Scarry. I wish that I had been more articulate 27 years ago, but am happy that if words failed at least, given what you said about Scarry - my ideas didn't.
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