Lost for Words
In this piece for The Pilgrim magazine psychotherapist Susan Holliday suggests we need language rooted in nature to reveal the intimate ecologies of the heart
‘The Gleaners’ by Jean François Millet (1857)
She stands truncated. Limbs which once reached up like widespan fingers, now stick out like sore thumbs. Bleak as the sky which replaces her, the evidence of brutality lies exposed for all to see. Light deserts the old oak. Shorn of leaves, it has nowhere to land, to dance and play. Dumb stupidity replaces the eloquence of movement. No more rustling, creaking, whispering or weeping. She is deathly silent.
Rigid with shock and disbelief, I want to cry, to tear, pound and wail, but I too am stumped. The sap of language in me cauterized, I have no words to express my sorrow, my rage, my utter incomprehension.
What language can we use to clothe feelings which surface when something or someone we love is dismantled, their vitality and grace stolen, their life inexplicably truncated? As a psychotherapist during these months of the pandemic, I have born witness to hopes which once reached up like widespan fingers now brutally cut short, to lives deserted by light, to homes now deathly silent. I have held a space open for men and women who find themselves lost for words.
In the wildness of grief, where internal landscapes are breaking apart and reforming, our emotions lie ‘twisted about one another in giant and swollen groupings.’[i] It’s genuinely difficult to tell them apart. At times like these, language is a navigational tool essential for survival. Words are harbours in the wild seas of original experience. Places of anchorage. Sheltered within their walls, we begin to see where we are.
Disturbed by the swell of emotions, language often seems to fail us. Everything withdraws into a tunnel of silence as we confront feelings which appear unspeakable. Infact all original experience is, by definition, unspoken. Poets give voice to this inarticulate speech of the heart precisely because they stay with ineffable feelings long enough for language to surface. They bear with the experience of being tongue-tied.
This birthing of articulate vision, as Emerson reminds us, can test us to the core.
“Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own.[ii] ”
Words are dream catchers. They conjure intimations of feeling into form from the depths of experience. This fragile cargo of meaning is easily miscarried by the intervention of abstract language. Budding insight is quickly buried under the dead weight of dusty descriptors. Increasingly however, we are encouraged to see the ebb and flow of our hearts through a vocabulary littered with inert nouns which solidify, categorise and label human experience. ‘Grief’ for example is represented through a linear sequence of stages: ‘Denial. Anger. Depression. Bargaining. Acceptance’. Devoid of tenderness, story and movement, abstractions like these pin the butterflies of our hearts to the board.
Like the wind, which we discern through the rustle of leaves, or the ripple of water, our psychological life is revealed through the ways in which it moves us. If we are to see into the vital ecology of our hearts, we need verbs which move and symbols which clash together. As Jay Griffiths reminds us in her book Wild, ‘all things that represent life at its most vital and wild wiggle. Words wiggle into metaphor.’[iii] These wiggling words are rarely found in psychology textbooks. They are seeded in a native tongue rich in poetic imagery.
In an age where the power to name experience is outsourced to experts, we are perhaps losing sight of the searing (seer-ing) truth which sounds within everyday speech. Increasingly accustomed to grabbing words out of the manual, we have lost faith in the wellspring of living language which is woven into our everyday vernacular. Listening to the stories of men and women who have worked on the frontline of the pandemic in hospital ICUs, I have been moved by their frequent use of the word ‘harrowing’. The vital metaphor at the heart of the word has been worn away through long usage. If the word is to shed light and bring solace, it needs to be re-storied.
The harrow is a heavy metal implement which is dragged over a ploughed field, to cut into clods of earth and break apart remnants of the old crop, in preparation for seeding. Harrowing creates space for the soil to breathe, to open, to receive.
Re-visioned and re-rooted in our relationship to the natural world, language like this opens up a story with a narrative trajectory which renders experience meaningful. Witness to sudden loss, lives are broken apart. Old ways of being are overturned. Redundant priorities, like stones, lie suddenly exposed at the surface. Held tenderly and with insight, this turning over prepares the soil for new life to grow. Time and again in recent months I have seen how the harrowed heart is opened to a deeper capacity for love.
Language renders our emotions apparent, vivid and differentiated through the art of naming. A name wraps itself around a newborn feeling as closely as skin or pelt. In its belly it carries a story, seeded with vital and particular meaning. In his book Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane laments the falling away of a once rich and vibrant naming of the natural world. His book begins with a list of nature words recently culled from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, words like acorn, adder, ash, beech and bluebell. This depletion of vocabulary, he argues, leads inexorably to an impoverishment of perception itself. In place of ash, beech, oak, elm or birch, we are now more likely to see is ‘tree’. In place of daisy or cowslip we might see ‘wildflower’, or worse still ‘weed’.
What is being lost here is an infinitely varied poetic vernacular which tells the story of each species. Cowslip originates in cu-slyppe meaning ‘cow dung’. It tells us about the place in which this little flower thrives. Daisy was originally ‘day’s eye’, a tender tribute to the face which opens afresh to greet each new day. Macfarlane argues that the depletion of the natural world is actual and imaginal. As we crowd ourselves into urban spaces, we are losing our ability to name our native wildlife and topography and ‘once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen.[iv] Unseen they become vulnerable to violation and neglect.
As a traveller in the landscapes of human nature, I believe we are also losing our ability to name (and so to see) the intricate ecology of our hearts. Increasingly we seem fixated on a small number of sunny aspects. Happiness and success have become the benchmarks of worth and wellbeing. Instead of looking closely at the other side of ‘happy’ or ‘successful’, we tend to negate them by adding the prefix ‘un’. This gives us bland binary configurations like happy and un-happy. Lacking the vital resonance of story and meaning, we try to pull these ‘weed-words’ out.
Of course, the absence of happy is not just negative space. It has a finely delineated shape pregnant with story. We might feel bereft, melancholy, yearning, floundering, despondent, desolate, or bewildered, to name but a few possibilities. Each of these states has its own truth, its own narrative root and trajectory, its own exquisite distinction. Faced by the sweeping changes wrought in our lives by the pandemic, many of us have felt ‘bewildered’. Severed from its imaginal roots, the word has come to mean ‘baffled’. Re-storied, it carries a much more vital and specific meaning. The word ‘wild’, which lies at the heart of our bewilderment, shares its origins with the Old English ‘weald’ and ‘wold’, both vernacular names for native forest. To feel bewildered means to experience our inner landscape as a densely wooded tangle of emotions, an indigenous place with its own will, its own rhythms and balance.
This other-wise state will need to be approached with respect if it is to become known. We cannot simply slap a label on the wealds of the heart and expect these regions to succumb to our will. Bewilderment requires us to slow down, to look around, to listen. There is an intensity to this state of being. For it is precisely when we are lost that we become most fully present. Wits sharpen, instincts stir, senses awaken. Untethered from signposts, charts and familiar landmarks, we find ourselves asking ‘what can I glean about the place I find myself in?’
The word ‘glean’ has largely fallen into disuse, but it carries a particular resonance in this time of change and loss. It originates in the Latin ‘glennare’ meaning to piece together through a gathering of fragments. Millet’s glorious painting ‘The Gleaners’ reminds us of the centuries old right of the poor to pick over the harvested fields in search of grain left by the reapers. Gleaning is patient and painstaking work. Likewise, in the wake of the pandemic’s reaping, new life is pieced together, bit by bit, from the scythed stubble of loss.
Shorn of a language of experience once rich in imagery drawn from nature, we increasingly see our emotional worlds through muddy mood words like ‘fine’ and ‘ok’, or ‘down’ and ‘low’. These bland descriptors give voice to a turbid mix of feelings and thoughts. Weighed down by these unintelligible stirrings, the impressions of our inner life clog together in a hairball of sensation which clogs up the flow of experience. Medicating this mire of symptoms into an uneasy slumber, we shoot the messenger.
Lost for our own words, we turn to the language of popular psychology. The narrative around mental health is awash with bucket words which gather up the exquisite complexity and delicacy of the human condition in a single swill. Words like depression and anxiety cast themselves across human experience like giant trawler nets which indiscriminately capture a myriad of finely differentiated species of experience in their mesh. These labels offer us a semblance of discernment. ‘Ah that’s what I’m feeling’ we say, relieved someone has got a map. In truth we have just exchanged one bland irreducible descriptor for another.
It seems increasingly clear to me that the words we need to articulate the tumults, desolations and epiphanies of experience are found in figures of speech rooted in a natural world which is essentially dynamic, intricate and meaningful. In A Grief Observed, C S Lewis’ intimate record of losing his wife Joy to cancer, he repeatedly turns to images from nature to articulate his grief. Torn between his longing to be released from the agony of remembrance and his fear of forgetting, Lewis writes:
“Slowly, quietly, like snowflakes that
come when it is going to snow all night -
flakes of me, my impressions, my selections,
are settling down on the image of her.
The real shape will be quite hidden in the end”
It is hard to imagine a more tender articulation of this season of sorrowing.
Trapped between the emptied husks of worn-out words and the sclerotic language of diagnosis, our rich human topography of experience risks falling out of view. This loss of poetic vision may itself be contributing to the epidemic of emptiness and despair which fuels our manic consumption. Our myopia, it seems, is costing us the earth.
[i] Marcel Proust, in Upheavals of Thought by Martha C Nussbaum (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[ii] Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844, The Poet (Create Space, 2017), p.37.
[iii] Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey (Penguin, 2006).
[iv] Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (Penguin, 2015).
[v]. C S Lewis, A Grief Observed (Faber and Faber, 1961).
This article first appeared in The Pilgrim Magazine June 2021
The Pilgrim is a new magazine for people passionate about nature, discovery, culture, literature, history, the arts, with a strong interest in deepening their knowledge of the world.
