Groping For Trouts
Words leave us captive to their magic touch but were only fooling ourselves - we are our own jailers and prefer it so.
“You can tune a piano but you can’t tune a fish”
Words, words, words. Sometimes I feel like becoming a monk solely for the reason to be beyond words, of no need of words, away from words and their slinking skullduggery. They are cruel and they often don’t mean what they mean.
I know I’m groping for trout. I’ll get to that point in a moment. First, let me tell you what set off this minor mental meandering.
My wife has been doing some translation work and she asked me about this sentence –
“The watch is going”
I immediately told her that it meant the watch was “dying” or almost finished.
She looked at me puzzled and asked if it might mean something else. I thought about it and couldn’t think of anything else it might mean (so clouded we are by the force of WORDS).
She said, “might it mean that it is working?” And then it hit me, of course, that is what it does mean! And then it hit me again, blimey — isn’t that the exact opposite of the first meaning? Oh yeah, contronyms.
You see, words have got us by the throat and they won’t let us go. They are our, are our arrrr arrrr, real taskmasters. It is us who are groping for trout.
And that brings me to the title of this little piece.
You see, often when I get confused, I seek refuge with those who have even got more confused by the same demons. So I took down my newly unpacked volumes of William Gass and cracked open an essay or two. More exactly, in his essay “Groping for Trouts” where he elaborates on how we create our own meaning of things and there is no center that holds….
“No, we can put order anywhere we like. There’s not a trout we can’t tickle, a fish for which we can’t contrive a net. We can find forms in inkblots, clouds, and the tubercular painter’s spit: and to the ants, we can impute designs that Alexander would have thought himself vainglorious to dream of. But to think of order and chaos in this relative way is not to confuse them, or put conditions out of the reach of judgment. there are clashes between orders, and confusions of realms. Not every arrangement is equally effective. And we must keep in mind the relation of any order to the chosen good.”
Hmmm. What I think good, great Gass is saying is that we create the meaning, not the words! I guess I see this point. And time, that destroyer of all things is the worst culprit. It changes the meaning and lets some things endure, and others die. And our words get full of confusion. We now drive on a parkway and park in a driveway.
Still, I’m not quite sure if words don’t have their own “hold” and power. Not to do a Wittgenstein but as a teacher, honored to be a meister of words, I’ve seen how words have their own force, independent of human will or even Fromkin and Rodman.
Think of fAt and fit. Does the eye lie? Or what of all those guttural sounds that all represent a disgUst? William Blood wrote a whole book on the poetic alphabet centuries ago and his point still stands — words (by default sound) have their own power independent of man. This is how the hole expands with slit — slat — slot (and even “slut”) as the vowel sound widens?
I guess I’m not making a lot of sense. But that is precisely the point. Words don’t make sense, so we do. Or we make sense and words do in turn. Or perhaps the truth is somewhere between?
To end on a lighter note, a story. Long ago, teaching ESL to new immigrants to Canada, I received a note from Snezenka, a Serbian student (and I kid you not, her name means, “Snow White”). It was a letter apologizing for missing some classes. At the end it read, “P.S. Thank you for the massage. As I read it, I was really confused. She was a beautiful woman and had this really happened? I was working long hours and who knows…. but then, after some thought, my mind started “going” — it dawned on me. It was simply a spelling mistake, “message” not “massage”.
I”m still like that, still groping for trout in the wonderful stream of words.
Thoughts
"Often we have to get away from speech in order to think clearly."
— R. S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology
to two too =s 3
no thinking thin king
run on sentence life sentence
le mot juste
Ommm Ahhh Oh! Yeah shhhhhhhhhh
says the tired tire
wee wee wee all the way
to the small home hole
Ole Ole Ole cafe au lait O! Lay
lady lay……
springs sing
in the flower bed
every year why ear?
we’re here weir
damn it! damn it! damn it!
aswants the tin mad!
steeling a way
anyway,
something like that
3 eees
with ease
we do as we please
stuckkkkkkkkkkkkin
bloody place body face
two faced the mirror
or rathOR
saw themselves in two
two pieces suits you
ewe moo you and who
who who who who
hoots the unfoul owl
Ough! aaaH! Ouch!
we too two wake up
at a wake
who who who who
died? Lewis
carolled
no question to mark
the grave
question a quest
ask again, request
Hark! who who who
goes there
any way or
somewhere like that
cuz THAT
is how it goes
goes goes ooooooooos
around
another round please
the wait ‘er is over
we have time to
two all ready drunks
drink up get down
kup after hiccup
to ketchup
words aren’t enough
but they’re all
we hal ve
ah!!! So unfair there is
no fair where
we’re goinggoinggoingone
all sawn
see saw
in two pieces
who says.