SOURCE: "About Language," in Ohio Review, 1994, pp. 7-19.

Great stories give us metaphors that flash upon the mind the way lightning flashes upon the earth, illuminating for a instant an entire landscape that had been hidden in the dark.

In some sense all stories are metaphors. There is mystery in the way they make recognizable what we think we have not experienced. Four hundred years ago, Edmund Spenser, the English poet, wrote: "The story of any man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of everyone of us." It is as though at the core of humanness, at least in young humans, there is a readiness for news not only from the world apprehended by the senses but from those other worlds reached through imagination.

In an essay on story, a contemporary writer, Carol Bly, has written: "The human mind recognizes a feeling only when it has words for it—which means someone else has conversed in it. When Conrad Aiken in his story Silent Snow, Secret Snow tells the reader how much the boy loves his beautiful imagined inner life—the snow—we recognize the same love in our own inner life. If we hadn't had his story, and others like it, we might never recognize how dear we hold our private perception of the universe."

A writer gathers up all the seemingly random elements of life, stares into the roiling mass of feeling and thought that is at once the affliction and peculiar blessing of being human, and finds a design—that is, a story. If it is a good story, if it is after truth, it intimates what is beyond words. If it is a poor story, no matter how skilled its use of language, it is only words, and a reader senses in it an intrusive self-congratulation like that suggested by a Buddhist homily that tells of a man who pointed at the moon but wanted the onlooker to notice only his pointing finger.

Everyone's story matters. Each story is, one might say, a word in a larger story, the intimations of which can reach us in myriad ways, through religion and philosophy, or in a sudden tremor of sensibility that, for an instant, can penetrate the fog of our ignorance not only of why we are here, but where here is.

"Maybe we're here," wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, "only to say: house, / bridge, well, gate, jug, olive-tree, window—/ at most, pillar, tower—but to say them, remember,/ oh! to say them in a way that the things themselves / never dreamed of existing so intensely." Rilke's words make me think of the immense silence into which we hold up our small bundle of words. It is like the blue light of our small planet glimmering in the darkness all around.

The language of great poets and writers alludes to what we cannot speak. It enables us to question the surface of life. Robert Louis Stevenson said there aren't enough words in Shakespeare to express the merest fraction of human experience in one hour. But, he wrote, "a particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable that it makes us forget the absence of many which remain unexpressed, like a bright window in a distant view."

The urgency with which we describe our passages through life appears involuntary, as though the impulse to record the journey is as powerful as the impulse to speak—a thing embedded in the genetic make-up of our species. "To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday at 12 o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike and I began to cry simultaneously," so David Copperfield announces his birth. When I first read that opening passage—after all, the simple statement of arrival anyone who has lived and anyone alive at this moment could make—I was 10, and I was electrified. I've since then read it to students, some very young, some old, and I've seen on most of their faces that startled attention that gripped me when I was a child. It is downright and plain, but the stroke of art in it, I think, lies in the word believe. It is exactly the light word to convey David Copperfield's nature, and to suggest his destiny, which is to unfold in the hundreds of pages that follow. It is a humorous word in its context, faintly, in fact, disbelieving.

Record-keeping began millennia before Charles Dickens was born, in cave paintings, in the lists on shards of the pottery of vanished civilizations, in the accounts, journals, logs, and diaries discovered in those first written languages of which we have any knowledge. There is the unwritten library too, what used to be called the oral tradition, tales passed from generation to generation; generations that lived before the blind poet we call Homer told of wily Odysseus, of Hector, the great warrior, of the mischief of Paris and Helen's beauty—a library that we must hope will endure long after our own time, long after the life and death of another blind poet, Jorge Luis Borges, who died in 1986, 2700 years after Homer spoke his poem.

Poetry and imaginative literature are record-keeping of all that animates what we name, variously, the soul, the psyche, spirit, mind, and heart. But words are not the things they name. They are things themselves, potent and galvanizing, that can arouse and disturb, provoke laughter or murder, and even instruct us as to their limitations when, after we think we have explained everything, we are confronted by existence itself.

Language can only point at reality, like a mute gesturing frantically at the unnameable. Still, we are driven to speak, to try to understand, to try to penetrate mysteries, to interpret the not altogether reliable news we receive from our senses, to "get it." And in some fashion, if insufficiently, we can get it, such is the power of language.

But it is fragile, too, and always at risk. It is so much easier to resort to the day's catch-words, its jargon, when one is in the grip of fear and confusion, startled by the intimation of the chaos that can turn life upside down on any sunny morning.

There is a great affair now in this country about dialects, about their right to claim equal standing with the English that has dominated written and spoken discourse for centuries. Yet English itself is a dialect. It belongs to a Germanic sub-family of Indo-European, whose vast range includes such disparate sub-families as Arcadian Greek, Old Norse, Celtic, and, far far back, hieroglyphic Hittite. All languages are dialects, constantly in flux, shrinking or swelling, subject to the migrations and settlements and conflicts of human history.

Years ago, among the many jobs I had in my youth was one that involved reading South American and Mexican novels for a movie studio. I was paid $6 to $9 for each book, depending on its length, and I was obliged to summarize plots to present to producers who would judge whether or not they were movie material. I was hired because I could speak Spanish. Or so I thought. What I discovered, after my first attempts at reading these works, was that what I spoke was Cuban, itself composed of dialects, with words absorbed from Africa and China, from native Carib, as well as the varied Latin-rooted Spanish, colored by idioms from all the provinces of Spain from which colonizers came to Cuba. For the novels of Chile and Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru, I needed Quechua, or at least some familiarity with a few of its 28 sub-groups. The job didn't last long, and I was careful after it to qualify what I meant when I said I could speak and read Spanish.

What interests me as a working writer are the ways in which we use language to elucidate reality or to falsify it in whatever dialect we claim as ours, and another way in which we don't use it for anything except as vocal padding around nothing at all, as in a brief exchange I overheard as I walked on the street behind two men.

"It's going to rain. You know what I'm saying?" asked one.

"I hear you," replied the other.

Then there are those dry-as-dust phrases that seduce speaker and listeners into thinking something important is actually being said, as in an interview of a sociologist on a radio program I listened to. The sociologist became so unhinged by his use of the phrase "in terms of" that it seemed to take on physical properties, like a maze, from which he was unable to escape. At last he actually said, "in terms of … in terms of…." There was a broken giggle, silence, then a burst of vapid music during which, I imagined, the sociologist was led away to rest for a while.

It is not hard to find words that have been so mauled that their original meanings have leaked out of them like air from punctured balloons, words, for example, like creative and concept, that are applied recklessly to all manner of human endeavor, and are used to characterize not only the effort involved in the deployment of armed rockets in space, but also the latest design in running shoes for the middle-aged jogger.

The French poet Paul Verlaine said one hundred years ago, "When you hear the word concept, get up at once and leave the room."

It is the lingo of psychology and sociology, initially devoted to the exploration and explication of human community and behavior, that has made singular contributions to the disintegration of meaning in language. I think of a middle-aged woman I knew, who, when she learned her father was close to death, said at once that death could be a "very enriching experience." Before her emotions could be engaged by this momentous event in her life, she had sped away from it, staking out a claim for the enrichment of her own soul before the anguish of a death could get the drop on her.

Even in minor matters we are too impatient to permit ourselves to be as puzzled as, in truth, we are. We rush to define events before we begin to sense what we feel about them. We are astonished, then chagrined and frightened at the fluid, shifting nature of our own feelings. We refuse to put up with uncertainty. So we write off continents of human mysteries with feeble clichés; we reduce the living person standing right in front of us to a heap of sociological or psychological platitudes.

Of course we put names to things to help ourselves begin to understand them, and, in the social sciences, to establish reference points from which to construct theories about human behavior. But there is a counter-tendency. We also name them so as to dismiss them and rid ourselves of the hard work of reflection. It appears to be the tendency of these disciplines to grow rigid in time if an opposing impulse does not come into play to break up the frozen mass of certainties.

The most cursory glance at changes in thinking about psychology over the last 50 years suggests we can only hypothesize about the nature of human personality. New information is always arriving. It may be partly that because we do not have the steadying forms of older cultures to fall back upon, we are, as a nation, more open to the new. And it is a great thing not to be sealed into the tombs of the past, a great thing to resist the impulse to ransom openness in order to preserve dead tradition. But the danger is to hail what is new as absolute truth—until the next new comes along to displace it.

Nietzsche observed that everything absolute leads to pathology. A contemporary physicist, Dr. David Bohm, writes that "most categories are so familiar to us that they are used almost unconsciously … it is possible for categories to become so fixed a part of the intellect that the mind finally becomes engaged in playing false to support them."

What I am thinking about is the deadening of language, an extreme alienation from living experience which manifests itself in words that have no resonance, a language of labels that numbs our power to feel, our sensibilities, and stifles our innate capacity to question, to turn things over in our minds and reflect upon them. During the Vietnam war, the phrase body count entered the American vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporting. It distances us from the terrible reality of the dead and mutilated.

The language of labels is like money issued with nothing of intrinsic value behind it. And it is dangerous. George Orwell wrote that if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A while ago I saw an appalling instance of language gone berserk in the words of a woman interviewed in the parking lot of a small office building in which a man had just shot 7 people to death. Yes, she had seen it all, she told the television reporter, just as she was about to get into her car. For a moment she ducked out of camera range, then reappeared clasping in her arms her son, a boy of 5 or 6. "He saw it all, too, and it was a real learning experience," she said.

Last fall, as schools were opening, a series of interviews brought another child and his mother before the camera. The mother smiled dotingly and ruefully as she confessed she had paid nearly $100 for the running shoes her 8-year old was wearing to his first day in school. No, she replied to the reporter's question, she really couldn't afford them but felt she had to buy them. Whereupon the 8-year-old piped up, "You have to do what your peer group does," a non-thought he may have picked up from television, that great forum of shiftlessness and banality.

Why has the word indicate taken the place of said, as in "The journalist indicated the building had been bombed"? What is the gain? And consider "like," which has broken loose from hip talk, once its main province, and taken root in the daily language of observation and emotion, so involuntary as to seem a neurologicaltic. "I feel like sad," said a youth after the shooting murder of a classmate in a gun- and gang-beleaguered Brooklyn high school.

There is to me a significant shade of difference between sad and like sad. Perhaps "like," meaningless and automatic, served to postpone, if only for a split-second, the realization of a real death. To say I feel sad is concrete. But as Orwell observed in 1949, the whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. I think of loving, caring, sharing, healing, the four new horsemen—or horsepeople—of a limp apocalypse. I think of the vast range of human emotion and need which is to be packaged by them, its paradoxes and contrarieties smoothed flat. I think of the way their deep meaning has been made meager by mindless use. They have become formulas. In a publisher's ad I saw in the New York Times, a plug for a murder mystery began, "lovingly written…."

Picture, if you will, Macbeth and Othello, the Karamazov brothers, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Lady Chatterley, and even Scarlett O'Hara, in the waiting room of a contemporary therapist, desperate to discuss their problems of low self-esteem. "Self-esteem," its presence or absence, is to guarantee success or abysmal failure, as it seeks to explicate all human behavior, as though human beings have not waked in the mornings to do the daily drudgery of the world, made art and science, built up civilizations, and given charity and hope and love to each other in famine and war and pestilence, when they were half-mad with suffering and bewilderment.

Should we not honor and esteem the life in the self as well as the self in life?

In a book whose title I have forgotten, I recall reading that American English as it is routinely spoken—and apart from the often impenetrable jargon of specialists—consists of about 142 words, and that this number is shrinking rapidly. The world may end as T. S. Eliot intimated, not with a bang but with a whimper, at least the world of mind.

The rock-bottom significance of language, its organic nature, can be exemplified in the difference between the German of Goethe and Heine, and the German spoken in the concentration camps of World War II. The latter speech was totally barbarized to fit the circumstance. While he was a prisoner in Auschwitz, the Italian-Jewish writer, Primo Levi, noted that the German infinitive, to eat, when applied to the feeding of prisoners, was rendered as fressen, which in good German is applied only to the feeding of animals. When violence is done to people, it is preceded by violence done to and in language.

A few months ago, a representative of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam asserted during a speech he made at Kean College in New Jersey, that Jews have stolen rubies, pearls, and diamonds from every country in the world, which, he said, explained the word, jewelry. He used his own gross ignorance to invent an etymology that incites to murder.

As we grow up, we learn to make distinctions between what we call real and what we call imagined, almost always at the expense of the latter. Yet it is imagination that brings us intimations of the elusive truth of being, and of what Carl Jung called "the terrible ambiguity of the moment." Imagination is as stifled by obscure and ornate language as it is by psychological and sociological cant. And there are too many experts in those fields who believe there are answers to anything, and anything is defined by them as that for which they have answers.

I read the following statement in a newspaper column: "The youngest sibling in a family unit, encouraged by her role models, has begun to communicate interpersonally." Is this illuminating about the onset of speech? Is there a way to communicate other than interpersonally? What is a role model? A person? A call to Central Casting? Is life a performance? Recently I reread E. M. Forster's novel A Room with a View, and this passage struck me: "She gave up trying to understand herself and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catchwords. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their striving after virtue."

A sculptor acquaintance, who teaches art at the Pratt Institute, told me about a student in her class who announced, "I can't relate to him," when the sculptor began the semester with a lecture on Leonardo da Vinci. The student, adept at ideological bullying, went on to say, "Da Vinci has no relevance for today's artists." Used in such a manner, relevance can only be capricious, a thing that can change from month to month as fashion does, a powerful constraint on the effort to see beyond the immediate and opportune.

An implication underlying this phrase relate to is that what one doesn't recognize as directly pertaining to one's own life is, at best, of no interest and, at worst, menacing. How are people to learn with an attitude that is so inimical to spiritual growth, to the spirit of inquiry that has wrung from our species its best thought and art? "I can't identify … I can't relate to…." What is the consequence of these notions, if not their intent, but to consign to oblivion all that is unlike us, all that we are not habituated to?

The literature of imagination cannot survive such strictures as these. It is a paradox that in this most "now" atmosphere, where only the "new" is supposed to engage us, the opposite occurs. Novels must substantiate what we think we already know. How like the affliction borne by contemporary composers: If it isn't Mozart, if I can't whistle it, burn it! The ungenerous, narrow ideas of relevance, of self-identification must be reinvented. They perpetuate the provincialism of self. They banish the interesting from life.

When I was young, I, and the people I knew, read novels for news. News is the very meaning of the word novel. We read for the transforming experience of losing ourselves in a great story, and when it ended, turning our still dazzled eyes and attention to daily life, of finding our lost selves returned to us, consoled and deepened.

It was the tail-end of the Depression. War was imminent. A person who had been to college was an oddity. We were poor. The circumstances of most of the people I knew were like mine: grim. Yet we read and exchanged books. I still have a worn copy of Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald that may have been given to me, or else which I pinched. And I remember with what inexpressible delight I found in "Ode to a Nightingale," by Keats, the very words of that title. I read the novel while I looked for miserable jobs and cheap places to live. I read The Idiot, too, and A Passage to India, and novels by D. H. Lawrence and Faulkner and Hemingway and O'Hara and Tolstoy, and Chekhov's stories. And I and the people I knew, as we scrounged to live, talked and talked about them.

For some of us, it was the way we began to learn about the world. The novel, unlike other art forms, contains things that are, in a sense, alien to it—science and history, religion, music, art, and above all, psychology.

"People in a novel need not be like real ones," Ortega y Gasset wrote. "It is enough they are possible."

What great novelists and poets try to imagine is truth. And truth is like the light that falls, without prejudice or judgment, on the French Riviera of the '20s, 19th-century Russia, a mining town in England, the snows of Kilimanjaro, and the narrow dusty roads of a southern hamlet. The light fell, too, on me, on the people I knew, who were like beads from a broken string, rolling about the country, trying to find places where we could exist. Literature and poetry gathered us up.

Reading was healing. It went with love and caring. Books were shared.

Now we have arrived in a time where the summoning of imagination to put the self in another's place, that most fundamental function of writing, perhaps of human community itself, is under siege. I heard an interview on the National Public Radio in which the interviewer, a woman, asked a male novelist, in a disbelieving voice, "You're writing about a woman? From the inside? How fascinating!"

She may have been simply ignorant of all that literature has aspired to. I suspect not. I suspect her posture was disingenuous, dictated by the new truth squads among us who command writers to write only about their own genders and ethnicities and circumstances. She had lost, or never attained, that ordinary sense, that it requires an imaginative leap over the fence of one's gender to understand the opposite sex, and that that leap is propelled by the same kind of imagination needed to understand anything.

The ideology of these truth squads sanctifies the differences between people, attributes only virtue to one group, only villainy to another. The squads have been always a part of the human community, ordering people about, telling them how to think, and in extreme instances, cutting out their tongues when they were displeased.

That fence I spoke about is turned into a metaphysical wall, impossible to scale. Even to try is an offense, or, as was suggested in the interview, peculiar. People who claim that no one has the authority to write about them except themselves are really asserting that they are unimaginable.

I cannot conceive of a more devastating isolation than that suggested by the idea that I am unimaginable except to someone of the same sex and background, the same age and experience of life. That is—a clone of myself. What unutterable boredom!

There is no such clone. We are as individual as our thumb prints, a perception that ought not be confined to police stations. Writers have always known it. They have been obliged by the nature of their work to break through the arbitrary barriers erected by that tribalism which may be yet another original sin. Or so it would seem from its consequences today and throughout human history. Writers have been obliged to go against the sulk of passing ideologies, to reveal, as great clowns do, the underside of our nervous certainties, our crippling and murderous follies.

Hard and unremitting labor is what writing is. Yet it is in that labor that I feel the weight and force of life. That is its nettlesome reward. It is not usually easy to convince people in writing courses just how much unremitting labor is required of a writer. Gene Tunney, a writer of the '40s, said: "Writing is easy. You just sit there staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

Sentimentality, as opposed to sentiment, is another enemy of writing. Sentimentality says: only feelings matter, thought doesn't matter; words don't matter. That's like telling a pianist that it is of small consequence if you play B-flat instead of the C-sharp that is written on the score. It's the feeling that counts. Tell that to a musician. Tell a writer language doesn't matter. Words, like notes, have tempo and color and innate sequence, and they are as elusive as will-o-the-wisps—the right words, that is, the ones we must struggle to find.

None of us, or very few, I think, are partial to slow, ruthless wearying effort. Yet there comes a time when you know that ruthless effort is what you must exert. There is no other way, and along that way you will find such limitations in yourself as to make you gasp with the knowledge of them. Yet, still, you work on. If you have done that for a long time, something will happen to you. You will succeed in becoming dogged. You will have become resolute about one thing—you go to your desk day after day, and you try to work. You give up the hope you can come to a conclusion about yourself as a writer. You give up conclusion.

A critic of the '20s, John Middleton Murry, wrote a definition of the writer's work: "A writer does not really come to conclusions about life, he discovers a quality in it. His emotions, reinforcing one another gradually form in him a habit of emotion; certain kinds of objects and incidents impress him with a peculiar significance. This emotional bias or predilection is what I have ventured to call the writer's mode of experience; it is by virtue of this mysterious accumulation of past emotions that the writer … is able to accomplish the miracle of giving to the particular the weight and force of the universal."

My Spanish grandmother told me stories of her life in Spain before and after she was sent at the age of 16 to marry a man she had never seen. Some stories were comical, some were filled with dread. My grandfather, a man from Asturia, owned a plantation far from Havana. His very young bride was plunged into a 19th-century colonial world that is now gone forever. He died just after the Spanish-American War. Her life was changed violently again when she left the plantation, most of which had been burned to the ground during the war, and came to the United States.

What I recall about her stories, told to me in fragments over the years I lived with her in a rather mean little suburb on Long Island, was an underlying elegiac note, a puzzled mourning for the past. Every story, as substantial, as palpable, as the kitchen table where we often sat, or in the tiny living room where sunlight fell upon a worn carpet through the rusted bars of a fire escape, had a subtext, and it was its melancholy note I can still hear.

Concrete stories, transcendental meanings; surface and depth. Writing is a struggle to understand the mystery of human life. Writers—real writers—do not claim the discovery of truth. What they attempt to arrest is that reality we embody so that we can bring it closer to the light of consciousness. Stories re-invent the world so that we can look at it. Stories are those bright windows of Robert Louis Stevenson's, shining in the darkness that ever threatens to shroud them.

"It sometimes seems to me," Franz Kafka begins a letter to his friend, Max Brod, "that the nature of art in general, the existence of art, is explicable solely in terms of making possible the exchange of truthful words from person to person." Such a claim for language, for story, for writing that holds both writer and reader accountable to each other, reminds us that reading is the great answering art to the art of fiction.

The Greek word for reading means: recognition.