Oakness

Are words the enemy of belonging? So asks Ellie Robins in considering Paul Kingsnorth’s “Savage Gods”. (See “Are Words the Enemy of Belonging?”, Los Angeles Review of Books, September 30, 2019)

She might be asking something similar in this poem gifted to me by friend and former colleague, Christina Griffith.

Here’s a transcription of Robins’ delicate treatment of this peculiar relationship between language and essential experience.

Would we be more at home
on this earth if we saw a tree
and heard
the shimmering
of its leaves,
saw their gradations of green,
felt the roughness of its bark and
the tickle
of ants scaling it,
instead of thinking
"oak"?

— Ellie Robins

I’m struck by her reference to “at home”. That feels to me a lot like belonging.

Sometimes it seems like we work our world into words for the sake of communication, clarity, and commerce. Transactional linguistics. It’s intrinsic to this civic contract we call community. Humanity. Echoes of Giambattista Vico…

Lately I’ve been wondering if words are getting in the way. Of this. Rosslyn Redux. And if so. Then. What? How?