The English Language
Most people don’t choose the language they speak. I, if my mother is to be believed, did. Her plan to raise me as a bilingual child foundered on my stubborn insistence on responding to and in English and not French. My tongue spoke only English I said and so that is the language I was raised in. Freudians can speculate on this endlessly I suppose. The fact remains that English is not only my ‘mother tongue’ but also my sandbox and plaything. I am also, to the annoyance of students, a guardian and shepherd of this tongue, a role of which I am deeply unworthy. Deep down I don’t regret this though my Gaelic and French speaking ancestors may think I have sold out to the oppressors. Perhaps I have but the fact remains that, though it is almost impossible to articulate this sensibly, I made the exact right choice. I am aware, of course, that if I were raised as a Mandarin speaker I might say the same of Mandarin. Though obvious, this objection does not quite sway me. Somewhere in the universe there might BE a better- for- me kind of language. At the same time, as a poet especially, I think English is my calling and my fate though this sounds on its face wrong and absurd. I suppose the ‘Glory of English Literature’ has something to do with this, but, if I have all-time favorite poems, they are probably by Verlaine. Plus, the names of German poets like George, Novalis and Trakl summon the occult depths of the Black Forest which I imagine as darker, more profound than anything evoked in Tennyson or Browning. That may be pure fancy on my part and I would be very unhappy if I learned enough German to find out it was not true! Furthermore, there is no English Dante and Milton and Spenser, fine as they are, do not even come close. Finally, if one brings up the question of beautiful languages someone might mention Russian or Farsi but no one EVER mentions English. I have chosen, it would seem, a slattern though I am too immersed in her materiality to ever really know.
I fear this early stubbornness may have played a role in my lamentable track record at learning other languages. Latin and Greek were terrible slogs for me and I never found my footing in them. I am clumsy as an oaf in French. One summer I got up enough Spanish to read St. John of the Cross. These baffling, beautiful poems, though, hardly seemed to be in Spanish or any other language for that matter. That is indicated, at bare minimum, by the fact that I read them with no difficulty. Thus, where deep reading is concerned I have about 500 years of English to play with. I can navigate with some rough fluency the language of Chaucer but the worlds of the Gawain poet and the Anglo-Saxons are closed books to me, a deficiency I still have some faint hope of rectifying. Within this stretch of time though I can put up my feet and luxuriate. What is more, I can create things of my own in a series of registers from vernacular poetry to formal academic prose with numerous stops between. I like the way this is possible in English. I like, as Blake did, the ‘stubborn foundations’ of English which spit out and reject certain things and not others for reasons that seem purely implicit and impossible to explain to exasperated students. Plus, I think “wiry and white fiery and whirlwind swiveled snow spins to the widow making, un-childing un-fathering deeps” reflects something more than the genius of Hopkins. I love a language in which you can pull off a sentence like that. Plus, the wide geographic extent of English and its many dialects and vernaculars allows me to add an equally virtuosic sentence from the American rapper Nas: “He's a Big Will, used to slang krill, now he own the hill/ Couldn't take losin his cash, and I could feel/ Somethin’ in the air yeah, Frank returned with Pierre/ A gun slinger, who niggaz hadn't seen in a year”.[1] Then there are triumphs of understatement such as Phillip Larkin on death: “Most things may never happen: this one will…”. This too is a bit more than individual genius. So is “Now you wear your skin like iron and your breath’s as hard as kerosene”. Plus, at the risk of being trivial, what would ‘Hop on Pop’ be without the monosyllabic substructure of a West Germanic tongue? I note this example as Children’s Lit seems to be something the English excel at though they do not seem to excel at all at raising children. Is this is because English has a natural, easy, childlike register as one of its ‘stubborn foundations’?
But what, after all, can I say to the objection that Aeschylus’ Greek or Dante’s Italian have even more marvelous properties to say nothing of Dutch, Sanskrit or Cree? Here I must call on Hegel. The tools make the worker as the worker makes the tools. There could be an alternate timeline where Michelangelo worked in sound rather than marble. In this world, the only world I know of, marble reached the pinnacle of its expressive potential at his hands and Michelangelo realized himself as an artist in marble. The man became his material and the material became a man. In just this way a carpenter may feel born to wield a hammer or a saw though, again, in some alternate timeline she COULD have been a potter. There are necessities and after the fact necessities with happy marriages, say, being one of the latter. This is because who we are, is where we build and dwell. I could have been a better, much better poet in Frisian and, if current speculation in physics is correct, in some universe I am. Turns out I am not and if happenstance is what determines that in an empirical sort of way (added to mommy issues) a language also becomes a second body. My Scottish ancestors were unjustly deprived of that body though, history being untidy and dissatisfying, I have attained one by the very same process. This is my body (and I intend EVERY resonance of this phrase) and I do not pine for another.
[1] Consider also: “The mac-ten was in the grass n’/ I ran like a cheetah with thoughts of an assassin/picked the mac up/ told brothas back up/the mac spit/lead was hittin’ niggaz one ran/I made him back flip”. This verse, by Nas, depicts a combat as visceral as any in Beowulf. I think it is greatly to the credit of English that Hopkins and Hip-Hop share more than the letter H. The Ancient scop, the English Jesuit and the black urban poet all share a common accentual ‘sprung’ meter.
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