I'm trying to persuade my writing students that language's power lies in the way words bring reality into being. Whether the reality is visible or invisible, we create reality with language.
It's an enormous responsibilty and a lot of fun. When we write, we are creators. We can say as we write a word, "Let there be miasma" and there is miasma. Like right there, behnd the word "like" back there at the beginning of this sentence. There's miasma. I brought miasma and all that that word implies, suggests, denotes, connotes into being. I brought your history with that word into being and I brought my history with into being and the word itself has a long history, so that history is brought into being.
What history? Well miasma's history looks, briefly, like this: Origin: 1655–65; <>míasma stain, pollution, akin to miaínein to pollute, stain.
When I say, "Growing up in Kellogg was to live in a miasma", not only am I bringing into being the reality of Kellogg's air being dangerous, noxious, I am also reaching back to the Greeks who used the word miasma to suggest pollution or stain. I know Greek tragedy well enough to know that for the Greeks, the words "pollution" and "stain" carry moral implications.
When I say, "Growing up in Kellogg was to live in a miasma" is to say, if we let the word "miasma" have its full meaning, that the pollution or the stain of the emissions in Kellogg were not only poisonous, they were immoral.
That's quite a statement. I need to weigh that one. Is that the reality that I want to bring into being? Do I want to create with the word "miasma" the reality that Kellogg's pollution was a miasma and let it carry both physical denotation and moral connotation?
Yes. For people to breathe the kind of air we breathed in Kellogg is wrong. It was immoral to put economic gain ahead of people's health and promiscuously dump toxic emissions into the air.
Was it a necessary immorality? To a degree, yes. If there was going to be such a thing as Kellogg, Idaho, its existence depended upon miasma, upon pollution, upon a stain, upon immorality.
My point is that the history of a word connects us with the history of the word and the history of the thing that that word is used to denote.
Language, words bring complex realities into being, far beyond their immediate meaning.
"I grew up in a miasma." I grew up in pollution. The pollution stained Kellogg. It stained our bodies. It was a moral stain.
We accepted the miasma. We argued for it. We needed it.
We were in a bind.
7 comments:
when I eat cabbage I often create a miasma.
I like your point about the writing of a word bringing both the writer's and the reader's personal experience of the word into being. Therefore, a piece of writing, once read, can never again be a static thing--it subtly transforms with every new reader, or even with an old reader who returns to it after accumulating new experience (like the first time and the last time I read through the Chronicles of Narnia.)
It's the same with art. Once the artist has finished the work, he is only its partial owner. Each person who sees it will take something different from it based on his own experiences and filters.
I'm sorry about Kellogg, and the catch-22 of its existence.
Words and their memories are powerful indeed. I haven't been able to use the word embrace since you wrinkled up your nose and shrugged disdainfully over the use of it in writing 122 (2 years ago). It's funny how we collect favorite words and reject others. Sepulchral and viscera are 2 of my faves--how macabre of me.
I was just thinking about favorite words when I read Sara's contribution. My favorite word is cacophony.
Bill, that's an interesting outlook on Kellogg. I lived with my parents there in the summer of '74, the year where Gulf resources super-accelerated activity at Bunker Hill; the stench was unbelievable uptown. Our house at the time was in Elizabeth Park, and my bedroom was in the basement. Close to 5 miles away from the smelter. And when I woke up in the morning, with the windows shut and my bedroom door closed, I could still smell the fumes. And, I remember walking around in uptown Kellogg, taking a whiff of that smoke, and a weird funny feeling in my lungs. Up front, I never liked the valley, and it brought me a lot of grief in my life. I imagine you have a ton of mixed emotions, having grown up there, having roots there, and yet realizing "it is what it is"...if I never see Kellogg or Shoshone County again, it'll be too soon for me. Well written, though. I'd say that life in the valley gave me a "mental miasma".
Whoa. RP, miasma=Kellogg? I can't get there from here. Bunker, psychopaths in suits, corporate anonymity, fear, blinded loyalty, unquestioned belief in the goodness of "management", yes I accept all of those as being miasma, related to the entire valley, in a generic sense. But "Kellogg"? I can't make those lines connect.
Your post made me recall some of my memories of smelter smoke, so I posted it on my blog. The haze of smoke, the burning throat. But I knew no different. That is just the way it was. But I'm thankful my daughters can breathe clean air these days as they play on the playground at Sunnyside Elementary.
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