On Language and Stories

Sometimes I’m not always great with words. At times I find myself fumbling for the correct words to use or other times I find myself effortlessly using words that I had forgotten were part of my vocabulary. It’s something about words though, there’s something about a well crafted story or speech or even a movie script that comes to life. It’s the way we can use words to shape our culture, identities and ideas. There are Inuit people who have over ten different words for the word snow. The word snow! The kind of snow, the texture, all of that and I think, “wow, if only English had that immensity to it.” The funny thing is that we do. How many different words do you know to describe the act of being wet? Soaked, drenched, wet, dripping, etc. Language, and the way we use it to craft is as beautiful as it is amazing.

Maybe that’s what I’ve always liked the idea of being a writer because then I could craft in my own way. Things aren’t always entirely unique but the ability to craft and mold an idea into something written is a wonderful labor in and of itself. My communication professor always described humans as “homonarons”, meaning we exist through stories whether written down or delivered verbally and I’ve always found that mesmerizing and untouchable in a way. It makes me wonder about the way we form concepts and ideas using words as well as warning and wonder that is our greatest achievement as a species is our ability to communicate like that. Sometimes people form fucking memories that didn’t exist because of the ability one has for storytelling, or at least they get you to that place where you can swear up and down you’ve been there before.

The only downside I see at times is the words we create and use that seem to butcher language. Bae is one of those words or YOLO. I never understood how we can take words and minimize them until I looked at how we’re diminishing the stories when not spoken. We live in 140 characters more and more and we try to make things faster. I’ve heard bae is an acronym but still, why? To me calling a significant other bae is a slap in the face and to me weakens the feeling of those peoples relationship. Use baby, babe, honey, my dear, love, anything but bae, even if it’s something ridiculous it’s always going to be better than bae. We’ve been gifted with a irritatingly complex language at times and other languages have words that far surpass the English language in terms of depth and beauty and ease of usage. So why should we start to butcher any language? I’m not sure I remember the complete wording but my girlfriend summed it up nicely by saying that this is the language she speaks so why should we be messing it up. And it’s true, why should we?

Give me stories, give me words, give me depth and rhythm. There’s a hell of a lot of stuff out there even if a lot of times now our stories steal themes because the hero story is instilled in our psyche. Have you ever read an essayist? It’s gorgeous the way you can suck someone in writing about what you’d think would be nothing and then having it just expounded upon to a level you never thought about. One thing that comes to mind is from Rebecca Stolnit about how blue represents traveling and the journey, how we’re always following the blue of life. It takes me to my writing about deserts and road trips and how the heat and openness of the desert represents travel and driving with nothing but the windows down and the country opened up. It’s like as I’m slowly reading Lolita when I have the time and the way that Nabokov writes is so much different because it’s almost poetic in its delivery. Stories, man, stories. Language, stories, words, it’s all quite lovely and I feel odd that I can expound on that but I like to do so.

It reminds me of something I wrote years ago and now I realize even then how much stories resonate with me and have long held my imagination captivated. I always thought it would be awesome if at the end of everything I had the ability to gather everything, every story, movie, thought someone had, thing they saw, like if our eyes recorded our lives. If I could have all of that and then one more lifetime to go through all of it. I’d love to create a grand epic from the beginning of the universe to the end of it and find a way to capture all those moments and put them together in a way that you watch this movie and see, well you see everything. Somehow I could capture all of the emotions, thoughts, things we see, all together in this film so we don’t just understand what it is to be human and ourselves, but we understand what it’s like to be everyone and to be made up of the universe. That what happened in the beginning is happening now and will be happening if any of this ever ends. When I think on that I get excited and sad at the same time because I know it’s not possible but can you imagine the stories one could tell or just the story you could tell? If there’s one thing we must never lose it’s our stories in whatever way we present them though if possible make sure there’s a way to have it in ones hands. That saddest day in respect to this that I can imagine is when we lose books (if we ever do) in a physical form. Language, man, language.