“Words are events, they do things, change things… transform both speaker and hearer… feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her magnificent meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and each other two centuries after Mary Shelley prophesied that “words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”

I have been thinking lately about words, the power of them and the prison of them, the way we task them with containing the inarticulable and then come to mistake them for the contents, the way they are still our best hope for bridging the abyss between us in order to be understood. And yet outside of music and mathematics, the dream of a common language is just a dream. We speak of language as if it were unitary, forgetting that within any one tongue are nested infinities — the slang of subcultures, the vernacular of different generations and heritages, the private lexicon of lovers. When the parts we live with try to speak to each other, they speak in different tongues we keep translating to discern the whole and articulate it to others, to say who we are and what we want, how we suffer and how we like to be loved.

bell hooks takes on these infinities in one of the essays collected in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (public library). With an eye to a line from an Adrienne Rich poem that lodged itself in her soul and became the lever for her reckoning with language, she writes:

Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will… to challenge and assist.

“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” Rich wrote in her epochal collection The Dream of a Common Language. We speak our loves to make them true, to make them tender. To say “I want you” is to walk right up to the edge of the abyss and leap, hoping to be caught; it is to say “I want to live.” A generation after Pablo Neruda made words an object of desire, hooks makes desire the subject of words:

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.

[…]

To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language.

We are not, however, merely the users of language — we are its makers. Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great revelation of Einstein’s relativity was that spacetime — the fabric of the universe — tells matter how to move and matter tells spacetime how to bend. Language is the fabric of our lives. Language tells thinking how to move and thought tells language how to bend. We can bend ideas with words, we can even break them to make a mosaic of the pieces in the image of the world we want to live in, in the shape of our desires.

Reflecting on desire as the antidote to dualism, the most primal integration of the body and the mind, hooks writes:

To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular… There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do… liberating ourselves in language.

Couple with hooks on hove, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem and artist Julie Paschkis’s illustrated love letter to words.