Rivers and Words

Dear Readers:

You may correctly assume that I am a fan of lists, be they practical or playful. However, lists do not explain why I post things to this blog or why I am pursuing the sort of education that I am. In short, I am addicted to words. From an early age I appreciated the connection between sound, sense, and subject. When I recollect my childhood I can recall the fun I had with the sound of particular letters and the rhymes one could produce by duplicating them. As I aged I began to think of words and their effects. A few authors and many more poets fed this addiction. If I cast about for an example then Normal Mclean comes to mind. Consider this passage from the end of the titular story of his novella A Riven Runs Through It: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”

Mclean was an author who knew both the beauty and brutality of the world and managed to capture both in his writing, a bit like Sylvia Plath. What always strikes me about Mclean’s prose is its lyricism, its taught structure, and its sparse yet effective imagery. While I can do without the Judeo-Christian references in the above passage, the metaphors work for me. And water is like memory, rolling and cascading over the details of our experience. At times languid, at other moments crushing, water carries the detritus of life along. Memory does much of the same, and like water it never follows the same course in exactly the same manner. New channels are carved, old beds abandoned in times of dryness or overabundance. Both water and memory have that connection to words that Mclean suggests. Be these the words of God or the words that name those we loved and have passed before us, the words are there holding everything together, making all possible. When I consider myself I do so in words. Long ago I learned not to trust the mental image I carried of myself. Words, however, make even the duplicitous image capable of interpretation.

If, as Mclean writes, “some of the words are theirs” then some of them are mine too, and this is why I write. My words and I are there, waiting beneath the waters of existence and memory. This is an act of excavation as much as it is an act of creation. Propelling both is the sound, hushed or shouted, whimpering or keening, breathy or bellowed, and I want the sound of my waters to carry us along, if only for a rippling moment or two.