Squiggles

One Thanksgiving when I was very young, after supper, the children excused from the table while the adults lingered over shards of mincemeat pie and tiny glasses of Bénédictine, the older cousins took me to one of the upstairs bedrooms, where they lit a candle in the dark and read me Edgar Allen Poe until I screamed. I sometimes think of this as the night I fell in love with language, the night I first felt its power. The night I suddenly couldn’t wait to read.

My early language experiences were, by contemporary standards, rather haphazard. This was long before the Age of Sesame Street, children’s TV still had delightfully little interest in education, and, while I certainly had a set of alphabet blocks, my parents weren’t overly solicitous that I become well lettered. What I liked about the letters on the blocks were their shapes: their edges, their curves, their serifs. They were to me as so many squiggles, and I enjoyed placing them next to each other simply for the visual pleasure of the juxtaposition (a pleasure I recall every time I see the word “onyx”).

My sense that those squiggles put into a certain, set, repeatable order could actually convey meaning I owe primarily to commerce and politics. One night as we were driving through the city in the family station wagon, we passed a billboard for Coca-Cola. Excited, I said, “Oh look!” and apparently read the billboard verbatim. My family was astonished. But as they asked me how I had figured out the words, they realized that I had seen the ad so many times already on TV that I just automatically blurted out the slogan when I saw the billboard. As it turned out, instead of being a prodigy I was a notch above (or perhaps below) Pavlov’s dog, and in developmental terms the experience had less to do with the language part of my brain than with whatever lobe it is that controls human sensitivity to marketing. Nonetheless, a phantasm had clearly been created. I had connected the sequence C-o-c-a-C-o-l-a with the universal “soda” or, perhaps more broadly, “sugar delivery systems”. I was on my way.

It was my encounter with the sequence R-u-s-s, however, that truly shook my world. “Russ” was editorial shorthand for Russia, and in those Cold War breakfasts of my childhood it showed up with some frequency on the front page of my father’s newspaper. One morning I finally asked him, “What’s that word?” He looked where I was pointing and said, “Russ.” Now, our next-door neighbors had a boy named Russ, so I asked, “Why is he always in the paper?” My father smiled, took a sip of his coffee, and said, “Because he does bad things.” “Where?”, I wanted to know. He shook his head and folded up the paper. “Well, just about everywhere, I guess.” At first I thought that the newspaper Russ was our Russ next door, but, although he was a teenager, he seemed nice enough and had a paper route, which I figured didn’t leave him much time for worldwide havoc. But my older brother had read me Superman comics, in which there were any number of global-scale villains, and I suddenly realized that, while my brother had told me Superman wasn’t real, apparently the villains were. A new phantasm had formed, and its universal was “evil in the world”.

Learning to read became an idée fixe. I couldn’t wait to get to school, where, I thought, the entire day was dedicated to reading and writing. In the event, I was totally blindsided by math and afforded it only the most perfunctory attention, a stance I’ve pretty much maintained to this day. Religion, however, was an extraordinary surprise. My parents had, of course, sketched in the rough outlines of God—his goodness, his love; the fact that he was “always watching”—but it wasn’t until I was handed over to the nuns that I began to see how fascinating he really was (as were, of course, the nuns themselves). God became as important a reason for going to school as reading, and as my linguistic infrastructure was being laid it became the template for my experience of God as well. The opening pages of my first grade reader—“David./See David./See David run./Run, David run.”—rendered my hearing of the Creation Story as “God/See God./See God create./Create, God, create.”, and I believe this basic template, in its movement from object to observation to reflective engagement, has informed everything I’ve read or written since. At the end of every novel, every essay, every poem, every Gospel, I just want David to run.

The rest is a sentimental blur of grammar exercises, phonics worksheets, spelling bees, parsing sentences and, of course, diagramming them. (I especially liked the little side roads off the main highway for prepositional phrases.) I’ve spent the lion’s share of my life as what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls a “language worker”, and, as I move into the metaphorical autumn of my life, I sometimes feel I am at this point nothing but language held together by moisturizer. I currently work as a proofreader and copy editor, paying my rent on other people’s mistakes.

I work—and I pray. My native sense that language shares a syntax with the divine has never left me and has, in fact, only grown over the years. More and more I find God at the heart of language; and more and more I find that true language is only found at the heart of God. Indeed, I suspect that we were only given language in the first place so that we could pray. My own prayer life is largely centered on the Liturgy of the Hours and lectio divina, the latter informed by the conviction that every word of the Bible contemplatively considered will ultimately point to Christ. As Psalm 130 puts it, “My soul waits for the Lord. I count on his word.”

And the word I count on is the Word that St. John tells us was with God from the beginning: the Logos. “Logos” is one of those Greek words that has two distinct meanings both active at the same time, an apparent ambivalence that English speakers find confusing but the Greeks were perfectly comfortable with. (They also have an indicative verb form in which an action is both in the process of happening and has already been accomplished.) This is what made it the perfect language for both poetry and philosophy. So on the one hand “logos” simply means an individual written or spoken word; but at the same time, it references the organizing principle of the entire universe, the very texture of being, Ultimate Reality. Thus St. John’s genius in using it for Christ, an individual human being who embodies All That Is. He’s not just a word with meaning. He’s meaning itself.

That’s the meaning I’m looking for as I move from word to word. And it’s always there, just below the surface. Sometimes as I’m praying a psalm or doing lectio, I’ll suddenly be brought back to my building-block days, my eyes skating along undifferentiated letters, mere interesting shapes. Squiggles. I skate along the surface of the text, instantly aware of how thin it is, how thin it’s always been, and sense some profound depth just below it, something beyond “profound”. I skate—and pray for the ice to break.

"Ice, Lake Superior, Duluth 2/19/19" by Sharon Mollerus is licensed under CC BY 2.0.