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-eraser,
horizon, whore, roots-everything
bears in great top-heavy clusters
a second reading and a special grace.
— Jamolan
It must have started with the mother
whose voice is the larger part of my earliest memories.
She is reciting not only nursery rhymes and poems from
The Child's Garden of Verses, but the wonderful dragon
and hero stories from Mr. Hawthorne's Wonder Book and
Tanglewood Tales. There are warm pictures in my mind
of a two-eyed wood stove and a rocking chair with the smallest
of five children in a cozy lap and four pressed close, two
on either side.
Miss Sara came next.
First grade, and my eyes and ears learned the themes and
cadences of "The Little Pot That Boiled" and "Stone
Stew" with The Adventures of Mabel to follow.
Here animals talked to those who were good and led me on
the quest that continues to say-one day, if your heart is
pure, you will round a sudden corner and see your very own
unicorn.
I was ten maybe when
a traveling troupe came to Orrs Elementary to present The
Merchant of Venice, and I was never the same again.
I left cowboys and Indians behind, soaring off, brief in
hand, into the world of Shakespeare's Portia and the old
Jew Shylock. Another fine day, there was Brooksie Wells
who stood on that same stage, tiny feet pointed so, and
recited Poe's Raven, rhyme supreme stepping up from the
earliest recitation I had done of "The Gingham Dog
and the Calico Cat." Surely I didn't understand all
of Poe's words any more than I had captured all of the tongue-twisting
words of The Merchant of Venice. But with both, there was
the rhythm, the cadences of word, of rhyme that echoes today
like an old and much-loved song in my mind.
Emma Bealor Walker
came along to pique my sixth grade self with the enchantingly-possible
tale of The Swiss Family Robinson-not altogether
a pleasant memory since it earned me one of my few whippings
on the occasion of my having sneaked the book out of the
classroom for an overnight romp into adventure. Somewhat
calmer is the memory, soft and insistent, of Mrs. Dreary,
my Sunday school teacher whose love for the King James Bible
rubbed off on me as I learned to recite "When I consider
thy heavens, the works of thy fingers, the moon and stars
which thou hast ordained, what is man..."
Those are only the
highlights-and now, these many years after, suddenly and
with some marvelous serendipity, I have run across the very
word for what was happening to me all along-and what I know
must keep happening every day that I live-I was and am Wordstruck!
A friend brought me
'the book, a loving memoir written by Robert McNeill. Parts
of one passage from Wordstruck are woquoting:
It must be with words as
it is with music. Music heard early in life lays down
a rich bed of memories against which you evaluate and
absorb music encountered later. Each layer adds to the
richness ... so it is with words and word patterns ...
they accumulate in layers (which govern) all use and appreciation
of language henceforth...against them we judge the sweetness
and justness of netterns.
This
happens, he says, the same both for the bookish person and
for the illiterate. Each person has a mind programmed with
language-from prayers, hymns, verses, jokes, patriotic speeches,
folk sayings, proverbs, clichés, and the various
aspects of the mass media. He goes on to create the images
that most captured hinking:
I picture each of those
layers of experience and language gradually accumulating
and thickening to form a kind of living matrix, nourishing
like a placenta, serving as a mini-thesaurus or dictionary
of quotations, yet more retrievable and interactive and
richer because it is so one's own, steeped in emotional
color and personal aiations.
Today, armed with that matrix, that nourishing placenta
of words, I operate in two interconnected spheres, the teacher
and the writer. The two nourish each other, the words of
others spilling into the ones that I have been accumulating
for a lifetime. I may go to hear twentieth century living
poets reading their lines at a conference in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama. Their language strikes me as spare, and I pick
up the words I don't hear, make them a poem:
after the reading ,
I gathered up
adjectives
three poets cut
to make their poems
spare as splinters,
needles to pick them out,
iodine,
scalpels sterilized
in the autoclave,
sharp enough ~
to trim the pain
or grief
to neat scars, scarcely
puckering
on the flesh,
little half-moon
places
where doubts once ached,
aging mothers,
and affairs oe heart.
Each new experience adds to the treasure, each book that
I read, each student whom I encounter. And, oh, the richness
of one of the strangest meetings of my life. A young murderer
sits on Death Row in Jackson, Georgia. Some years ago, he
wrote, asking that I should help him learn to write. Over
the months, I have sent him assignments, been stunned by
his responses, especially when I asked him to re-write Whitman's
passage "There Was a Child Went Forth" from his
own experience. I hear in his words what experiences and
reactions might just have led a boy on the road to the ultimate
prison and pose death:
And the older brother and older sister I
like,
and mama's other children, that I didn't,
and mama in gingham and poppa in jail...
and the ducking and the hiding and the sneaking...
and the hot rods and beer cans and funny weeds
and shattering glass and telephone poles
that stand old and mean like teachers and hallways...
And yes sir and no sir and slamming doors
and concrete and steel bars and narrow, hard bunks
and emptiness and loneliness and fearfulness
and solitude want...
Do I call this an enriching experience? Well, whoever said
that all that enriches us must be pleasant? My clash with
Emma Bealor Walker and The Swiss Family Robinson
still stings, combining pure delight with a moment of humiliation.
And my years of correspondence with the prisoner on Death
Row have created a rich complex of learning something about
the horrors of solitude and fear from the inside of another
human being. But that is coupled with the joy of seeing
his development as a writer, creating poems and short stories
from the sad and dingy fabric of the sort of life that I
cannot fully know.
Through him I am wordstruck
allover again-and it must keep happening.
When I was an undergraduate
at La Grange College, I had a wonderful bumbling old scarecrow
of a professor named Dr. Davis Melson who must bear the
responsibility for whatever sort of teacher I have become.
As I sat in his classes for two semesters-Old Testament
and Life of Paul-my respect for this teacher grew. I could
sense that if there were something new, some new development
in the scholarship of the Qumran scrolls, he would almost
immediately incorporate that additional insight into his
daily lectures. One day after class, I was talking with
him when he said the magic words: "You know, you can't
get clean water out of a stagnant pool." Not new words,
surely, but for the undergraduate, a vast door was opened,
a light came in, for he was talking about us all. If we
do not keep learning, words, ideas, concepts, everything-our
minds will glaze over like a pond with no water coming in,
no water going out-in other words, a Dead Sea!
In another class at
La Grange, I met Cardinal Newman's "The Idea of the
University." That matrix swelled within me as he wrote
about a liberal education being "an instrument of good."
I pondered what he meant by "good" as he explained
that "Good is not only good, but reproductive of good."
There is, he says, no excellence, beauty or perfection unless
it "overflows and spreads the likeness of itself all
around it." Hntinues:
Good is prolific, communicates
itself, excites our admiration and love, our desire and
gratitude ... A great good will impart great good. And
in that it is also useful-diffusing good-like a gift,
power, treasure-first to the owner, then through him to
e world.
And I was reminded of something important I had learned
about the nature of love from that same Mrs. Drewry who
had encouraged me to learn so many verses from the King
James Bible. She had likened how love operates to a
cup filled to overflowing. She said that only when we are
so filled with love that we overflow can there by any to
spill out onto others. And I must apply that same theory
to my being Wordstruck. Is it not only when I am filled
to overflowing with those words and ideas accumulated over
a lifetime that I will have some to share with my students
and my readers?
It is part of our keeping
the humanities alive and well that we feel as did Pablo
Neruda, the great South American writer, who so obviously
loved the language brought to his part of the world by the
Spanish conquistadors. Writing in his Memoirs, he concludes
a passage he calHE WORD:
... They (the conquistadors)
swallowed up everything, religious, pyramids, tribes,
idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their
huge sacks... Wherever they were, they razed the land...But
words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians,
out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes,
luminous wordsthat were left, glittering here...our language.
We came up 1osers...We came up winners... They carried
off the gold and left us the gold... They carried everything
off and left us everything... They lefe words.
It must keep happening. Just a few months ago at a national
conference of teaches of English, I met a charming woman
whose lively interest in life belied her seventy-five or
so years. And in our conversation, amid the buzz of a busy
hotel lobby, she gave me the ultimate analogy for how sad
it would be if we should miss a single opportunity to enrich
our precious word-hoard and our life's experiences. While
living and working in the desert of Saudi Arabia, she and
her husband were invited to attend a native version of the
picnic. For some reason, they tried to decline-whereupon
their Arabic host exclaimed with some distress: "But
you must come, we have rented the only fig tree in the desert!"
Today and each of our
tomorrows will be days when we too will receive an invitation
to the word feast, a feast of rare opportunity, perhaps
the chance of a lifetime. Words are power, the tools with
which we communicate and create. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
in his poem "Kubla Khan" talks about the joys
of having both the imagination and the words to make "a
miracle of rare device"-we too may "build that
dome in air, that sunny dome, those caves of ice."
Then all who look upon us will be tempted to cry: "Weave
a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy
dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk
of Paradise." 
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