Earliest Images

Now that one chapter in our national political narrative is over, I’m going to make this blog broader, deeper, and more personal.

Like many people, now that the national narrative (an episode, at least), has ended, and our vicarious thrill and/or defeat has occurred, I’m returning to something more internal.

In the interests of full disclosure and full advice to those who consider speech and speechwriting essential, I’m going to work with my personal narrative and tell my faithful few readers about my dialogue with words since the beginning.

My earliest memories of my experiences with words vary. Some are episodic and good for the occasional anecdote, “breaking the ice at parties" material, while others form their own rooms in the verbal house I’ve constructed.

Some anecdotes…

At the age of four, falling in love with a particular phrase on a family vacation, “I wouldn’t say that”, and, I am sure, reaching the heights of the obnoxious.

At the age of six, cursing (I don’t remember the actual words) the siren (I don’t know what it ever did to me; it was just there) with some of my friends from the apparent safety of a tunnel in the spillway of a creek in our little town. My oldest brother, may he rest in peace, came to collect me so that I could come home and receive some punishment.

At the age of about ten, riding a bike down to a spot near that spillway, saying proudly to one of my friends, “Fancy meeting you here!”, then promptly hitting a mud puddle and wiping out. I doubt I ever rode a bike again.

As a sophomore in college, at a friend’s suite for dinner, gulping down some wine because we were in a hurry to see the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, and getting slightly inebriated. As a result, I whispered repeatedly, “That Katherine Ross, what a piece!” to the endless amusement of my friends, because I had the reputation of a straight arrow.

The more fundamental associations: Psalm settings and biblical imagery in general, famines, thirsts, deserts, sheep, all these hot and dry elements juxtaposed against the often cold and snowy reality of the upstate New York hamlet where we lived.

Probably the most striking verbal images had to do with the speech of North American Indians, particularly those in the Northeast. I became quite an expert, at an early age on the Algonquins and Iroquois of New York, and New England, part of my fascination had to do with the rich and fundamental vocabulary of these tribes. The biggest impediment to the forming of the League of the Iroquois was the Onondaga wizard, Atotarho, a sorcerer so terrifying that his hair teemed with snakes. When the great orator Hiawatha, (“He Who Combs”), along with the inspirational genius behind the League’s forming, Dekanawidah, persuaded Atotarho to lend his support to the forming of the league, Hiawatha combed the snakes from Atotarho’s hair. In parallel, Prophetic terms, Hiawatha “made the crooked straight”.

Tribal imagery was immediate and concrete. While white authorities relied on their notion of exploration, treaty, precedent to buttress land claims, the Iroquois proclaimed that they “sprang from the ground”.

And the loss of land became the most descriptive and heart-rending: “We barely have the place to spread our blankets.” Amazing how poverty's descriptions provide the richest images...

Next time: language and learning. Stay tuned.