On Why the Language That Speaks Us as Children Matters

A young child revealed by nature

I.

The language that we dwell within is of crucial importance. 

For ultimately, such language speaks us, as Heidegger famously noted.* In other words, language mediates the existential unfolding or disclosedness of Dasein. 

Further, in as much as our actions are determined via linguistic categories, language is also in a very real sense world-creating. It certainly does more than merely represent the world, or communicate ideas. Language makes things possible; including the magical space/time of childhood.

II.

One of the most alarming chapters in Isabella Tree's recent book relates not to the destruction of the British countryside and the wildlife thereof over the last fifty years, but to what she refers to as the extinction of childhood experience in terms of the natural world.

Echoing the concerns of Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion, she reminds us of how the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary have set about replacing words including acorn, buttercup, and conker with terms such as attachment, blog and chat room.** Whilst this obviously reflects a "shift in children's perceptions and activities over the past few decades", it might also help explain why so many young people seem so fucked-up today.   

For according to the author, much that is troublesome in their behaviour is rooted in a lack of empathy with (and knowledge of) nature. Not only are they unable to name trees, flowers, birds and insects, but they themselves are no longer spoken by the language of the natural world. Instead, they are enframed by technology and spoken by the language of social media and the digital workplace.

Thus, whilst they have profiles on Facebook and Instagram, they have a void where their souls used to be. And the more they intervene technology between themselves and the Outside, the more they numb and atrophy their own senses, denying themselves the opportunity to enter into a more natural revealing and to experience, as Heidegger would say, "the call of a more primal truth".    

A young child enframed by technology

Notes

*Heidegger first formulated the idea that language speaks [Die sprache spricht] in his 1950 lecture 'Language', trans. into English by Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper and Row, 1971). See also: 'The Question Concerning Technology' and 'The Way to Language', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).

**Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion were among a group of 28 authors so concerned about the removal of words associated with the natural world from the OJD that they wrote to the publishers, calling for the decision to be reversed. Whilst recognising the need to introduce new words, they found it worrying that 'in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today'. I share this concern and don't believe this is simply a romantic (or nostalgic) desire to project memories of my own childhood onto today's youngsters. I also agree with Motion, the former poet laureate, who argues that by discarding so many landscape words and animal names, the editors of the OJD 'deny children a store of words that is marvellous for its own sake' and that their defence - that lots of children now have zero experience of the natural world - is absurd; for dictionaries 'exist to extend our knowledge, as much (or more) as they do to confirm what we already know'.  

For further details, see Alison Flood, 'Oxford Junior Dictionary's replacement of 'natural' words with 21st-century terms sparks outcry', The Guardian (13 Jan 2015): click here to read online.

Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), p. 294. 

For a sister post to this one - on biophilia and nature-deficit disorder - please click here.  

Why I Love Philip Larkin (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post - 2018)

Portrait of Philip Larkin by gforce7 (1996)

deviantart.com 

There are many reasons to love Larkin - and doubtless just as many to hate him. 

Primarily, of course, is the body of work he left behind. Whatever the shortcomings of the man, these were more than compensated for - as if they needed to be - by the strength of his writing. He's unarguably one of our finest post-war poets, something which even most of his critics concede.

But I also love Larkin for his porno-fetishistic interests, his peculiarly English pessimism that is both ironic and understated, and the fact that he declined the honorary position of Poet Laureate when offered it in 1984 (having already turned down an OBE in 1968). A lyrical discontent, Larkin disliked fame and had no time for the trappings of success.       

And then - perhaps best of all - there's his love for Lawrence, whose work his father introduced him to and whom he regarded as the greatest of all English novelists throughout his life. Indeed, such was Larkin's devotion to DH that, according to his biographer, he even liked to mow his lawn whilst wearing a Lawrence t-shirt and drink his tea from a Lawrence mug.     

See: Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, (Faber and Faber, 1994). 

For a sister post to this one - on Larkin and the Larkin Toad - please click here. 

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part I) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

Lady Gaga arrives for the 2013 Glamour Women of the Year Awards in NYC

Photo: Timothy Clary AFP / Getty Images.

In a recent article by Luke Lewis on pretentiousness, Lady Gaga may conceivably be disappointed only to come in at No. 16, but she is in entertainingly ostentatious company nonetheless.

Among a showcase of superlative conceits, the writer's implied lesson on the moral merits of humility features an exegesis on the comedic indebtedness of the custard pie to the English Harlequinade, a vaingloriously metaphysical advert for a replica All Blacks shirt (This is not a jersey. This is a portal through which men pass ...) and a photograph of Sting solemnly fingering a lute as his widely pitied wife Trudy assumes a preposterous yoga pose. 

While many would readily draw the line at the notorious earnestness of The Police's former frontman, such a rush to judgement may unwittingly serve to highlight the begged question: who dares to distinguish the genuinely creative individuals from the frauds?

Step forward former poet laureate Andrew Motion, a man who seems more than happy to act in such a capacity. But whenever I think of his dissing the sequin-strewing Jeremy Reed as an effete little pseud - and without holding any specific brief for the latter's literary credentials - I suffer a nasty bout of Motion sickness.

Reed doesn't need Motion's stamp of approval. And besides, there's no fate more deleterious to an author than to be courted, feted, and finally authorised - to become, as in Prufrock's lepidopterist nightmare, 'formulated, sprawling on a pin / pinned and wriggling on a wall'.

 

Likewise, however delicious the passing irony might be of Lewis taking seriously enough those whom he accuses of taking themselves too seriously to spend his time writing about them, the premise of his piece will surely drive a splinter of dread into acolytes of the imagination everywhere.   

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog; parts II and III will follow shortly.