From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Wordstruck
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 02:34:34 GMT



                                 Tuesday, the 25th of August, 1992

The typing is dedicated to Joann, the subject matter mostly
to Matt and Tom, and the cricket (sorry no Eco this time) to Francis.

There was one more passage from _Wordstruck_ I wanted to report,
but first the cricket-bat speech from _The Real Thing_ by Tom Stoppard:
   Annie: It just needs a bit of work.
   Henry: You're all bent.
   Annie: You're jealous.
   Henry: Of Brodie?
   Annie: You're jealous of the idea of the writer. You want to keep
          it sacred, special, not something anybody can do. Some of
          us have it, some of us don't. *We* write, *you* get written
          about. What gets you about Brodie is he doesn't know his
          place. You say he can't write like a head waiter saying
          you can't come in here without a tie. Because he can't put
          words together. What's so good about putting words together?
   Henry: It's traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.
   Annie: He's not a writer. He's a convict. *You're* a writer. You
          write *because* you're a writer. Even when you write *about*
          something, you have to think up something to write about
          just so you can keep writing. More well chosen words nicely
          put together. So what? Why should that be *it*? Who says?
   Henry: Nobody says. It just works best.
   Annie: Of *course* it works. You teach a lot of people what to
          expect from good writing, and you end up with a lot of
          people saying you write well. Then somebody who isn't on the
          game comes along, like Brodie, who really has something
          to write about, something real, and you can't get through it.
          Well, *he* couldn't get through *yours*, so where are you?
          To you, he can't write. To him, write is all you *can* do.
   Henry: Jesus, Annie, you're beginning to appal me. There's something
          scary about stupidity made coherent. I can deal with idiots,
          and I can deal with sensible arguments, but I don't know
          how to deal with you. Where's my cricket bat?
   Annie: Your cricket bat?
   Henry: Yes. It's a new approach.
        [He heads out into the hall.]
   Annie: Are you trying to be funny?
   Henry: No, I'm serious.
        [He goes out while she watches in wary disbelief. He returns
         with an old cricket bat.]
   Annie: You better not be.
   Henry: Right, you silly cow---
   Annie: Don't you bloody dare---
   Henry: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a
          wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular
          wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that
          the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's
          for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the
          cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds,
          and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top
          off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking
          a fly...[he clucks his tongue to make the noise.] What we're
          trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw
          up an idea and give it a little knock, it might...*travel*...
          [He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.] Now,
          what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same
          shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball
          with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will
          drop the bat and dance about shouting `Ouch!' with your
          hands stuck into your armpits. [Indicating the cricket
          bat.] This isn't better because someone says it's better,
          or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels
          off the field. It's better because it's better. You don't
          believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and
          see how you get on. `You're a strange boy, Billy, how old
          are you?'`Twenty, but I've lived more than you'll ever
          live.' Ooh, ouch!
          [He drops the script and hops about with his hands in
          his armpits, going `Ouch!' Annie watches him expressionlessly
          until he desists.]
          [pp. 50, 51 of faber & faber paperback]

Hope, Francis, that cricket isn't too Santa-Monica British for you.

Ezra Pound somewhere says that the *making* that a poet does is to
charge words with their highest possible meaning. Here's the last bit
of Robert MacNeil I wanted to type:
   We are adrift today in a sea of weightless words. As Eliot said,
   *words will not stay in place*; they float like the astronauts'
   pencils in space.
     There must be some living connection between the weight of words
   and truth---not literal, factual truth, perhaps, but an effort at
   truth, like the effort of a poet, someone who struggles for truth.
   Today, it seems, words increasingly mean nothing to the person
   using them, have no connection to what he believes, yet are presented
   as though they had.
     The public words of public men seem to be used increasingly
   like aerosol room fresheners, to make nice smells. The President
   of the United States routinely uttered words he did not think through,
   words that he had not searched his thoughts to find; just a package
   of words on a file card. Occasionally he read the wrong set and laughed
   it off.
     The U.S. was founded on words that weighed heavily, words that
   carried the deepest conviction of thoughtful, daring men. Would you 
   believe a politician today who said he pledged his life and his
   sacred honour? Or have these words just come to be a way of sounding
   sincere?
     Today we can weigh invisible atomic particles, we can weigh stars
   so distant man will never reach them, yet we have lost the way of
   weighing words. Students are seldom obliged to search for words.
   They are given the different task of selecting from multiple
   choices, of guessing, of betting odds. If they guess right, they pass;
   disposable words good only for one test.
     Politics, the law, advertising, religion become the art of employing
   words to cover for the moment, to get you off the hook, to win a
   verdict, pass a test, fill a space, get rid of a question.
     There are antidotes to this poison of weightless words. Any good
   writer will give you good weight. Often it is only words of fiction which
   have it. How do writers learn the weight of words? From childhood,
   they read and are read to; they read more and listen; they listen to
   the language the way artists look at paintings.
     If you love the language, the greatest thing you can do to
   ensure its survival is not to complain about bad usage but to pass
   your enthusiasm to a child. Find a child and read to it often the
   things you admire, not being afraid to read the classics.
     Exposing children to the words of the classics will do them no
   more harm than articulate adults do in conversation. Not to be exposed
   is not to have the chance of learning. If adults always talked down
   to them, children might never advance beyond baby talk. There is a
   real deprivation in restricting them to pabulum dished up by
   someone with a prescribed average of how many words a six-year-old
   should know; the effect must be to drive the level ever downwards, both
   in terms of expression and of sentiments.
     The children will not be aware of what you are really doing
   for them. I certainly wasn't aware that it was being done to
   me. I just liked being read good stories.
     All boys can throw once they see another do it and practice
   a lot. I cannot remember not knowing how. Like other boys, I threw
   all the time---baseballs, marbles, stones, acorns, snowballs---at
   bottles, squirrels, trees, other boys, windows in abandoned houses,
   and one taxi. If anyone had asked me how the pleasure of being read
   a poem or story compared with the pleasure of throwing something,
   there would have been no contest.
     Humans have been throwing for thousands of years, perhaps longer
   than they have been talking or at least using words. Someone who
   does not try throwing, for example a girl brought up to believe
   that it is boyish, will not be able to. Innately the talent or capacity
   is there, the pathways in her brain are there but have not been used,
   except perhaps to observe boys throwing.
     People who do not develop the pathways for words will be like
   the girl trying to throw. They have all the innate equipment;
   the circuitry is built in; only the software and practice are
   missing. It intrigues me to realise how long the software loading
   took to produce in me a sense of accomplishment and pleasure with
   words remotely comparable to what I got instantly from throwing. The
   words must have been delayed-action devices, planted to explode
   later.
     It was not until many years later that I became consciously
   aware of the pleasure of words. Yet the seeds were being
   planted at the time I was learning to throw, ride a bike, swim,
   skate, and build snow forts. [pp. 224-227]

              Mike Morris
       (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)

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