Linguistic Linguine

Noodles with words. Love of language must have hit me young. Reverberations of “Hickory Dickory Dock” and “Hi Ho The Radio” echo in early memory. My aspiration at age four was to be a ballerina named Diarrhea. Or, I thought, Chlorine had a nice ring to it. To my young sensibility, what could be more pleasing? Articulated sounds seemed like music to me with meaning almost secondary. Words spoke themselves.

Sounds. Names. Words. Plays on words. I grew up with an ear tuned to impressive expressions. For sheer enjoyment: rhymes, idioms, lingo, nonsensical tongues. Igpay Atinlay orfay acttay. My childish tongue could handle twisters and rolled them off easily and often. In middle school English we coined wordplays and I came up with “Hey, sucker, you’re licked!” Thinking I was original, I was secretly proud but too abashed to share it with my class. My grandfather was a notorious punster and my mom inherited the knack and so it was an intergenerational affliction. I wasn’t surprised that my mind ran along similar lines.

I began to see how words could connect by common roots or just by a similarity of sound. Mysterious wistful hysteria (something I often succumbed to). Fluxy and flummoxed, how you felt when a bad flu hit. I slowly discovered the various charms of written language. Lilting alliteration, sonorous assonance and, the always popular with Batman and boys, onomatopoeia. I wrote long-winded bits dripping with description (still do). It’s a weakness for words that makes me swoon.

Deep into adolescence, I was collecting lists of them. Tepid, infusion, fanning, fused, wilted, wicked, silvered, silted, strand, stray, dimpled, rippled, fen. They stacked up in my notebook in piles like buttons or beads. Strung together in various patterns they led me down obscure paths in my brain, opening out into unexpected clearings. They exhibited an ambiguous sort of precision, which I now associate with poetry.

My dad studied poetry in college and read to me from Chaucer and Keats (ah, The Eve of St. Agnes). I raided our family bookshelf for his worn textbooks and so came to read Emily Dickinson, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, and Yeats. I scratched out a few poems of my own in high school, just experimenting. I won the poetry contest in senior year (cringe) but mostly shelved any literary ambitions and kept to happenstance chicken scratches in my journals or notes to friends. These days, I recognize poetry rearing its head in popular culture primarily as songwriting and have joined the rampant ranks of ditty-noodlers.

Artistically inclined, I naturally favor the visual form. My teenage obsession with Rick Griffin’s psychedelic lettering on the Haight-Ashbury posters and Grateful Dead album covers extrapolated into my own brand of wild lettering and strange logos. I changed my handwriting style several times and designed a “glyph” signature for my paintings, which has morphed through the years. Scripts, alphabets, fonts, sigils, Chinese characters, Arabic writing, alchemical symbols, calligraphic forms like the Islamic zoomorphic pictures, all captivate me with their pictorial beauty and intrinsic or secretive meanings. I just recently heard invented writing referred to as “asemic” writing, as in “having no semantic content”. So even those glyphic shapes I doodle in my margins are graced with a name.

Beyond playing with words for the joy of it, I contemplate that essential core of the linguistic apple, which is communication. As a means of conveyance, language has catapulted me enough times into such alive revelatory spaces, unfolded, fluid and teeming with flippant shape-shifty sing-song syllabic sublimity that I eagerly penetrate any tangle or string out my own. Maybe I’ll write something worthwhile before my time is up.
Picture: Sample of asemic writing. (As posted on www.thenonist.com)