In my desk, I keep a piece of the Blarney stone. Well, if you read the fine print, it admits that it really just comes from the local bluestone, though the legends of the Blarney stone say it didn’t even come from there. As befits such a stone, contradictory legends give it mutually exclusive but equally fantastic origins, whether from the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny on the Hill of Tara, or half of the original Stone of Scone, or hoisted from the walls of Jerusalem in the Crusades, or the pillow of the Biblical patriarch Jacob, and brought to Ireland by the prophet Jeremaiah. Why such a storied and powerful stone would end up, without any apparent honor or recognition, in the walls of a local lord’s castle, these stories do not say. But they do say that anyone who kisses the stone will have “the gift of gab.”

It takes some doing to kiss that stone, though. Once climbing to the castle’s peak, you must lean, backwards, over the parapet. Traditionally, you’d have someone with you to make sure you do not plummet to your death—something that happened much more commonly before they installed wrought-iron guardrails.

One story goes that when Queen Elizabeth—that sovereign most often credited with overseeing the dawn of the modern age—demanded oaths of loyalty from her subjects, Cormac Teige McCarthy, the Lord of Blarney, responded with flattery and flowery words. He subtly danced around the issue, seeming to honor her, but nowhere “giving in.” The Queen supposedly remarked that she had received “a lot of Blarney.” That “gift of gab,” that “blarney,” has come to mean something trivial and insincere. That modern interpretation sits uncomfortably with the ritual—a long pilgrimage, culminating in a rite that risked life and limb—a sure sign that our attitudes have changed. We harbor a suspicion of flowery words and pretty speech, but once, you could afford another person no greater compliment than to remark upon his eloquence. In native traditions, eloquence still stands tall as one of the primary virtues. Throughout his books, Martín Prechtel writes of the importance of eloquence, and its use to express both grief and praise. “True praise is not something that raises people away from the earth they must finally rest in,” he writes. “Praise is a grief-soaked type of life-endorsing way of speaking that brings the praised closer to the world that is otherwise so hard to live in. Praise does not make haughty, it brings life. Anything else is an empty seduction that makes words into things that are lesser than they should be.” (2005:80)

Most of us have had far too much experience with such empty seductions, and it has made us bitter and cynical. It has turned the honor once heaped upon an Irish poet into our cynical regard for “blarney.” And why not? We live in a cold and uncaring universe, unresponsive to our pleas, so what good does such “blarney” do, except to try to seduce or trick someone? It takes a lot of pain, never grieved, to teach us such cynicism and bitterness. After all, the world does not present itself in such a way. When you press your hand against something, you can feel it pressing back against you. The very act of seeing the world means taking up a point of view in it, and feeling the potential of others seeing you. We do not see, hear, touch, smell or taste anything in isolation; we sense and perceive with our whole bodies, in every way, all the time, feeling the world flow through us. With every breath, we can feel the wind inside us and the wind outside us, separated only by our fleshy membranes, and returned a moment later. To drink or eat, and then excrete, means to feel a flow through our bodies that only moves a little slower. The world around us responds to our presence constantly. It reacts to us. To our immediate senses, everything we see, hear, touch and smell reacts to those senses like a living thing, with its own volition and will. “To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all our conceptualizations and definitions.” (Abram, 1997:56)

To convince ourselves of anything else, we must carefully train ourselves to disregard the report of our senses. I must train myself to think of the wall that presses back against my hand as not responding to my touch. Even if I can convince myself of this consciously, my minute-by-minute experience continues to contradict this, so even if I have the energy to keep up the charade, it still seeps into my speech: something calls my attention, or catches my gaze, or grabs me. So, I must remind myself to never trust myself. “The senses are deceptive,” you have no doubt heard. “You can’t trust them.” This passes for great wisdom in the modern world. If you repeat it like a mantra against the evil eye, and put enough faith in it, you can ignore your own senses. You have probably mastered this yourself. Jean Piaget calls animism a stage in childhood development. I call this systematic alienation from our own senses a critical part of enculturation in the modern world.

In fact, most of the humans on the planet today have mastered this so thoroughly that to consider anything else—to really get back in touch with our own senses—seems like a daunting task, one that might intimidate us even to the point of thinking we could never possibly succeed in it. We have our human nature on our side. After all, our senses try to show us this world constantly. We have mastered a way of speaking that helps us keep our senses at bay. By speaking of the world as if it contained no personhood, no will, no volition, we can convince ourselves of it. The seemingly endless list of nouns in the English language helps us to objectify the world around us.

For example, consider the simple word is. While it may have some comparatively innocent usages, it serves primarily to equate this with that. But when have you ever experienced, in the world of your own, sensory experience, any two truly identical objects? As the famed philosopher George Santayana, best known for his prediction that those who ignored history doomed themselves to repeat it, wrote: “Whenever I use the word is, except in sheer tautology, I deeply misuse it,” for, “it names and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.” (1923) David Bourland proposed a subset of English without the verb is in any of its forms, called E-Prime. Even with the rest of the English language intact, the exorcism of this particular linguistic demon and the objectification it serves seems to have an immediate and measurable impact on the quality of the writing it produces, and the critical thinking it promotes. (Bourland, 1989; Wilson, 1991) This objectification in our language not only divorces us from our senses, it also muddles our thinking. Martín Prechtel also remarks on this difference between English and Mayan languages: “For Mayans, without a verb ‘to be,’ a ritual need not ‘be’ a symbol or metaphor for something that it cannot ‘be’ literally in a ‘to be’ language like English. A ritual can ‘be’ the universe, because the ritual and the universe can be the same thing.” (2005:119)

I gave a speech titled, “Writing, Language & Thought,” where I spoke about some of this, and some other subjects besides. As an example, I compared the English word “coyote,” a noun that describes a particular object, defined by a particular set of characteristics that make it a member of the species Canis latrans, to the word in Chinuk wawa, or Chinook jargon, talêpês, a verb that describes a particular pattern of movement. Part of the objectification of our language lies precisely in its enormous collection of nouns. The urban myth about the “forty Eskimo words for snow” comes from the fact that Inuit languages, like so many native languages, fall under the heading of “polysynthetic languages.” In other words, rather than a collection of nouns, they have a rich collection of affixes. This allows them to create very precise verb forms, so they can speak almost entirely in verbs. Dan Moonhawk Alford asks, do you first see the dance, or the dancers? Noun-dominated languages like English describe the scene in terms of objects, objectifying our senses, telling us about the dancers. Verb-dominated languages cleave closer to our sensory experience, not of objects, but of dance. (1999) In a world of objects, shapeshifting seems like pure fantasy; we are what we are, after all. In a world of verbs, where talêpês describes not an object but a pattern of moving and acting and relating, shapeshifting becomes easy, even expected.

Willem Larsen proposes E-Primitive, as a means of rehabilitating the English language by taking E-Prime even further. (2008a) It adds to E-Prime ambitions of high-context language (language grounded in rich oral tradition) and verbing our language. For a traditional hunter and tracker, these practices become crucial survival skills. For English-speaking trackers, no error causes more problems than misidentification. Our language of nouns urges us to put a name to the track. As the tracks change, our investment in the first name we applied can keep us from adapting. But if we have only verbs, and we can’t say, “A coyote made this track,” but, “He coyoted here,” then we can easily adapt, and as the tracks change, we can say, “Here, he started dogging!”

In fact, we experience a shapeshifting world all around us, all the time. My walk spot taught me this lesson, too. You look, and you think you see a particular shape. You come closer, and you see something else. Our objectifying language says that it was that all along. Our senses tricked us. If I instead trust my senses, then I have glimpsed something much more profound. To us, the revelations of relativistic physics seem nigh incomprehensible. For example, what sense can we make of the paradox that light is both a particle and a wave? Yet I cannot even state the apparent paradox without once again summoning that little demon, is. As Benjamin Whorf noted in his study of the Hopi language, the paradox disappears without that. Light particles, or light waves. In fact, that rather neatly describes the experimental results; when we look at light one way, it particles, and when we look at it another way, it waves.

That same physics has started to show us that observing the world changes it. Before our observation, all possibilities exist—plenipotential. Only when we observe it does it snap into one thing and not another. It overturns the understanding of reality that we learn from our objectifying language, but it validates many other animating languages. Calvin Luther Martin writes beautifully about the plenipotential of the universe just beyond our perception, and relates a Lnu (sometimes called the Mi’kmaq) story of a hunter in a strange winter when he could find no game. Desperate in the woods, somewhere along the way, he passed a threshold, and saw Someone. That someone took him back to his home, and gave him good food to eat, and sent him home with a great big bag of something to take with him. He left it by the door and told his wife. When she brought it in, she demanded to know why he had brought him a bag full of poplar bark.

Gone is the Power of something; in its place are rigidly measured shapes: poplar bark, beaver, beaver lodge, with no room for being any other. A great cosmic door has slammed shut; reality itself has moved over a notch. A beaver is now a beaver is but a beaver. Our hunter is now thinking as an empiricist; he has doubted his role in the “participatory universe.” (Martin, 1999:84)

His words pour from his mouth like a spell, collapsing the plenipotential he experienced into a single thing. The story goes on to explain why the hunter has gone wrong here. Our senses swim in a world of plenipotential, a participatory universe, a constantly shapeshifting world. The spirit world, the other world, the realms of faerie, they lie just beyond the reach of our senses, where everything remains possible, just before we perceive them. The skin of the earth stretches at the limits of our perception, and the closer we cleave to our senses, the more room we leave open for the magic of that world to enter our lives. The longer we keep open that respect for Someone, describing only what we perceive and trying, as much as we can, to keep our judgments or identifications from it, the longer we remain open to that plenipotential.

Our objectifying language does a terrible violence to that. It collapses the world even before we perceive it. It invades the spirit realm from which we derive our own life and sustenance, and names it this and not that. Alienated from our senses, magic slips from the way of all life, to fantasy, and the world becomes the cold, clockwork machinery of Descartes’ delusions—the man who “nailed his wife’s pet dog by its four paws to a board and dissected the creature while it was alive.” (Spencer, 1996:201) He wrote that we must ignore the seemingly plaintive wails of such creatures, though they might seem to show signs of terrible agony, though your empathy might reach out naturally to them, you cannot trust your senses. They cannot feel pain. They are not persons like us.

Our language does not have to alienate us from our senses, each other, or the world we live in. Once upon a time, when we honored eloquence and poetry, it brought us closer to them. Once, we offered our speech as a gift to the world around us. We spoke of a more-than-human world where we made our home. We still find some traces of this, though we tend to brush it aside as poetry or metaphor. We find it in fairy tales and art. “There is something about this storied way of speaking—this acknowledgment of a world all alive, awake, and aware—that brings us close to our senses, and to the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us.” (Abram, 2009)

Compare, for instance, these two stories. Richard Dawkins tells a story about our selfish genes; how, really, we exist to serve them. They use us as vehicles to perpetuate themselves, their chemical lives prescribed by natural laws. (2006) “A traditional faithkeeper of the Tzutujil Maya tells the story that the Gods speak Poetry, which creates all life. That you embody the eloquence of a God’s language, along with all other beings. Saying the complex poetry of your name creates you; if the gods didn’t speak, and speak beautifully, you wouldn’t live.” (Larsen, 2008) They seem to tell a similar story, of strange and immortal beings that sing us into creation, but for their tone. Dawkins’ story objectifies the world; the faithkeeper’s story animates the world. While our science now probes the limits of how far our objectifying language can take us, finding that it falls apart into double-talk, paradox, and babbling when we press into the quantum or the galactic realms of reality, much like Einstein’s theories displaced Newton’s before—or even become serious impediments to us in such an earthly pursuit as tracking—these very same discoveries seem to come round about, to confirm and validate this animating language.

David Abram proposes a great undertaking. He suggests that all of our environmental activism may well ultimately fail if we do not succeed first in a monumental task of eloquence, if we do not bring ourselves back to our senses, and weave ourselves back into the fabric of a more-than-human world. Our endlessly objectifying language makes the world seem dead to us, and it makes us deaf to its cries. We can abide the ecological destruction we wreak only because we first became blind to it. More important than any amount of laws or regulations, Abram suggests, we must feel that tragedy again. That means returning to our senses, in every sense, and that task requires all of our eloquence.

Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves—to the green uttering forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that lace us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs—letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf. (Abram, 1997:274)

So we come back around again to Martín Prechtel, and his eloquent words about praise. Our eloquence can bring us back to our senses. Our gifts of praise can begin to restore our broken relationships with a more-than-human world. But perhaps, first of all, we must express our grief. We have much to grieve. I suggested before that perhaps we can find the roots of our present pathology in the sudden loss, 10,000 years ago, of our elders. Certainly, we have acted like the lost children of Golding’s novel, The Lord of the Flies, ever since, each generation perpetuating that trauma upon the next. We have lost our traditions, our rootedness and sense of place and home, our stories, even our own humanity.

And we have never grieved for that. We have even celebrated it, called it “progress,” and shouted down anyone who would even suggest taking a glance to see what we might have lost along the way. What do you think so much ungrieved-for pain could do? Could it turn a whole society mad, plunging it on an insane quest to conquer the world and the powers of nature itself? Could it set us on a path of our own destruction, perhaps secretly even hoping for death—for ourselves, for us all, perhaps even, in all our ungrieved-for pain, hoping that we might take the whole world with us?

Powerful magic lies in the expression of our grief, precisely because the world does respond to our cries, because it does not act in the cold, uncaring fashion that we imagine. Too many native stories turn on the moment when the protagonist cries out his grief, and the world takes pity on him. I cannot even begin to name them all. Arlie Upfront relates an anecdote about a young woman who asked an elder, “Auntie, why is it when Native people sing, they sound like they’re crying?”

Grandma responded, “Because it’s the universal language of all humankind. It’s the first language that we speak when we’re born onto this mother earth. And whoever hears this cry, and comes to us, and comforts us, and feeds us—through this first cry they begin to teach us about what it means to be a human being, about what it means to have a family, what it means to have relationships.” And she said, “You don’t even need words to explain what it means.”

And through our songs and our ceremonies we reach out. We reach out to our family; we reach out to all creation to establish relationships. To establish love.

Bibliography

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