Words

7 things worth sharing

Hi All,

I’m enjoying experimenting with this format, 7 things worth sharing, which is arbitrary but useful. I collect interesting tidbits throughout the week and put them in a draft post. Then on Monday or Tuesday, I try to shape it into 7 things worth sharing. This is the fourth time I’m trying it. Here are attempts one, two, and three.

The emergent theme this week is words.

1. One place confusion creeps into our lives is when we take “words for things.”

   1. Feldenkrais pointed this out a lot. Here’s a choice quote from an interview he gave to the New Sun in 1977: “We take words for things, and once we got them as a thing, we find the thing doesn’t work as we wish. Because a word means a million different things to every other person.”

   2. “You say sad and you want me to treat sadness. I can’t treat sadness. Sadness is an expression of something—your sadness and my sadness and his sadness are three different things. Everybody’s sadness is a different thing. I will never be sad for the same thing as you. Therefore, when you say sadness, I can’t do anything to sadness. But, a person being sad, I can do something to the person: how does he behave to bring about sadness?”

   3. “NS: But isn’t there a difference when you’re working with, let’s say, old age and with the whole group of problems associated with old age: rheumatism, arthritis …

      MF: No, you’re mistaken. When you say that, you again make words into things, as if arthritis and old age go together.

      NS: So instead of saying, “I have arthritis; what can you do about it?” you would say, “Arthritis I don’t know about. You, I can work with.”

      MF: Yes, I can make you tick in such a way that you don’t have arthritis.”¹

2. Then I was reading a chapter of Nachmanovitch’s book about how nouns turn words into things, but verbs do something else.

   1. “Nouns break the world and our experience apart, into things. Naming, and manipulating names and symbols, has enabled the lion’s share of our advanced civilization. But in our love of and reliance on language, we tend to confuse the name with the thing named.”

   2. But verbs, on the other hand, emphasize process.

   3. “Christopher Small, a musicologist, suggested that people fundamentally distort music by treating it as a thing; he wanted to get rid of the noun music and replace it with the verb to music, or musicking. Musicking is the real-time activity of grabbing instruments and playing, singing, writing, hearing, tapping on kitchen utensils, dancing. At the moment of listening to a concert, recording, or broadcast, people are linked in participation with others near and far, including the performers. Musicking reframes song as an activity taking place in a particular time and context; it is a process.”²
      

3. Another example from Feldenkrais: “You haven't got the body. You've got the mind and the body, a brain and the body. And none of them can exist or function without the other. Then it's not the body, it’s you. We say ‘your body’ ‘my body,’ as if I can sell it or change it. Or I can go away and leave it somewhere. Or change a piece which is broken. If it's your car, you can fix it. If it's your horse, you can sell it. But if it's me or you, none of us can do that. Therefore it's not our body, it's we. It's myself.”³

   So maybe instead of using the word body, we could say we’re all currently body-ing?

4. But then I realized it’s not just individual words—not just nouns or verbs—but sentences. Because we’re always putting nouns and verbs together. And sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into longer things. If we record or write down enough of them maybe we end up with an essay or a novel, or at least a Substack post.
   
   There’s an amazing book by Verlyn Klinkenborg called “Several Short Sentences About Writing,” where he focuses on what makes good, powerful sentences that do amazing things:
   
   “As a reader, you know the feeling of looking up after eighty pages and wondering how you got there,

   The sense of immersion, of entering a shared but private space.

   All the authority a writer ever possesses is the authority the reader grants him.

   Yet the reader grants it in response to her sense of the writer’s authority.”⁴

5. So after reading that, I was on the lookout for authority in sentences, or should I say sentences that authoritize? And I found an interview where Tim Kreider talks about why a certain phrase of his—“the mortifying ordeal of being known”—had enough authority to become an internet meme. I thought this was worth sharing because it shows how it’s not just the meaning of the words but the sound of the language that makes it powerful: “Euphony and cadence are the only areas in which the very abstract symbolic system of writing gets to exploit the subrational sensory pleasures of music, sneak in past the left brain and move us on levels to which other art forms have more direct access.”⁵

   
   Does that make sense?
   

6. Back to confusion. One place confusion creeps in is when words and phrases get enmeshed with images, emotions, habits of thought, self-perceptions and God knows what else in a mixed-up inner experience that’s tough to tease apart.
   
   Con (with)
   fused (many mixed as one)
   
   Have you ever spent time with the sentence “I am confused,” and later realized there were just too many things going on at once?

   Or instead of “I am confused,” maybe it should be “I am in the act of confusing.”
   
   Anyway, sometimes it’s nice to have a method in such a moment.
   Good Feldenkrais lessons help with muscular confusion.
   And Klinkenborg has a method that’s very Feldenkraisian to help with confusion in language.

   Here it is.

   Are you ready?
   
   “Imagine sentences instead of writing them.

   Keep them imaginary until you’re happy with them.”
   
   Oh, I was so happy to see this.

   
   If you’re interested, try it. Next time confusion arises, try to imagine a satisfying sentence somewhere close to the confusion. It has to be a complete sentence with a subject and a predicate, and it has to be satisfying. To you. If you can’t imagine your own satisfying sentence, just be patient and try a little. Without forcing it you might eventually start to sense how the confusion is getting in the way of your satisfaction. If that doesn’t work or you don’t want to, you could also try letting sentences pour forth without imagining anything.

7. If you’ve read this far, maybe you could put a sentence or two worth sharing in the comments below. Pre-imagined or otherwise. Maybe about this post, or really about whatever’s currently satisfying for you. All satisfying sentences welcome here. Or maybe you’ll choose to satisfy yourself some other way.

   Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support, please share with a friend or become a paid subscriber.

   Your fellow in word and indeed,
   Ethan

1. From the book Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais

2. From the book The Art of Is by Stephen Nachmanovitch

3. From Feldenkrais’ Quest Workshop, first or second ATM lesson

4. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

5. The most important thing was never to get a real job.