an excess of words

I cannot tell you why I began reading Alexsandar Hemon's piece in the current issue of the New Yorker, besides the fact that I think he's a fantastic writer (who happens to possess a particularly compelling biography), and that it was about his young children. But really. Why? I mean, it's the Summer Fiction issue! There are so many other things to read; so many things that do not include the words "my baby" and "cancer." But I started reading, and then I could not stop, and now here I am, grieving along with him.

What made the piece bearable was his reflections on language and story, gleaned from observing his eldest daughter at age almost-three, who told constant, rambling tales of her imaginary friend Mingus throughout her little sister's illness. Stepping back to think about stories is how a reader finds enough air to breathe and thus survive this tale of family tragedy.

Hemon talks about how children process the mysteries of daily life through stories. Imaginary friends can take on all the strong emotions children feel and actually do something with them. Those insights are familiar territory. But then Hemon suggests something more which I found striking: between the ages of two and four, children acquire language at such a fast and furious rate that they cannot possibly have sufficient personal experience to connect with it all. They turn to imagination and story to give all the words a home. Young children naturally want to use all the extraordinary power they are steadily accumulating with each and every new word. In exercising their new linguistic capabilities, bizarre tales ensue.

Dister Lister comes to mind. And Gabriel's superhero universe, which features The Crane (pictured above), some bad guys named The Switch and The Drip, and a terrifying place where bad guys must be sent called the Cracker Mill. It's why I love to transcribe the kids' stories on occasion; they are so inventive, so off-the-wall, so very strange - not unlike good art. It's cool to think that that creative boundlessness has to do with a developmental excess of words. It's an overflow of language that kids need only reach out to collect with jars, cups, pots, and bare hands; anything that might work to catch it all, and make it theirs.

It's a state of affairs that is most dramatic in early childhood, when nothing is old hat and everything from beetles to elevator buttons is a new, engrossing puzzle to ponder. Marry that sense of wonder with an acquisition of language that barrels along daily at a whiplash-inducing pace and you have the makings of some awesome poetry. The way children describe their actual and imaginary worlds can be downright arresting in its weirdness. They see everything fresh, and describe it with words that are equally fresh. Their words have not yet found their place in common phrases, in cliches, in abstract associations - they simply come into existence, as perfect and startlingly singular as a goldfinch alighting on the wildflowers in the garden.

Last night Gabriel and I were sitting on the floor of his room. I had joined him because he was lying there in grumpy protest against bedtime. I asked him how he was feeling. We ended up talking about all the different feelings we both have ('grown ups don't cry!') and he kept asking me for more and more feeling words. Running low on classic examples, I asked him if he ever felt ridiculous. He looked at me, thinking hard, and asked, "Do you mean when someone else has a cookie and you wish you had one too?" No, that's feeling envious, I explained. Gabriel's face lit up. "I feel envious when Didi gets a toy from her school!" Done. Now he's tucked that one away. Next?

As we grow - in theory anyway - the excess of words situation remains unchanged. We don't learn words anywhere near the pace that we once did, but we have accumulated quite a few by adulthood, and they can't possibly all map onto our direct experiences of the world. And we are still in need of help processing the mysteries of daily life, right? Yet the world seems to smooth us out, and make our language and vision normal when they were once blessedly weird. Not so artists, perhaps. How is it that they are able to hang onto the strangeness of things, to find unique places to put all those words? Here is what Hemon says about it:

"...I recognized in a humbling flash that she was doing exactly what I'd been doing as a writer all these years: the fictional characters in my books had allowed me to understand what was hard for me to understand (which, so far, has been nearly everything). Much like Ella, I'd found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my own biography. I'd needed narrative space to extend myself into; I'd needed more lives."

Not that I need my kids to be fiction writers, but it does seem to me that the world is richer, fuller, more meaningful - a place replete with spiritual and creative potential - if we retain that awareness of language as overflowing. Harboring an excess of words seems like a good way to stay in tune with our essential humanity as we grow older. Isn't it cool to think that one of the most essential roles we play as parents is Giver of Words? In conversation, in books, in songs, we keep on watering the fountain. And all the while we are given the gift of delight in return, watching as their cups runneth over.