The borders of words

For me, one of the most powerful and passionate scenes in American theater comes in William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, when young Helen Keller, blind, deaf, and mute from birth, speaks her first word - not as a concept but as a reality.

Her teacher, Annie Sullivan, stands at the well, pumping water onto Helen and saying the word into her palm again and again until Helen at last mouths the word "Wa-ter" - not as a piece of language to be used but as a cool, clear, ringing fact. She had come to realize the truth inside of words, with all the power and vision that opens to her. Sullivan declares it: "That words can be her eyes, to everything in the world outside her, and inside too, what is she without words? With them she can think, have ideas, be reached, there's not a thought or fact in the world that can't be hers." I believe in that.

I also know what I do not believe in: the practice of using language for inclusion and exclusion. Though discrimination may be basic to our sensory-psychological processes and can help us tell the difference between the sound of a cow and a sheep, between the odor of human food and human waste, when discrimination is enlarged to separate us from others or from the natural world, it becomes a human evil. It becomes a limitation that walls us off from ourselves and all that we are. When we begin to mark and label our experience, our language - that tool for communication and expression - can become a block to the heart.

"It's only human!" "That's just human nature." I'm tired of this lame excuse for human abuse when "being human" should mean having the ability to see beyond such limitations. Denial-in whatever sense we use it-is always a denial of self, and from it come the "shadows" that fall across our lives. Clearly we are all parts of groups-our families, our tribes, our communities; they all have their names - but shouldn't this recognition of human connection be extended to others? Could there be a path of inclusion that does not also exclude? I know the few man-to-man talks my father ever gave me and my brother in our cluttered basement were about this. Leaning on his tool table, he advised us in simple terms about treating all women as sisters, about extending family blood to everyone. Back then it seemed both natural and right. It still does.

What brought on all this concern about boundaries? It truly arises not as a "reaction" but as a "realization" - as a "sensing" more than a "knowledge" In my fifties, I look around and begin to see the slowness of progress and the all-too-familiar obstacles of ignorance, violence, coercion, fear, and denial. Added to and integral with those is the human capacity to restrict, to cast labels and draw lines. Sadly, the specifics of discrimination are easy to cite: Nazism, fascism, and an other nationalisms which start wars and institutionalize oppression; the patterns of class division, of haves and have-nots, which foster social injustice and unrest; the antisocial notice that we are not welcome here. Human history abounds with our records of such abuse and denial.

At rare times we make efforts to rise above such sham, as in the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," adopted in 1948 by the U.N. General Assembly. Recognizing human potential as well as human rights, nations had met and drafted a way out of our patterned injustices-a declaration of our common rights:

Article 12- No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks....

Article 23-

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Here is language put to its ultimate good, and I go back to these clear statements to correct my own vision of the world. They are my corrective lenses, reminders of what we are capable of doing as well as how we have failed. The idealism may sound tinny to young ears, but that is only because young people live amidst our failures and the clatter of words. I sense that our young still want to see us all live up to such values. They're just more disgusted with our lack of progress and with the sacrifice of their own innocence. However, this copy of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" comes today from fundamentally a youth-supported organization - Amnesty International. We are all young and old together.

To get this closer to home, to our personal ways of exclusion, we need only ask what makes us draw those lines between ourselves and others - the color of their skin, their origins, their way of speech or dress, where they live and with whom, how they grow their hair or grass. What makes us sense them as different and therefore outside of ourselves? And what gives us this right to exclude? Walk into a crowded room and you can read the body language - the diverted eyes, the turned shoulders, the silences that speak. Blacks in America are well practiced at reading these signs, as are Native Americans and other minority ethnic groups. But so are women and the poor, young and old. In fact, we are all part of the process - both excluded and excluder. All of us are in and outside of lines; all of us draw those lines around ourselves and our groups. When we sanctify the process with language, it becomes a way of seeing and being, and a tragic loss of life - for us all.

As a teacher, I walk into a lot of rooms, and what I find is myself standing up in front while others choose their seats and associations - whom they accept into their circle, whom they will talk with. In one class, it may be a best friend; in another, someone from home or someone who now lives in the dorm, someone who is old or black or female. And yet our circles are not fixed; we have the capacity to extend them infinitely. That is our hope - to open the nets.

I believe that the cause of this divisiveness is twofold: fear and its shadow, powerlessness. Because we deny and doubt our own feelings, we are afraid; feeling powerless, we create the fictive power of withdrawal. Like a small child, we choose not to recognize or respond to these others. We place them beneath us, or render them invisible through the infantile power of denial. And we end with what? - a divided heart making boundaries that abuse ourselves as much as others. Mimicking our social culture, we separate our life into compartments - dividing our day into work and play, business and home, struggle and recreation ... the words are there. And so we separate the sacred and secular, home and education, commerce and nature until we end with a fractured and fragmented vision. To maintain the unreasonable nature of our boundaries, we create the divided self.

As a teacher and writer, this realization of the tyranny of language came as something of a shock, yet it is something I had suspected for a long time. This semester it struck me as I asked my students to write on the issue of "poverty in America." As I wrote the words the poor across the board, I faced my students and was struck dumb with a triple realization: that some of them live below the "poverty line"; that no clear definition exists for the words the poor; and that, if I began to pretend that there were, I would be teaching a lie. The minute we point at "the poor," they are other, and so I was pushed through a long birth canal to the realization: we are the poor, all of us. We are also the rich, the wicked, the kind, and the unkind. I told them that as I was telling it to myself. Grounded in truth, the discussion grew and blossomed in some of their best writings.

A further realization came in another lesson I had been doing on "Writing Towards Wholeness." It begins with the question of how we come to know the world - how we receive it into ourselves. The answers are so basic, it's hard to see their importance. I begin by asking them, "Point to where you are inside your body." They, of course, point to their head or heart or eyes, or they sit in a confused silence. I draw a large circle on the board and begin to intersect it with lines drawn through the middle. At the top, I write, "Thought (the head)" and at the opposite end I write, "Emotions (the heart)." We have a long discussion on each as a way of knowing, and I ask how many of them are more of a "thinking" person and how many consider themselves a "feeling" person. It is usually about half and half. I do the same for other points on the grid - "Senses and Intuition," "Rational and Irrational" - usually ending with "Literal and Spiritual." After some practice, I hand them a poem - William Stafford's "Driving Through the Dark" - and ask them to read and mark what aspects of the person are called forth in the words. It's a good exercise and yet all wrong.

Somewhere into the fourth or fifth time I was teaching it I realized: these are not polarities; these are all integral parts of the self. We learn the simplest things again and again. We need not divide ourselves but must remain integrated and whole. Thereafter, for each of the aspects of the self I drew arrows, and all of them were pointing to the center, where the real wholeness lies. I'm reminded that the Japanese have a single word that means both "head and heart" - a more accurate reflection of how we live.

Beware dualistic thinking, I tell myself; but also more specifically now, beware starting any sentence with a collective noun. The second I start to say, "Blacks . . ." or "Students today . . ." or "American women . . . ." I know that I am wrong. Not only am I destined to stereotype for convenience but I am also treating a word as though it were a reality - and that reality, in turn, controls my perception. This is more than political correctness; it has become a necessary way of maintaining fairness and power over our own minds and hearts. If we want these things, we must strive for the holistic view.

In Scott Russell Sanders' recent article for Parabola, I find assurance. He points out the beauty of the mandala symbol, in which the four pointed crosses or squares designating the four elements embrace the wholeness of the circle. To Carl Jung he attributes the recognition that such mandalas "symbolize the search for a center, outwardly in the cosmos and inwardly in the psyche." Happily, such symbols of inclusiveness are there if we search them out. Sanders also recognized rightly that "any description of the world is a net thrown over a flood; no matter how fine the mesh, the world leaks through" and advises us that "no single alphabet can express the full range of our knowledge." Inside this open system, all can live free; the search for understanding is continuous and dependent upon diversity. We can all take comfort in that.

Another place where I find comfort is in the gentle guidance of Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart: "Compassion allows life to pass through our hearts with its great paradoxes of fife, love, joy, and pain. When compassion opens in us, we give what we can to stop the war, to heal the environment, to care for the poor, to care for people with AIDS, to save the rain forests." Most of this happens without words, though a kind and mindful word is always a way of converting karma. Zen student Trudi Jinpu Hirsch tells the story of visiting a friend with AIDS. On one visit, a doctor told her bluntly, "Your friend is a dead person. You may as well face it." Hirsch confesses, "As soon as that happened, conditioning set in. When I went back to see this person ... I'm now looking at a dead person. I mean ... what that can do.... I mean I'm killing him with my mind." We become slaves to our perception, yet the way to avoid becoming encaged in language and labels is to recognize that we walk into that cage ourselves. And if we empower ourselves, we can walk back out; it's our own mind, after all. As Octavio Paz reminds us, even an enslaved man is free if he can close his eyes and think.

Ultimately, the power to resist and envision still rests within each of us. Why should we be slaves when we can transform the world? Language may be a way to divide us and our world. But if we can keep our hearts and eyes open to each other, our language can become a way to connect us and set us free.

Larry Smith is a professor of English at Bowling Green State University's Firelands College. He is the author of six books of poetry and two literary biographies.

COPYRIGHT 1995 American Humanist Association
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