Are we using words with freight?
Robert Aitken spent his entire chapter on jnana describing how language has lost its power. He writes, “All words and phrases were intimate with experience but many have lost their intimacy, which is to say they have lost their meaning. They have lost their freight and are just deadheading.”
Words have lost their freight.
I have been thinking about this for days. Of course, as a writer, I think about words a lot. How do you use these signifiers to convey what you want to communicate? How on earth do you figure out how to do that over time, across cultures, from one person to the next? The more I study Eastern spirituality, the more I realize there’s a chasm of meaning between what my Western education has taught me and what these foreign words are trying to teach.
That’s actually the reason I embarked on this Paramita Project ten months ago. I wanted to understand what it meant to practice these virtues. And I felt certain that the way I understood them didn’t–and in a real way, couldn’t–capture what the Eastern Sanskrit or Pali words were trying to say. The best thing I knew to do was to try to abide in them, sit with them, listen to them. Let them teach me.
Ten months later, I can tell you my hunch was correct. My Western assumptions have regularly been wrong. And I also know that even after my diligent practice, the true meaning of these ten virtues has often left me without word to convey what I think I’ve experienced. Not to mention how much I *know* I’ve missed, misunderstood, misconstrued or just simply cannot comprehend yet, for whatever reason.
I’m not sure if this is making any sense, which I suppose is the point of this post.
We are surrounded by more words on a daily basis now than ever in human history. We are overwhelmed with words. And though much of that is to be celebrated, it also comes at a cost.
The cost is meaning.
The cost is words without freight. Without heft. Without skin and bone and sinew.
This weekend was Trinity Sunday for Christians who follow the liturgical calendar. (Not all do.) Basically, it’s the one guaranteed day a year where the sermon will be about the idea of God being “three persons.” This gets very problematic very quickly, because it’s a mystery that nobody understands. We claim it, but we don’t understand it. As best we can describe, God seems to be in relationship- not only with us and creation, but within God’s own Self. But whenever we try to nail this down any more than that, it just sucks all the air right out of the room. And the problem with that is that the Trinity, whatever it is, invites us to wonder. Awe. Joy. Appreciation.
It’s like we don’t trust the weight of the idea, the mystery of just that word itself- trinity- to be enough.
Maybe it’s enough.
What if these crazy, freighted words like trinity and God and bodhisattva and jnana carry within them all the heft they could possibly need? What if the problem is that we’re trying to unload the freight, unpack the weight, rather than sit with them and let them teach us? Maybe we’re trying to explain them, rather than experience them.
Robert Aitken says this is why he prefers not to translate words or make them more “accessible.” He uses “zazen” rather than meditation. He uses “Dharma” instead of teaching. There’s weight there, in the process of hearing something foreign and having to think about what it might mean to enter into its mystery.
Whatever jnana is, I think it means doing just that.
This week, make it a point to notice words. But more than that, try to feel them. Experience them. Listen to them. They carry something worthwhile. They hold something precious. Don’t let familiarity or inattention prevent you from receiving the gift.
