What exactly does the Word create? (by Jenny Factor)

 

In my John Milton class at Brandeis University (I am there attending school), time spent occasionally talking about God is evidently time spent talking about the relation between literary texts and religious ones.

In both the KJV and NIV (versions) of the Bible, the Book of John recounts the creation of the world via words thus:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What I find lovely about this construction, literarily, is how one can use it to measure the space between saying and being, or one could say “word”-ing and “create”-ing. The repetitions and graduated iterations of the phrases describe potential geometries of the relationship between words and power: simultaneous or adjacent, identical or neighborly.

How much power do our words have to manifest what isn’t there? To portray what is?

Looking for more insight into this origin myth for language-qua-creation, I find myself grabbing for the Hebrew version of Bereishit (Old Testament) that describes the creational magnificence of words this way:

Yehi or va yehi or.

We translate that as “God said, ‘Let there be light and there was light.’” But look more closely. The actual words are not a graduated transition as the English implies. They are a sequence of identical twin-like repetitions—dual humps connected by a “v” (and). The uttered phrase (yehay ohr) is rendered identical to the performed one (yehay ohr). Only the single letter “v” (and) connects the languaging with the manifesting.

As poets and readers, we may find ourselves at times aware that words are incredible, and creative, and yet….there are often things in the manifest world that our human language can neither mimic nor summon up. Between words and being there is distance. And into that chasm falls...well, so much! childhood impotence, hocus-pocus, Lacanian lack, modes of consciousness, alternate realities, power and desire. 

What exactly do words create? What do the non-word elements of the poem bring into being? In a series of blog posts, I’ll talk a bit about words—and wordsmiths—as creational, depictional, powerful and powerless.

Next Up: Plato and the Dangers of Poetry. Or Percy Bysshe Shelley and Strategies of Unsaying. 

Comments

[Stacey]

Thank you for this post Jenny. I'm looking forward to the next (and welcome welcome back!)

[Joe Schwartz]

Interested to see how this develops.

One quick correction: "Let there be light" and there was light is indeed "yehi or vayehi or" as you have it in the subheading -- not "yehay lilah" as you have it in the body of the post.

Also, the shadow that falls between the word and being was very powerfully explored by Bialik in his "Revealment and Concealment in Language." Here is a translation: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/cedars-of-lebanon-revealment-and-concealment-in-language/

[Jenny Factor]

Joe: Thank you for this link and this correction, and for commenting!

Bialik's analysis is so interesting and to-the-point.

"how shaky is their bridge of mere words, how deep and dark the void is that opens at their feet, and how much every step taken safely partakes of the miraculous."

[Jenny Factor]

It's so very good to BE back, Stacey. (If life changes can't make time for pleasures like this, how sad would that be!)