Groping for Words

For the first horrifying moments, there were gasps and tears, a groping for words. But in the days that followed Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, a lexicon of tragedy began to emerge, a sound loop carrying voices of striking homogeny, whether they belonged to teens or seniors, East Coast or West Coast residents, Democrats or Republicans. “America is changed forever. ... I feel like I’m watching a movie. ... This is the end of innocence.”

Then, across the United States, on talk radio and in Internet chat rooms, everyday people began to absorb and repeat the chilling lingo of specialists--”threatcon delta,” “terrorist cell,” “a massive failure of U.S. intelligence [agencies].”

Those who listen closely to the words we use--poets, playwrights and linguists--were struck by the inadequacy of the language they were hearing, and difficulty of finding speech in private life and public that would let us express the dimensions of the tragedy. Words shape experience, they say, and define events for ourselves and for history.

At its grandest, the speech of tragedy is transcendent, a rallying symbol of resolve and strength: Winston Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” bracing his country for war in 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “ ... the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” during the Depression.

And at its most powerfully intimate, speech can capture the unspeakable. “The house of the city is blue with spilled blood,” writes poet Shirley Graham in “Guernica.” “Even its roof is torn away, / torn and fallen on the people it should protect, / the people of the house of the city, / the blue people, the screaming people, / the dead people./

Hold the light up while you can. / See what someone wanted.”

The language of Tuesday’s tragedy is still emerging.

“What strikes me as a writer,” said Cambridge-based poet and journalist Ruben Martinez, “is that we are trying to use language for something we don’t have language for. ... Americans have been shielded from this. This type of tragedy is something that other regions of the world have experienced more than we have. When I was covering the wars in Central America in the ‘80s, I saw chaos on daily basis. There is a much more fluid language about this because tragedy is your daily companion

History has kept us innocent, he said. “We’ve never been invaded--tragedy has always been far away.” And consequently, Americans have “never developed a language of tragedy. We’re a language of optimism. We’re [Walt] Whitman’s language. And in favor of optimism, we’ve excised tragedy.”

Much of our language’s disconnection has to do with emotional distance, if not confusion, said culture critic bell hooks, author of “Salvation: Black People and Love” (Morrow).

“As a nation, we don’t want to hear the language of suffering,” hooks said. “We replace it with vengeance. The designated authorities are looking at it as if we are at the shootout at the OK Corral. In this language of war, we can’t allow this face where pain can be felt, and public grief. Here are thousands of people who are lost, but the spectacle, evocation and retribution doesn’t allow for us to share that sense of grief.

“So much of the architecture of spectacle--buildings, smoke, the planes--serves as a kind of mask. People saw people jump out of buildings and die. There is an anguish to this. I’ve seen nothing of that anguish to speak of. This has to do with a patriarchal language: This will not defeat us. To mask sorrow, to mask being out of control. It’s heart rending to process it as terror rather than as trauma. Those are two key words. You hear terror, not trauma. That is key.”

Finding adequate words for anguish, says poet David St. John, requires stepping away from the media blitz, and this is a time, he added, when poets and other writers should do so and offer an alternative voice. It’s “the responsibility of poets to find a public language adequate to the dimension of horror and grief,” said St. John, a professor of English at USC, “to speak for the grief of the individual. To recall what feels national and enormous is, in fact, a tragedy that exists by family and household.”

Some poets have already been driven to pinpoint the precise emotions that, of late, obsess them. As the news unfolded, Los Angeles poet Russell Leong scrapped plans to read a poem he had selected for an appearance. In half an hour, he wrote a replacement, “It’s Another City, Today, Sept. 11, 2001,” wrapping in the phrases that TV news had pounded into his brain: “It’s another city today / They say. / HE, or SHE, or THEY, may be praying or plotting / In a mosque. In a temple. In a church. / In a truck, car or plane.”

As writers, he said, “shouldn’t we be writing about today? ... I think that our duty, basically, is to shape the thinking, whether it’s intellectual or emotional, about what’s happening. Whether it’s [W.H.] Auden or [Pablo] Neruda, poets throughout the world, historically, know the power of language. ... So I think we have this duty to rise to the occasion. ...”

Writers, not rescue teams or grieving families, carry the burden of expressing what we’re observing, concurred poet Suzanne Lummis, co-director of the L.A. Poetry Festival. “I saw on the news a firefighter coming out of the rubble, and he was clearly torn about by what he had seen, and he said, ‘Words cannot describe it.’ I thought words can describe it, but that’s not his job. It is the job of other people--it is the job of poets and our leaders, and they are failing, not because they are stupid. ... It’s a society that does not know the poetry of its own language. So how in the the world are we going to have political leaders who can find the powerful and stirring language in a time of crisis?”

Some, however, have noted the richness passing between Americans in private conversations. “What strikes me is how unappealing some of the language coming out of politicians is and how remarkable the language coming out of common people is,” said Constance Hale, author of “Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose.” She also notes the “bifurcation between public speech and private, intimate speech ... especially in e-mails, of a human and soulful quality that really resonates. The public speech has been much more empty in a way, and it hasn’t gotten at the true soul pain that people are feeling in the country.”

And even the sweeping language of loss and condolence, with its seeming cliches and platitudes, say some linguists, is an essential component of community. “Every sentiment has a place,” said Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of “I Only Say This Because I Love You” (Random House). “People say, ‘There is nothing to say at a time like this’ because there isn’t. We Americans sneer at that and call it platitudes ... but that ... reflects a bias against words that [have been] used before. ... You use it, and you know you are saying the right sort of thing to the right sort of person. We have ways to express our shared experience. I don’t see it as a platitude but as a way to express a universal shared experience. To me, it is positive and moving thing.”

For a time, to expect the poetic might be inappropriate, said Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of “The Book of Jewish Values: A Day by Day Guide to Ethical Living.” “After a tragedy there is an overwhelming feeling of shock,” he said. “To speak with precision at a time of evil would be unimaginable. I would almost hold someone suspect who could articulate what they were feeling. We are overwhelmed by sorrow or anger. And neither emotion lends itself to precise expression.”

But honesty can move a leader or a people toward a language that is as powerful as poetry, Lummis said. “I have to go back to Winston Churchill, and I think about the words that became unforgettable: I can offer you nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat. And we cannot forget that one--it is the truth. I don’t think political leaders realize that, but even if the truth is hard, it’s a consolation to be told the truth as opposed to being lied to.” Churchill’s famous phrase, she said, “used many of the elements of poetry. It’s not a phrase cast in vagarities and vaporous abstractions, it has the element of poetic imagery. What poetry tries to do is bear the harsh and luminous world into language.”

“What I understand about language,” added playwright and performer Anna Deveare Smith, whose “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992” examined the city’s riots, “is that it’s kind of a petri dish, which has got in it specimens that are representative of much more of the words themselves. We are all right now in an extraordinary moment where we believe that the world could change forever, and we don’t have words for it. ... I think the people suffering couldn’t possibly have the words; they are trying to speak from the heart. The best thing we can do is to listen with our hearts.”