I: What Liars Words Are

My very good friend Gary and I had an understanding that, if we ever agreed on anything, we each needed to automatically re-examine his own position.

There was a Zen element mixed into this, mostly by Gary, who had taught in Japan, although I held my own. And his half of our agreement was premised on the fact that Gary was a Catholic-raised, Zen-loving, California-hating, gun-toting libertarian (who argued with being labeled in such ways, but would agree that those words come closer to the truth than most others, as they are diametrically opposed to liberal, gun-controlling, commie, pinko or protestant, let alone godless atheist.

Disagreeing with Gary was immensely liberating. We laughed together long and loud. On weekends we would go on book-buying excursions and politely explain to each other the error of the other’s ways, with bonus points delivered for a well-crafted gibe. I mean, we laughed almost as much as we talked, and we only stopped talking to eat, drink, or crank tunes. Life should always be so much fun.

It was during one of those excursions that we agreed on how words are, by their very nature, lies. The peril of potential agreement was immediately staved off by Gary claiming words bore almost no relationship to the things they represented, and that anyone who thought they did and ever let words upset them was self-deceived as well as deceived by the words themselves. It was, according to Gary, your own fault if you ever let words bother you.

I, on the other hand, felt words do have some relationship with what they represent. That I can say the words Kilamanjaro, White House, or John Wayne and reasonably rely on conjuring similar images or concepts in people’s mind — but that everyone might have different images of the White House (exterior, interior, the press room, whatever) or John Wayne (a young or old man, a western, a soldier) and that that was the disconnect. Further, while the words are usually not the things they represent, the word word actually is a word; noun is a word and a noun. I felt there is a closer relationship than he acknowledged.

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The whole discussion had long roots for me, the kind that stay easily buried amidst the daily bustles and hustles, until I got a little blast from the past recently.

I wish I had more time for exploring the blogosphere. Still, every so often I do make these forays into the unknown (thinking, I’ll come back here as soon as I can) and one day I found myself at the site of an educator in Santa Marta, Columbia, who liked some of the same movies I do (especially The Usual Suspects, A Hard Day’s Night, and American Splendor) and some of the same music and authors, and she had posted a list of books including J.D Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (but not Catcher…, interestingly) and Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and Vlad Nabokov’s Pale Fire and … Walker Percy for The Message in the Bottle.

That metaphorically poleaxed me.

The Message in the Bottle had a huge impact on me. And I won’t even go into telling about the cabin in northern Minnesota where I sequestered myself with it in January ’81, underlining it and scrawling in notebooks for my last college paper amidst the ultra-stillness of a hibernating forest dressed in white.

It’s where I learned the word water is not the fluid, the word car is not the vehicle it represents, the word glass is not the vessel it represents, and so on. Percy explains this with his triadic theory. In oversimplified essence, the triad is this: 1) you as the observer and speaker see 2) an object and use 3) the word for it. But the word is not the thing it represents.

Words are just make-believe. And they are very tricky, deceptive make-believe, too. And that’s only the beginning of our troubles with these symbols.

I’ll come back to the topic in the next post; and clicking the word here while take you there.