Words

 

My dad is a golf course architect. He received his degree in landscape architecture and since that day, what he has put to paper has been brought to life. My dad builds, and that is exactly what I wanted to do.

I made my decision to come to Oklahoma Christian solely based on baseball. When I got here it did not take long for me to see that the closest thing OC has to a landscape architecture degree is interior design. After semesters of searching for a suitable major, I soon came to realize that architecture is not the only way to build.

A wordsmith is someone who is a skilled user of words – a word architect. A wordsmith selects, arranges and harmonizes words in such a way as to yield a finished product that captures time and emotion.

Edgar Allan Poe was a wordsmith, penning such phrases as, “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson captured our idea of age when he wrote, “As we grow old… beauty steals inward.”

Mark Twain spoke a dozen words that would take many a dozen lifetimes to grasp when he said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”

William Shakespeare: “Be great in act, as you have been in thought.”

Walt Whitman: “I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.”

Part of the beauty in words is that, while they are the best way we have to articulate such indescribable concepts as emotions, they will never be enough. The beauty of words lies within their inadequacy; that no matter how vivid words may be, they cannot rival the intensity of reality

Dana Gioia constructed a poem, “Words,” that emphasizes this inadequacy of words in relation to the authenticity of nature.

“The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other –

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper –

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,

painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving

each lucent droplet back into the clouds that endangered it.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always –

greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.”

While words will never suffice in their efforts to justly depict reality, they are the medium through which we, as humans, travel to bring us as close to the edge of authenticity as possible. Yet where words fall short is where life blossoms, in the assurance that reality is far greater than words could ever hope to express.

So we persist in our construction, with words that will never escape their enduring inadequacy… and it is truly a thing of beauty.