Hacksaw, pesto, tuning fork . . .

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1.

We love concrete nouns: hacksaw, pesto, tuning fork, barnacle, nosegay¹, snorkel, pomegranate, charcoal, lantern, wintergreen, camisole, spigot, fly rod, thimble, cranberry, dandelion, mascara, twine, juniper, pigtail . . .

For years, I’ve encouraged student writers to favor such words. Why? Because they involve the body, because they’re particular, because they’re not vague, because they’re grabbier as words.²

Sometimes, it’s true, we need to generalize, to stand back: cornstalk becomes cornfield becomes rural farmland becomes agriculture. We abstract. Latin: ab [from/out of] + tract [drag/draw/derive].³ The idea is drawn out of the thing itself. Or dragged away from, we could say, as if the thing resists and/or resents this move from corporeal to incorporeal.

Abstractions are bloodless, skinless, weightless. Mercy, stinginess, inevitability, sin, gratitude, ambivalence, grief, sagacity, loneliness, eternity . . . The -ity, -hood, -ence, -ment, -ness class of words. They’re stepping-back words, summary words, mind words.

Use sparingly.⁴

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Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. . . .  The world’s abounding objects, its rampant variety of people, its exuberant, destructive, and unguessable changes, and the splendid interest of its multiple conjunctions, appeal, attract, and engage more than ideas do . . .               

                                                                          —Living By Fiction, Annie Dillard (1982)

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2.

In his iconoclastic treatise, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012), Howard Bloom⁵ takes up this question of the particular vs. the general. Throughout this mind-thrashing work, Bloom invokes what he calls “the five heresies.”

It’s the first two that concern us here:

• A does not equal A.

• One plus one does not equal two. 

I don’t have room to unpack Bloom’s whole train of thought, but at one point he argues that while abstractions may be “indispensable” for daily life, “they don’t accurately reflect reality.” It’s a line you can read without really getting for a moment, without grasping how radical a statement it is.

        One plus one does not equal two because each thing is only itself. 

Substack will let me know how many readings this post logs (Substack is big on stats), but if Rick reads it and Marti reads it and Alissa reads it, you have three instances of the bureaucratic category “readings,” but in the world of actual stuff, the one with atoms and molecules, you have only “Rick’s reading” and “Marti’s reading” and “Alissa’s reading.” Finally (I really love sharing this), Bloom cites the mathematician/philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who, he tells us, tortured himself over this paradox, who “puzzled over whether the relationships called ‘=’ and ‘is’ even exist.”⁶

This was a lesson I’d been trying to impart for years, even once put in the mouth of a character: Pay attention, things only happen once.

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3.

In the course of writing an essay on figurative language [“Bigger Than a Breadbox: The Power of Comparison”], I realized that writers sometimes need to describe an object or state of being that’s abstract to begin with, that lacks a physical reality or is otherwise so ephemeral or interior that everyday language isn’t enough. And that many writers tackle this problem using the same strategy: If simile and metaphor typically compare the new/unknown thing to something already known, in this case the writer ties the ineffable to something concrete, something that can be touched or tasted or seen—in essence, physicalizing the nonphysical. And often, in the process, we get the frisson/jangle that comes from exposure to the unexpected. It’s like spraying paint on the Invisible Man.

Three quick examples:

        Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog. 

                                                                 —The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene (1948)

        All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his mother’s                     aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit             in a turgid well.

                                                                              —Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847)

        You can’t dispel illusions as easily as you shake down the quicksilver in a                                      thermometer.                          

                                                                     —Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig, (1938)

I like the chemistry between “illusions” and “quicksilver.” I like thinking of illusions as quick and silvery. And it reminds me that the best similes/metaphors are like chemical transformations: two unrelated elements are fused, making a third, as in, for instance:

            soft metal that burns in air   +   green poisonous gas   =   table salt 

[BTW: Quicksilver and shake are Anglo-Saxon; illusion, dispel, thermometer are Latinate.]

Sometimes the linkage or transformation is truly startling/unsettling, as when Christa Wolf ties “soul” to “appendix”:

              . . . as a child she had imagined that her soul was like an appendix, a pale, crooked                    little tube of skin, that, in fact, resided in her chest cavity, near her stomach, where fear             was located as well. It had probably never occurred to her that her appendix, which                    looked just like her soul, could be removed by operation.

And look at the precision and deep understanding Toni Morrison achieves with this imagery:

            But it was a love that, like a pan of syrup kept too long on the stove, had cooked out,                  leaving only its odor and a hard, sweet sludge, impossible to scrape off.

                                                                                               —Sula, Toni Morrison (1973)

And Jerzy Kosinski’s depiction of a young Holocaust orphan’s desolate realization:  

        If it was true that there was no God, no Son, no Holy Mother, nor any of the lesser saints,         what had happened to all my prayers? Were they perhaps circling in the empty heaven like        a flock of birds whose nests had been destroyed by boys? 

                                                                              —The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński (1965)  

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4. 

Finally, though it’s slightly off-topic, in that “destroyed bodies” isn’t as immaterial/intangible/incorporeal as “illusions” or “love” or “prayers,” here’s a candidate for the simile HOF:

         She herself had been trained at Women’s College Hospital and then sent overseas during           the Sicilian invasion. That was in 1943. The First Canadian Infantry Division worked its          way up Italy, and the destroyed bodies were fed back to the field hospitals like mud                     passed back by tunnellers in the dark.

                                                                      —The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje (1992)

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Juliette Binoche [Hana], The English Patient (1996)

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1. Nosegay: Kind of an odd word, which always puts me in mind of an even odder word of the sort that tickles me to know: tussie-mussie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosegay#tussy-mussy

https://www.antiquetrader.com/collectibles/tussie-mussies-and-collectible-posy-holders

2. I even love the words we have for things we can’t quite get our mental pincers on: thingamajig/thingamabob, whatchamacallit, doohickey/doodad, gizmo, widget . . .

3. Traho, trahere, traxi, tractus.

4. Use sparingly: But what does that mean?

One thing it means: Prefer words from English’s Anglo-Saxon pool—they tend to represent the tangible world, they’re often one or two syllables, with harder, chunkier sounds. The Norman Invasion of 1066 brought Latinate words to Britain; for the next five hundred years, as modern English developed, there were two language streams (I’m simplifying this): the tongue of the overlord class (Latin-based) and the tongue of the worker class (Anglo-Saxon), the former rich in concept words, the latter in words for physical objects. Thus, in many batches of related meanings, we find a sliding scale from most physical at one end, to most abstract at the other.

        Anglo-Saxon:  corn/corncob, silk, dirt, seed, field, bin/crib, farm, reap, plow/plough,                thresh, harvest, blade, furrow, harrow, stock, iron, water, grow, gather, food, fodder . . . 

       Latinate:  agriculture, commodity, cereal, cultivate, storage, implement, multiply,                    accumulate, nourishment, sustenance . . . 

What else it means: I talked about this a few weeks ago in Voice [1]: What Voice Is. A big part of revision is clarifying who’s talking. If your text-in-progress is fraught with abstract words, then you’re speaking as a thinker/analyzer/maker of cerebral distinctions . . . and you’re appealing to that side of a reader’s brain.

One job I do as I re-work a piece is making sure I’m being who I want to be vis-à-vis a reader, and this often involves simplifying the language—not dumbing it down, but making it sound nicely rhythmic, friendly, attitude-rich, trustworthy, engaging. I use abstract words as needed, but only then. I zero in on spots where the wording is too thick, where I took too long to say something or put it too indirectly. Good writing should seem buoyant. I try to honor the mantra I used to give students:

                Quicker, smarter, voicier. 

5. Howard Bloom: Don’t confuse this Bloom with prolific literary scholar, Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994) . . . or philosopher Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987). And as the subtitle clarifies, this is not a book about religion, it’s an unconventional look at how complex structures can arise from a few simple rules or axioms.

6. Bloom: The God Problem: How a Godless Universe Creates, Howard Bloom (2012), p. 28.