Language and the Lost Art of Writing

I can speak English, Spanish some Thai and a little Italian and German.  My wife speaks English, Tagalog, Illongo a little Cebuano and some Spanish.  Language is the most curious thing.  It is the illustration of our thoughts, emotions, feelings and desires.  It is the instrument of expression and without it we would be as limited as my loving dog.  I might be able to understand happiness, sadness, pleasure or pain, hunger and when one needs to poop.  Beyond that things start to break down.

I have a lot of friends who I communicate with in English but English is not their first language.  This dynamic can frequently create misunderstandings.  Limited knowledge of a language often creates communication without nuance.  Stronger words chosen for convenience can often convey a message that was not intended.  There is always a danger of a misunderstanding, something blowing up that shouldn’t be.  In the face of such catastrophic consequence I maintain the policy of not getting pissed until I further probe the true intention of the words that were spoken.  The smallest misunderstanding or mis-intended statement can cause a war.  This is of course a reality that our own President Trump has no concept of.  

Language is filled with nuance and the deeper it is spoken the more complicated this becomes.    I adore the spoken and written word for all the complexity it can convey.  At times I find myself frustrated when I try to use it to express myself yet feel no reciprocation from many others.  For a long time I explained it as a lack of sincerity for me held by the person that I was speaking to.  As if somehow there was not the same reciprocal emotional commitment.  I felt like I poured my heart out and I could simply not understand why there was not a similar expression made to me.  The only explanation was that I must care more than “they” do and in that I must mean less to “them.”  

One day I was driving home from work and listening to a black American author speak on National Public Radio.  I really can’t recall what he was writing about but something he said struck me.  He said that some people don’t have the vocabulary to express themselves.  That was absolutely brilliant.  Suddenly it explained everything.  I do not mean to demean the vocabulary deprived person in the least.  People are who they are.  The statement simply worked to answer my expressed feeling of non-reciprocal written and spoken emotion.  How can a person answer if they don’t have the words to use?  It is like a painter painting a canvas.  The painter has the artistic talent to create an image.  I on the other hand, do not.  Were I to try it would look like disjointed lines and create no cohesive statement.  

Language is exactly the same way.  Spoken language and written language is an art.  I have never really considered my ability to commit words to print or verbalize my thoughts a talent but, in truth it is.  It is every bit as artistic as the painter and it answers a long held insecurity. 

So how do we find emotion if we can’t rely on our words?  

I believe that while the world of social networking has brought us together it is also pulling us apart. Of course there are the political fractures of ideology that are destroying us but through immediate and brief interaction we have additionally sacrificed personal communication.  I have come to believe that my generation was a dividing line.  Human civilization is filled with landmarks and every generation can find them if they want to.  That said, my generation was when written communication in many ways ended.  I typed my term papers on a typewriter.  There was a computer lab at my university but it was inconvenient and only the true hardcore techno geeks had anything close to a personal computer in their dorm rooms.  I firmly believe that if I had a computer spell checker it would have elevated my grades substantially.  With the risk of sounding like a wrinkled old man saying “In my day...” we also wrote letters.  It’s how I met my wife.  I had pen-friends around the world.  I can recall Germany, Sweden, England and Syria, France and the Philippines.  It was my way of reaching out from my northern Alaskan home to the world beyond.  We actually took the time to sit and compose a letter, buy a stamp, and send it half way around the world where we would wait weeks if not months for a response.  When it came there was excitement while sorting through the post eager to see a strange stamp adhering to often micro think paper folded with red and blue marks around it.  Par Avion.. Air Mail.. Luft Post... adorned the outside.  We seldom if ever spoke with these distant friends. Telephone calls cost a fortune and are practically out of the question.  There was no Skype.  When I was a university student in Europe I would look at my Austrian Schillings ticking away on a tiny pay phone display as I scrambled for more coins and rushed to tell my parents what I wanted them to know.  When I hung up the phone I knew I would spend the next few weeks living without something essential, usually food.  A short telephone call might cost twenty or fifty dollars.  

My wife was a pen pal.  I met her from a small add in a Psychology Today magazine

seeking international pen friends.  I suppose it was providence.  It must have been the only time in my life I actually read Psychology Today.  I must have been in a Dr’s office forced to choose between a woman’s magazine, Sports Illustrated or a Bible story book.  At the conclusion of my third university year I flew around the world and stopped in the Philippines to meet her.  In our house there is a large box filled with the letters we wrote each other in the years prior and the years that followed.  It is hard to imagine something similar today.  These days even email has become foreign.  Communication is on messenger apps in short blurbs.  I find it is only friends my age and older that actually take the time to sit and compose an email letter to each other.    Composition requires thought and emotion as feelings are transposed into text.  It is an involved process of reading, writing and editing.  Far different than a hurried text message often sent in short hand filled with misspellings and lack of punctuation.  I believe that as hand written letters have vanished so too will email letters.  

Lack of thought and expression is seductive.  It’s easier to watch than to read.  Instant gratification of a quickly sent thought is immediate.  The sight of a blinking three dots reassures you that your answer is coming.  When they vanish irritation often sets in as you realize the entity on the other end had something else to do.  Even voice communication is diminished. While it is cheap and easy it requires the commitment of presence and time.  Answering a text message is so much easier.  It can be accomplished while we watch a show or even use the toilet.

Sometimes I think that this blog is essentially a broadcast to the world.  A last ditch effort to find a person that will take the time to read it to its conclusion.    At the same time it is destined to be filed away in a printed book that will some day be either read by a descendant or tossed in the trash prior to a garage sale.

I am not sure how or if this will change.  Of course 30 years ago I could hardly have imagined email let alone the “Social Network.”  Perhaps we will come together in ways I can’t conceive.  Maybe division will be replaced by unity.  Still, I cannot stop thinking we are in some form of decline or reorganization of who we are as humans with redefinition of what we mean to each other.  For myself I will send my thoughts out to the world and file them away on a shelf.  A shelf filled with books that sits on top of a box filled with the letters I wrote with the woman who became my wife some twenty-nine years ago.