I’m not offering a regular essay this week, but a couple addenda and a reflection, a flag to come back to. Last week I wrote about dead words — empty, fossilized, inert material in language — but I forgot to include one of my favorite examples of it: “goodbye.”
When we’re leaving, we say “goodbye” or just “bye.” We have probably never considered the shape of the word. We simply use it. But what is the story of “goodbye”?
“Good” seems clear enough. But where does “bye” come from? Well, we might guess, “bye” means leaving or leave-taking, so we are wishing them a good departure. We are telling them to “fare well.”
But this is wrong. Instead, it turns out, it helps to see “goodbye” in the context of analogues in other languages, like “adieu” and “adios.” “Goodbye” too invokes God. Way back when there was “God be with you!” This was shortened to “God be!” and eventually to “Goodbye!”
To me, this is an amazing fossil in itself, and I can’t help be changed by the knowledge of it. At times, I sneer cynically at the fact that under our inert, mechanical, secular “goodbye” is a theological-informed imperative. We are much more pious than we think we are!
But before long I am more positive and hopeful. The word still stands in as a metaphor for the way God, our original relationship with the universe, is obscured through time and repetition and corruption, inevitable forces. But it also stands as a reminder of our task: unburying, witnessing, reanimating.
Next time you say “goodbye,” instead of it being mere reflex and empty words, you will have some awareness of what you are actually doing and saying. You are actually bowing in words to this person. Something deep in you is communicating something deep. You will be a bit more pious.
In other words, through this process of verbal digestion, your understanding of the word changes, and so do you. What had been external you have integrated and made part of you. The borrowed, the dead, the secondhand has been made new and yours and living. Your life grows deeper.
There’s something else I forgot to put in an earlier essay, which I in my notes this week:
I am losing my ability to buy things, to pay for things, to use these word-coins. The moment I would pay for something with them, they fall out of circulation. In the course of my habitual business, I pull a handful out of my pocket and reach them out across the counter, and in the process they dissolve.
It is as if, looking at a nail, you grab a hammer and begin to swing it, but in the middle of your swinging it the hammer becomes weightless, it crumbles like sand in your hands. Or rather, we are used to them like air, but they become like earth in my hands and I become aware of their solid earthy side. Their surfaces leap out and grab my attention. The words attract my eyes in their own right, which means that I am becoming unable to buy anything with these word-coins. Every time I start using them, very soon I am used by them, led by them. Where? I do not know.
Really, there’s some fairytale in it. It is as if I have been cursed, and, whenever I touch a coin, quarter or nickel or whatever, the air swirls around it and it takes on a new shape, turns into something else, is transformed into a blowing wind, or a crossing of a line, or a raising of an eyebrow, or a child peering through a window. In short, it turns into an image, a picture, a scene. I fully admit that I am sick, that I have a disease of speaking. I cannot speak properly, and fall silent, and am distracted, and misuse words.
I see now that this line of thinking, extending the metaphor of words as coins, fits right in with the theme from this essay on dementia: losing the ability to use words. This sense of disorientation, disruption, or breakdown is an important moment in the sequence I am exploring. For us to improve and learn, our habits have to be disrupted, and the same is true with language.
Noticing a word’s word-family is just one way of disrupting our language-habits, but it is simultaneously both a particularly accessible and profound one, favored both in and out of the philosophical tradition. The images I choose dramatize this disruption at its extreme, where it becomes compulsive, but some level of disruption is inevitable. If we are to come to use words more wisely and sanely, we must somehow perceive that we don’t know how to use them in our current state.
I won’t publish an essay for the next two weeks, since I will be at Vipassana center, doing a 10-day meditation retreat. Doing this retreat now, in the midst of this series on language, leads me to reflect on the role of calm and silence in the approach to language I am attempting to suggest and unfold here. Back at the start of this journey I paused to honor wonder, the humility of silence, speechlessness; but I am coming to see that silence needs to be more integrated in the course of these ideas. Not just to stand at the start, but to punctuate them. Silence, as a practice, is really a part of the heads-up approach and the slow use of language I am trying to learn and recommend.
That’s all for now. Goodbye.
Garrett