World Building

As a writer, I consider myself a curator of language. To curate: to select and organize. This definition in itself does not meet the mark. It is lacking, much too sterile. The etymology of the word curate evolved from Middle English— curate "member of the clergy," from Latin curatus (same meaning), from cura "spiritual charge of souls," from earlier cura "care, healing" — related to accurate, cure. These generational hints and roots come much closer to explaining my relationship to words.

Words are my spiritual balm. Through the process of writing I am most connected. To what? I have not found a name close enough to ascribe: ascribe, from Latin ascribere, meaning "to write in, enter in a list; to add in writing," composed of ad- (to) + scribere (to write). Through writing I learn to identify most accurately what I believe. With words I find a cure, not a fix, but a temporary remedy to the anxiety induced by the known and unknown. 

Currently, I am ate up with anxiety caused by both the known and the unknown horrors humans are capable of committing. The midterms are three days away and my doom scrolling has reached the point of causing me vertigo. I will not virtue signal here. Or judge. Instead, I will think about words in an attempt to calm my nervous system and share my word salad with you, in an attempt to calm yours.

To be a  philologist is to love a word in its historical entirety that resonates whether we think we can name it or not. Because the entirety of a word includes the ghost referent we can never truly “write in.” I think of words as magic in the smoke and mirrors way and the miracles way.

I have read sentences that feel like miracles. Here is one: “She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing” (Salinger). She remains out of reach, but this simple, irregular construction matches her gesture completely and tells us everything we need to know to create an entire world around her. This is a once in a lifetime sentence (definitely some spiritual charge of souls). The rest are made of mortal magic that try to name what can’t be named. It’s ironic, isn’t it? We try and try like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill in a time loop or warp. We want words to be the thing we are pointing to when all they can do is point. And so we exist in the gap between and try to get as close to the object that surely exists without a name, and in that absence or echo or trace, we create worlds.

So, maybe it's time to pay attention to what words we create into worlds and create a language bridge to a world that is at the very least meliorated and at best sublime before it's too late.

Salinger, J.D. Nine Stories. Little, Brown and Company, 1953.