This week my son is saying his first words, or we’re hearing them at least: he chases the cat around the house, “dat! dat! dat!,” and he stops us from eating a banana without him simply by naming it. This is the beginning, though honestly I’m a little sorry for it. Before we began to bring him into our house of language he had his songs, tuneless, vowel-crazy, his own untethered calls. He spoke all the time but not within the limits of sense, and that full range is narrowing now in the interest of talk. Now each thing is gathering its word, and soon he will watch things until we name them, and then walk away in search of the next unnamed. I am sad for the label on the box, sad that it will be harder for him to see things purely now that they will sit inside their names, and that all his funny songs will be collared into words.
It’s blackberry season here in Seattle, and this morning we went out with our buckets and sleeves. I love blackberry picking, though every time I go I hear Hass’s line “saying blackberry blackberry blackberry” and I feel myself a line removed from where I am. A richer context perhaps, but I wish I could shake that voice. It’s not that I don’t love the poem, just that my habits feel voiced-over.
I read secondhand (Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct,” I believe, via Beth Ann Fennelly’s “Great With Child,” sweet twofer) that they think our earliest memories stick only once we can make associations between things. Metaphor makes it last. I’ve always been curious about why we reach so often for comparisons, myself included. I can barely speak without turning from one thing to another, reaching without meaning. But meaning is made of the gap, I suppose, of the leap between rocks rather than the rock itself.
On my son’s behalf I miss the rock disappearing into Rock. I miss each thing sliding away into its name, even as he lunges for these names, as the names ready him for everyone he’ll meet and want to speak to. Or write for. I miss the unnamed rock but I am eager for the leaps, eager to see the everything he makes out of nothing.