What I Meant to Say
A reflection on the pervasiveness of cliché and the need for real experimentation in art.
We are all aware of clichés—those “well-worn” phrases we can’t help but use since they have been used so many times before us. They creep into both our written and verbal discourse. We don’t judge books by their covers, are often cold as ice, possibly from taking a chill pill, so we kiss and make up even as we read between the lines… We are told to avoid using clichés “like the plague.”
The reason for avoiding cliché in writing (and in speaking as well) is many faceted. For one, you borrow a tone of voice from someone else, so your own voice momentarily vanishes. But more importantly, the idea the cliché hopes to express has the “rug pulled out from underneath itself” since the phrase used to convey the idea is so stock and familiar. Clichés have an emptiness about them. They sound good. They were once an effective and even original way to express an idea, but by virtue of extreme overuse, they do little in allowing us to say things with real urgency or depth.
Over the years, I’ve developed a more expansive sense of cliché. Might an overwhelmingly significant percentage of the language we use to think about and express things be borrowed from the momentum of the history of language—from a well of stock phrases and concepts we perceive as permanent and original even, despite their lineage? Might English teachers and college professors (I have been both) rather than working to foster the free exchange of ideas and critical expression merely be providing boxes for student-thinkers to place their thoughts into? Is truly original human expression ever really the target, or are students mainly just asked to abide by certain norms and customs because they have become norms and customs?
As I’ve discussed elsewhere—are things like the good old five paragraph essay (or even more complex essay structures) the most effective way to use language to deepen one’s understanding and to convey that understanding to others?
This idea has been looming in my mind for many decades now, and writing about it is particularly difficult—since I find myself continually slipping into overused expressions and concepts. I often feel stuck inside a box of borrowed phrases, borrowed plots, borrowed motifs, ideologies, matrices….
Teaching young writers to write their first poems (or even their 500th poem if they have utterly bought into the cliché of what a poem is) often entails a massive rewiring of the process from the ground up. They insist on rhyming, insist on using tried and true similes and phrases (like “tried and true”). They think of a poem all too often as strings of words that sound good, are sing-songy and rhythmic and work to convey one’s deepest, darkest emotions, (all too often using words like “deepest” and “darkest”).
But what if all of us—most of the time—read from a kind of borrowed script? What if our thoughts and actions are dictated by a vast litany of invisible-until-you-open-your-eyes-to-them structures, paradigms, customs all too often conveyed as truths?
One of the reasons western settlers could so easily take “ownership” of native lands on this continent hinged on a fundamentally different concept of “ownership” for many tribal nations. Tribal “ownership” and even “identity” are often fundamentally different than the strong individualism and sense of ownership Europeans carried with them to the “new world.”
I remember a talk by a fellow young professor many years ago, which began with her holding up three fingers and asking us how many fingers we saw. She went on to explain that had mathematical history progressed a bit differently, we might have insisted she was holding up 7 fingers, which is a way of enumerating all possible groupings of fingers, 1.)index, 2.)index and middle, 3). index and ring, 4.) middle, 5.) middle and ring, 6.) ring, 7.) all three.
The point, I believe, was that we need to always consider that human beings have constructed the mechanisms we use to understand and express ourselves, and if these constructs have limitations, so too does our thinking.
In Flatland (referenced in my essay, “Parallel Universes”), we are asked to imagine a world of only 2 dimensions where creatures are not only incapable of moving outward into three dimensional space, they have no way of conceiving of it. When a three dimensional being appears in their world, they are not even capable of seeing it properly….
While philosophers do a good job of alerting us to the problem, they, like Plato’s cave dweller who yells at us that we are only seeing shadows of cutouts of the “real” objects that exist outside the cave, artists should feel a special obligation to break free of all the paradigms and customs of ordinary thought that bind us. They should work to invent structures that allow us see the world and our place in it anew.
Writer/aritsts need be especially cautious here since their only tools look identical to other constructs of language—groupings of mere words. While painters and photographers, dancers and musicians, filmmakers and sculptors can create works that leap out at us—and here I can’t forget the display at a museum in Barcelona I saw decades ago that was simply a large (10 feet round or more) pile of human pubic hair, the art forcing viewers to recoil then to consider why seeing something so simple and ordinary in this context was so off-putting—writers rarely find so delightfully outrageous a stage for their simple black markings on white pages.
Still, in another sense, language artists contend with the most essential of all human constructs, since the use of language itself is what most distinguishes us as human.
Hemingway famously claimed to think of his artistic language in the way impressionists stroke paint onto their canvases. He said he wanted to remove the “scaffolding” of language that, as the metaphor suggests, all too often acts as a cumbersome overlay to the essential core of layering words to illuminate, deepen, complicate understanding. In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell argues something similar, showing how rather than using language to clarify or uncover, it is all too often used to obfuscate and distract (especially in political circles).
I’ll end this reflection with a poem of John Ashberry’s where he clearly works to push well beyond the limitations of ordinary, cliché-bound expression and to forge a creative language that is utterly new, surprising, dynamic. I’ll forego any attempt at interpretation and just leave it to you to revel at and meander amongst its familiar-yet-strangely-foreign words.
They Dream Only of America
They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
"This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat."And hiding from darkness in barns
They can be grownups now
And the murderer's ashtray is more easily —
The lake a lilac cube.He holds a key in his right hand.
"Please," he asked willingly.
He is thirty years old.
That was beforeWe could drive hundreds of miles
At night through dandelions.
When his headache grew worse we
Stopped at a wire filling station.Now he cared only about signs.
Was the cigar a sign?
And what about the key?
He went slowly into the bedroom."I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen
Against the living room table. What is it to be back
Beside the bed? There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.
And I am lost without you."
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