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Believing in words

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , on 22 April 2026| Leave a Comment »

In his poem “Fly,” the American poet W.S. Merwin (1927-2019) describes himself as one who has “always believed too much in words.”

That statement would be remarkable coming from almost anyone, but it is particularly striking coming from an acclaimed poet and translator, then in his forties, whose distinguished career had been largely based on words. Profound and far-reaching, Merwin’s declaration can be understood in multiple contexts, most notably the personal, the environmental, and the metaphysical.

“Fly” appeared in The Lice (1972), Merwin’s sixth collection of poems, three years after the moon landing and concurrent with the dawn of the environmental movement. A lyric poem with a prominent narrative component, it recounts the narrator’s effort to compel an old, unhealthy, and “filthy” pigeon, whom the narrator has been keeping in a dovecote, to rally its energies and take flight:

            Fly I said throwing him into the air

            But he would drop and run back expecting to be fed

            I said it again and again throwing him up

            As he got worse

As foolish as they were futile, the narrator’s actions eventually result in the pigeon’s death. Finding him “in the dovecote dead / Of the needless efforts,” he contemplates the dead bird’s eye, “that could not / Conceive that I was a creature to run from.”

In the general scheme of human misdeeds, Merwin’s might seem minor, but to him it occasions introspection and harsh self-judgment. “So that is what I am,” he concludes, isolating that line for maximum impact. Having been presumptuous and obtuse in expecting the pigeon to obey his spoken command, he views himself as an agent of human cruelty, who has abused his dominion over beasts and fowls and caused the unnecessary death of a fellow creature.

Beyond its personal context, the narrator’s actions and his subsequent remorse reflect a broader, cultural sense of culpability. When the astronauts viewed the planet Earth from the vantage point of the moon, they were awed by its beauty, humbled by its magnificence, and made newly aware of its vulnerability. Michael Collins (Apollo 11) likened the planet to a precious jewel. James Irwin (Apollo 15) described it as so delicate that if “you touched it with a finger it would fall apart.” Those feelings were shared by many who viewed William Anders’ celebrated “Earthrise” photo, which the nature photographer Galen Rowell called the “most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Within that cultural milieu, the episode depicted in “Fly” epitomizes the greed, arrogance, and ignorance that by the 1960s had accelerated the extinction of floral and fauna and grievously plundered the Earth’s natural resources. And Merwin’s personal epiphany represents, in small, the cultural awakening that would engender the Whole Earth Movement (c.1970), the establishment of the EPA (1970), and, in the next decades, stringent environmental regulation.

Yet, if Merwin’s poem is in part a personal confession and in part a cultural avatar, it is also the mature work of a seasoned poet who, as a steward of the English language, has come to recognize his medium’s limitations. The word the narrator has believed in is “fly,” cast in the imperative mode. Not only does its inefficacy reveal the incapacity of human speech to control wild nature. It also points toward the limited ability of language in general to represent reality. To be sure, an abiding belief in words is necessary to navigate and survive everyday life. “Stop” means “stop,” and we’d better believe it. But excessive belief in language, whether as a measure of personal importance, a defining agent of social identity, or a mirror of things as they are, can foster delusion and inflict incalculable suffering. Witness theories of a master race or false historical ideologies justifying territorial invasion.

No spiritual tradition is more aware of the frailties of language than Zen Buddhism, which from its beginnings has declared itself “not dependent on words and letters” and regarded words as “fingers pointing toward the moon,” not to be mistaken for the moon itself. Like many poets and writers of his generation, Merwin was interested in Zen, and in 1976 he moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen master Robert Aitken Roshi. Just as “Fly” anticipates Merwin’s later environmental conservationism and his founding of the Merwin Conservancy, so does his poem adumbrate his wholehearted embrace of Zen teachings, which by and large view concepts and their linguistic vehicles, namely words, as filters and impediments between our minds and concrete reality. Even honest, well-intentioned words are not to be naively trusted, insofar as they reify interdependent, dynamic nexuses into separate, static “things.” From that perspective, a skeptical attitude toward words, however beautiful or inspiring, potent or inciteful they may be, is of itself a necessary, wise, and salutary practice.

Read “Fly” in its entirety at https://merwinconservancy.org/poems/fly-by-w-s-merwin/. .

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I should have thought

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , on 3 December 2025| Leave a Comment »

Many years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I traveled from eastern Iowa to the North of England to study English literature at the University of Leeds, a so-called “redbrick” university in West Yorkshire. There I lived for a year in a village on the outskirts of that soot-laden city in a hall of residence built in 1865 from Yorkshire gritstone. Most of my fellow residents were English, but others hailed from such faraway countries as Ghana, South Africa, Iceland, and Rhodesia.

Sometimes in the evenings I would walk down the hall to have a chat with my friend Asmundur (“Asi”) Jonsson, a husky, deep-voiced, older student from Keflavik. Asi smoked an ornate Meerschaum pipe. Sometimes, after I’d offered up a fresh opinion—or, no less likely, a callow misperception—he would sit back in his chair and patiently puff on his pipe as he formulated his response. “I should have thought,” he would finally say, and proceed to address whatever I’d said. More than once, his views differed from mine. I have long since forgotten our opinions, but I recall his opening phrase as vividly as I do the sweet fragrance of his tobacco. I had never heard it before and have rarely heard it since.

“I should have thought” is a verbal phrase cast in what grammarians call the conditional past tense. It places the action, in this case having a thought, in a time prior to the present, before a subsequent event has occurred. In this instance, the subsequent event is the voicing of a different or contrary opinion. For example, were Geoffrey to observe that “I’ve heard that it’s better to brush your teeth first, then floss afterward,” Nigel might reply, “I should have thought it was the other way around.” As this innocuous exchange illustrates, “I should have thought” provides a vehicle for polite disagreement. But even when engaged in more charged conversations, especially those concerning politics and religion, this now rare usage can serve to open the conversational space, establish an appropriate distance between conversationalists, and set a distinctive tone.

In contemporary American life, we have grown accustomed to living in cramped conversational spaces, where there is often little room for a variety of perspectives or a divergence of views. If one participant says something the other finds erroneous, ill-informed, or otherwise objectionable, the conversation may soon be abruptly over. Or worse, it might escalate into an angry confrontation.

By contrast, “I should have thought” expands the conversational arena to accommodate multiple, differing, and opposing views. And it opens the possibility of a “both/and” rather than a “right/wrong” or “either/or” resolution. Even views that stood in polar opposition at the beginning of the conversation may, by its end, prove compatible and even complementary.

By the same token, “I should have thought” widens the emotional distance between the participants in a conversation. It establishes an appropriate space between them. As the Zen teacher Norman Fischer has observed, in any relationship between two people, two components are ever present: their connection and their essential solitude. The two participants may be intimately connected by such bonds as family, friendship, country, or affiliation. At the same time, each has a private inner life that the other has no way of knowing. In the Japanese martial arts, an appropriate combative distance (known as ma-ai) is strictly maintained. Analogously, an appropriate distance in conversation honors both the speakers’ interconnection and their respective solitudes. And, as Fischer puts it, it also creates “[a] space charged with openness, silence, and mystery.”

And that is not all. In its very formality, “I should have thought” forges a link between contemporary usage, which tends to be casual and all too often careless, and the long history of the English language. Asi’s first language was Icelandic. He learned English in a school, where the old rule regarding “should” rather than “would” was still taught and enforced. According to that rule, “should” must be used when speaking in the first person. However archaic, Asi’s locution conjured a linguistic universe in which the observance of such fine distinctions imparted precision to ordinary speech. By extension, it also heightened the beauty and dignity of a conversation.

Today, no one I know would say “I should have thought,” except perhaps ironically or in a role-playing context. The phrase would come across as a pretentious affectation. But might there not be other ways by which the space, distance, and tone once created by that turn of phrase could be re-imagined, if only as a welcome alternative to the rude interruptions and abrupt dismissals, the in-your-face confrontations, and the unnecessary misunderstandings that afflict contemporary American discourse? I should have thought so.

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