Friday, September 02, 2005
Ground Floor
Has anyone noticed that I can’t shut up? I’m all about the words, running and tumbling around in my head like some barely repressed catholic high school wrestling team. I’m thinking of words so much of the time that I sometimes forget what they point to, overlooking the significance of the signifiers. They’re toys that never break no matter how I bend and twist them, tools that never tarnish no matter how long they’ve sat in the back of the junk drawer waiting to be remembered and dusted off.
I wasn’t big on toys as a young tyke; I had a few of the requisites but I spent more time at Brentano’s, Duttons and the ol’ public liberry, than at Toyz Am Us or such places. Words were my entertainment of choice and my closest confidantes. I don’t know when it started, but I do remember when I first realized it:
The Country School was not even remotely in the country. It stood at a gritty corner of a particularly typical part of the east san fernando valley off Laurel Canyon near Magnolia (which sounds more bucolic than it actually is). It was an adequately-appointed acre or so of low buildings and open playspace, and, to the best of my recollection, I enjoyed my time there. We learned sharing, climbing, and a nonsense song that later turned out to be “Frere Jacques.” It was a good place to learn to be with my little friends.
But the one clearest recollection I have from the Country School is from when I was about three years old, and concerned getting to know my life-long companions, the words I was just learning to use and enjoy. I guess this was my first playdate with them:
I was, as I intimated, at the Country School, standing outside at the base of a treehouse tree on which we were encouraged to climb to what seemed at the time to be dangerous heights but were probably pretty benign by objective adult standards. Having descended from on high, I stood there on a wooden pallet that served as a sort of landing for the treehouse ladder, through and beneath which the ground was visible. And this was my moment of linguistic epiphany: I asked myself, what am I standing on - the ground, or the floor? I could see the ground a few inches below my feet; yet the worn boards were like a floor - but floors were solid, and not outside. I stood with my hands on the gnarled bark of the tree and my feet on the dusty pallet for some time, lost in a sudden awareness of ambiguities between words and realities. It dawned on me that, even when there were many words to choose from, each with subtle shadings of meaning, sometimes they could still only approximate that which they were called upon to describe. I couldn’t resolve this conundrum as I stood there on the pallet, on a floor floating just over the ground. I figured it would take some more time and learning before I had a handle on it.
My opinion today is unchanged.
