AUTOMATIC LIVING

'The spooky art' -- that's what Norman Mailer calls writing. He's right. If you stop and think about it, writing really is spooky.

Remember, in school, when the teacher would order you to take out a piece of paper and a pen and do five minutes of that oh-so-exciting activity known as 'automatic writing'? You were supposed to just write down anything that popped into your head. It didn't matter if your ideas were random, disconnected, even illegible. (Mine were always illegible, being a lefty. Praise Allah for computers.) You were just supposed to see where your thoughts led you.

But isn't all writing 'automatic writing'? Sure, you start with a certain concept or image in your head, but by the time you finish writing your first sentence you've thought of another idea, a different idea, and that takes you down a long and winding road that is far, far from your initial idea.

What makes it so spooky? I think it has do with language. I think it has to do with the fact that, somehow or other, almost beyond are will, the words just emerge when we want them to. We have a feeling or emotion, and then we have this weird collage of symbols we've decided to call 'letters' that allows us a reasonable facsimile of what those emotions mean to us.

Ah, but sometimes those symbols aren't enough.

Because things get even spookier when you know even a little bit of a foreign language. You start to see how fragile and constructed and sometimes futile language can be.

Take Japanese. There's a Japanese word, 'natsukashii', that is used whenever you see something that makes you feel intensely nostalgic about something. So if you hear a song that transports you instantly back to the night of your high school prom, you can exclaim: "Ah! Natsukashii!"

English doesn't have a word for that concept. Yes, of course, we have the word 'nostalgia', sure, but you never hear somebody say: "Wow! This makes me feel really nostalgic right now!" (Or, if you do, it sure is a long and cumbersome way to express that feeling, dont'cha think?)

In Japanese, the word exists -- and, by existing, by its frequency of use, it reinforces and
encourages a certain yearning for an intangible past. Its absence in the English language may, perhaps, lead us to not yearn for a forgotten era as much as the Japanese seem to. The language validates the concept, and the concept implores us to find a word to represent it.

Or maybe not. That's the thing about language; if you think about it too much, try to figure out why and how it does what it does, you end up getting nowhere. Because it's deeper than language, this whole thing. It goes to the root of what language is meant to ultimately evoke, which are those strange and silent voices that somehow make themselves heard in our heads.

They come out, these voices, through words -- and actions. Always actions. Just as we write, somehow translating our human impulses to words, so do we live, hoping against hope that our strange and glorious thoughts and feelings can somehow acquire a shape and texture and meaning out here in the (so-called) real world, the world separate from our heads and minds and hearts.

Sometimes, we put the words on paper, hoping that what we feel can somehow be identified. Sometimes, we use our eyes, our lips, our fingers, our motions.

The intent is the same, whether it's through words or actions. We want all that is within to somehow emerge. We want ourselves to be validated, by any means.

Could be a word.

Or a touch.

Or a glance.

Spooky.