Things, Actions and Experiences

by Mankh (Walter E. Harris III)

"So the universe "eyes" in the same way a tree "apples" and space "stars." (You can always turn a noun into a verb because every thing is also an event, a happening.
Houses are "housing.")" --Alan Watts from Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal, Vintage Books: 1968, 1974 p.65.
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Intellectually, and grammatically, people tend to think of nouns as objects just sitting there doing nothing, while verbs, on the other hand, are the busy bees of language.

To grasp the basics of grammar we agree to this, and yet to further understand language and how it reflects actual living experiences, we are wise to look beyond the limits of these labels.

As a glass is lifted, although "lift" is the verb, the glass itself is in motion, and hence participating in the very action this verb exhibits; and without some "thing" to be lifted, the verb "lift" becomes an idle verb, a supposed action with nothing to act upon or with.

Akin to the chicken-egg, acorn-oak tree "which came first question," verbs and nouns work in living harmony.

The poets who write something like:

glass blue-tinted graceful-lift

though seeming to defy the rules of grammar and individual words, perhaps come closer to the true experience of what it's like to lift a glass without much attempt to define that, instead, simply enjoying the experience.

With the glass blue-tinted and the lifting graceful, what we call "adjectives" are added to this collective descriptive process.

Science tells us that even inanimate objects are busy moving around on a cellular level, actual energy-patterns that have somehow agreed to bond into what appears to us as a solid form. Thus, even an immobile object such as a "rock" (grammatically a "noun",) is active (though invisibly to the naked-eye,) and active enough to have what animistic cultures would call "a rock spirit".

Chinese picture-writing expresses the verb "to speak" as a combination of a "swinging door or gate" and a "mouth". A person opens or closes the mouth when speaking so the definition is apt. As far as English grammar is concerned, this Chinese "verb" is made up of two nouns, "door" and "mouth," that only imply the action. So who invented grammar anyway?

Though an essential part of speaking and writing logically and accurately, the rigidity of grammar softens when it comes to word-pictures, verbal-images, and the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. in our striving to convey actual (and sometimes imagined) experiences.

A sharpening and heightening of the use of words occurs when the poet explores more deeply the link between the verbal tools and the actual experience attempting to be conveyed. The written form then becomes yet another experience--not just the words, not just the experience described, but all of these combined and born anew on the page...

or the computer-screen...

or from the invisible energy-patterns emanating from the opening and closing of our door-mouths as "spoken word, speech, voice."

( first published at http://www.performancepoets.org/page12.html )
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Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is a poet, essayist and small press publisher.
His website: www.allbook-books.com