If you haven’t spoken to anyone at all for 24 hours, not even the newsagent or supermarket assistant, it can be odd trying to find the right words, and the right voice, to make a human connection.
If you haven’t spoken to anyone at all for 24 hours, not even the newsagent or supermarket assistant, it can be odd trying to find the right words, and the right voice, to make a human connection. It’s as if you can get rusty with audacious speed, and that without continual usage the habit of conversation begins to degenerate, like the muscles of a marathon runner who stops running. Radio, though, is a good way of pretending; of imagining yourself in a conversation even if there is no one else in the house. A couple of programmes on Radio Four this week talked about language, how we speak, how we make connections through what we say, and why words, or rather the right words, matter. It was impossible not to answer back.
In Winter Storm, an atmospheric afternoon play by the award-winning short-story writer Bernard MacLaverty (produced by Kirsteen Cameron), the right words came as a bit of a surprise. Andrew, played by the inimitable John Gregory’s Girl Gordon Sinclair, is a poet marooned on a university campus in Iowa on a year-long residency. He’s a bit of a loser relationship-wise, but not half bad with words. While the wind whistles across the prairies beyond his window, he’s got nothing else to do but chase down the perfect poem.
Poetry, he decides, is all about seeing the world around you and then reporting back ‘in the best words’. Yet he can’t stop the words of Wittgenstein he learnt as a student echoing through his mind, ‘It’s hard to say anything that’s as good as saying nothing.’
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in