In last week’s orientation Jack asked us the title question and in today’s class he referred to the fact that a temporal order is established every time we speak (or write?) due to the structures inherent in language. What a responsibility and what an opportunity this affords us!
I am grateful to Jack for pointing us to the William Bronk poem under Language and Arts, in the Fields of Inquiry section of the CCI website. I had never heard of William Bronk and, recognising the value of discovering more about his work, I found this wonderful essay which has much to offer in terms of TSK:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/177750
A passion for language has accompanied me all my life, fueled initially by my parents’ respectful, enthusiastic and knowledgeable relationship with it. Today Jack invited us to examine a chapter of KTS in light of how Rinpoche employs the three linguistic powers of analysis, interpretation and creation.  It occurs to me that an entire book could be devoted to an analysis of world literature examined through the prismatic lens of the TSK vision. In contemplating the question posed, I offer my current Top Three (which continues to be work-in-progress):
- Â Become a devotee of etymologies; seek out the origins of words and, in discovering them, allow a merging with the mind(s) and worldview which first gave voice to them.[i]
- Make effort to be specific[ii], accurate in what you write; to make space for a fresh new word to present itself, rather than defaulting to the hackneyed and well-practised. In doing this we can each contribute to ‘countering the inertia of the presupposed’ (KTS 51)
- Cultivate sensitivity to the power of language to harmonise, heal and evoke beauty, as well as to its function as a gateway to knowledge – through reading great poetry, innovative novelists, well crafted biographies, gifted essayists, excellent journalists.[iii]
[i] Richard Tarnas in his Passion of the Western Mind emphasizes the importance of appreciating the world view which gives birth to each philosophical epoch, and not just the ideas in isolation. I remember Leonard Bernstein, during a lecture on music, demonstrating graphically how the infant, placing its lips in a sucking gesture and giving voice to that, eventually develops the sound ‘mmmmm’ which opens eventually to ‘mama’.
[ii] Natalie Goldberg, includes this in her Rules of Writing Practice  –  I hugely recommend her book, Writing Down the Bones
[iii] Could we perhaps share a list with each other of favoured authors or books? I’m remembering a description in An Evil Cradling in which Brian Keenan documented four and a half years of being held hostage in Lebanon. At one point, quite late into his captivity, he returns to his cell to find his guards have left him an orange. His description of encountering and eating that orange, more clearly paralleled experiences I had had on early meditation retreats than anything I have read before or since. Perhaps poetry best lends itself to this endeavour. My current number one is this regard is David Whyte. For novelists, I would point to Doris Lessing and David Mitchell.