To Name is to Know and Remember

Words

By Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,

painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving

each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—

greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

In the first stanza, Gioia discusses language as not necessary to existence (in a way that Hannah Arendt would disagree with, since for her, language and thinking are connected to being). In the second stanza, Gioia moves to the dangers of language--hypostatization--the tendency for language to turn experiences into "ideas," disconnected from the reality that inspired them and made to be artificially cocooned inside of language. In spite of the dangers inherent in language, in the next stanza we see the way in which language and words are necessary to a deep understanding of the thing that the word refers to (and how words transmit those ideas over generations). In the final stanza, we see the Aristotelian distinction between praising and blessing (although he uses the word "praise," he is really talking about blessing here). This is the culmination of language--where it is unnecessary, but where we cannot keep ourselves from using it (and here is the vocation of the artist, as Gioia explains in his essay on art and passion).