Does the power of language lie only in its meanings ... or do its forms & movements work deeper magic? Children have a sense for such possibilities—a sense which adults have lost. ~Paul Matthews
Creativity Prompt #14: Imposing Will on the World | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
Sitting woman by Mikuláš Galanda
Most often, we write in statements, but to maximize our sense for language and our depth of creativity, we would be best off to befriend all of the sentence types and learn their various powers. For words and sentences do, indeed, have powers beyond their meanings (as poets have always known). Oh, and remember, if you want to skip this prelude and go straight to the structured prompt, scroll down to the bolded heading for Creativity Prompt #14.
Meanwhile, one of my favorite examples of word-power is abracadabra, about which Wikipedia says this:
Abracadabra is of unknown origin, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, its first known occurrence is in the second-century works of Serenus Sammonicus.
Several folk etymologies are associated with the word: from phrases in Hebrew that mean "I will create as I speak,” or Aramaic "I create like the word" (אברא כדברא).
And while Wikipedia goes on to acknowledge that according to the OED Online, “no documentation has been found to support any of the various conjectures” around abracadabra, I still think it’s enchanting to think about the way different words and sounds, along with different sentence types, exert different influences.
In the English language, we have four major sentence types:
The statement
The question
The exclamation
The command
And last week, we did take some intentional time with questions—also known as the interrogative.
Today, I’d like to explore the command, also known as the imperative mood. But I kind of enjoy the drama and poetry of the word “command.” It’s so … commanding. And, as poet Paul Matthews says, the command invites us to consider “language as deed, where the sentences is dynamic, imposing will on the world—not what language says, but what it does. Strength is the ideal it strives for, power for the good.”
To give you a sense of the imperative mood as expressed through the command, consider this excerpt from the poem “Leave No Trace” by Maggie Dietz, in which the speaker of the poem gives instructions for a trip to a place called Lonesome Lake:
However long you stay you must leave nothing.
No matchbox, no pole-tip, no grommet, no cup.
Carry in and out your Clif Bar wrappers,
Your fear of bears and storms. Keep the rage
You thought you’d push through your boot-soles into the stones,
The grief you hoped to shed. If you think you’ve changed,
Take all your changes with you.
If you lift
An arrowhead from the leaves, return it. Pocket
No pinecone, no pebble or faery root. Resist
The painted trillium even if its purple throat
Begs to be pressed between your trail guide’s pages.
I love how Dietz deftly overlaps the question and the command in that first sentence of the second excerpted stanza, with “If you lift/An arrowhead from the leaves, return it.” Such a lovely complexity.
Another truly stunning example of a piece written in commands is Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” which I love. Here’s a snippet:
… this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming …
And for a much more nonsensical example of imperative voice, I offer an excerpt that I’ve only taught in the workshop once, with polarizing results (writers either loved or hated it!). But nonsense often has a different kind of sense, so in that vein, we have:
The Imperative Mood (an excerpt) by Padgett Powell
Put that nice blue and white pitcher on the marble washstand. Determine your sock size. Play favorites. Have some. Be all you can be and all anyone else can be. Fall back and regroup. Be for heroes. Try not to fail. Recall your mother. Forget your father. Please release me. Let me love again. Trust that I will be okay.
Whatever floats your boat, go ahead and float it. Do not have large untenable quantities of despair. Do not go to parades. When you feed orphaned wild animals, do not expect them to make it. Be forewarned. Be careful that your genitals do not show outside the strict confines of your underwear. Learn at least three racquet games during your lifetime. Study the coin flip. Please understand, and have according sympathy when relevant, that pink-skinned people and animals have tender feet.
If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction. Let us abort the mission, if we are on one. Supply me with the name of that comic who climbed into a condom and tell me if it was specially manufactured or off the shelf. Be more forgiving. Test the wind. Brave the currents. Be strong, strong, strong. Tell me my name. Be gone.
Regardless of whether we are being serious or nonsensical or both, when we play with commands, we allow ourselves to interact with language on a level that feels different than our usual domain of statements. We’re invited, as Paul Matthews reminds us, to ask:
Does the power of language lie only in its meanings being responded to, or do its forms and movements work some deeper magic? Certainly children have a sense for such possibilities when they chant—Rain rain go away/Come again another day—a sense which adults have lost apart from their fear of certain obscene or unlucky words. For children, even the gibberish of certain counting-out rhymes has an underlying seriousness.
This week’s creativity prompt has an underlying seriousness as well, even in its playfulness. Below you’ll find a structured, stepwise structured exercise for mining the magic of the command and seeing where it takes you (perhaps to a previously unrecognized truth).