A Call for A Glossary of AttentionClose that tab. Put that phone down.
Where are you now? Peek at the sky. How would you describe it? Ok. Now try again - what’s the weight of the sky, how close is it to you, how is it impacting your skin, what shade is it, how does it taste, how is light interacting with it, what time is it telling you, how is it stirring you? It might be a tricky exercise! There might be candy-floss thoughts flossing but failing to gloss on the tip of your tongue before they dissolve. You may be grasping for a description like trying to cup water from A-to-B in your hands. Second exercise. Cast your thought-threads back to a moment when you’ve experienced something fantastic in nature. It might be a maple leaf iced with frost crystals…that inbetweeny shade of orange-pink-violet sunset…that satisfying squwerrlpch of your welly boot releasing from magnetising mud - could you describe any of those sensations in detail enough to do those moments justice?
Speaking in British English, from England 2022, our daily parlance often renders the world in 1998 no-glasses pixelation but with the right word to hand it that vision can suddenly become HD-sharp with overlooked details emanating lead character energy. Furry shapes can suddenly flourish with facets; that swilling emotion in your guts can somehow materialise out loud from the throat; tree families can reveal themselves through their rain-sounds; meaning can be scryed from a cloud gaze; green can explode into shades of crystalline complexity adding sensorial bite. It’s no coincidence ‘spells’ and ‘spell’ have a shared etymology - with the right word to tongue we can summon a re-enchanted relationship to ecology. Residual rain sprinkled from wind-blown branches can become a shammer, a deep melancholy for the leaves changing in Autumn could be described as a dropsig feeling; the ephemeral experience of sunlight as it filters through a canopy of tree leaves could be komorebi as Japanese describes it; a gap in a hedge where a small animal might scurry through becomes a smeuse. Sounds-stitched ‘just so’ have the power to materialise the previously unspeakable or un-sensed.
So this is a call to invent, experiment and try sounds (or spells) on for size. Deviously deviating from the ‘standardised dictionary’ I encourage you to tease words from the tip of your tongue and under the buds - they’re waiting to sprout! We all too often either don’t bother to give a name to an experience or we shorthand complex experiences with the closest cluster of letters to hand, obfuscating richness and precision in the process. That imaginative infilling that occurs between experience and utterance that we have as children in a state of perma-charm is lost. I propose that to use or invent such a word is a care practice - it is a gifting of time, a dedication of attention, an intimate act of gratitude and respect. By building our own or shared Glossaries of Attention we can re-flesh the world, listen on new frequencies and speak ourselves into new and personal relations.
In the same breath, sometimes words fail and it might be that nothing appropriate comes to mind or mouth. Indeed we may particularly struggle outside the bounds of thing-ness and actions - textures, smells, atmospheres, feelings may feel particularly elusive. Robert Macfarlane reminds us “language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say ‘Wow’”. Charles Foster in his excellent piece Against Nature Writing for Emergence magazine neatly summarises the frustration that comes with fabulating the right words for nature, “I am appalled by the distance between a petal and the word petal” he writes hinting the at the impossibility of even being able to imagine a word or do justice to the exquisiteness of something as beyond-ordinary as a petal. He continues, “when I think I’ve described a wood, I’m really describing the creaking architecture of my own mind.” That creaking architecture is your mind attempting to work it out and we all too often leave that apparatus ungreased. I’d stress then that the very act of even thinking those thoughts has already exercised the kin-strings of your being. By blending the personal and precise (down to the date, time, coordinates if you so wish) there are no wrong inventions, just efforts and concerted engagements. Invented words can be wielded as mnemonics of personal moments. The invention or use of one word does not erase or privilege existing lexicon, so let's have 5,789 words for an oak leaf on 7th September in Totteridge Fields, 22 degrees centigrade if we need it. From experience, the more specific a word I use, the more I feel I am filling-out with the world as it shapes the air out of my mouth. Further still, the more I learn the more I lament its possible loss. For me, a word therefore is at once an archive, a means of incanting into the present and a means of holding a future close. Word-making is a treasure-guarding practice.
Crucially, to D.I.Word is a powerful act of resistance. Again from the perspective of a 21st century English language speaker - word-making is endangered. Indigenous and regional languages have been suppressed out of existence and with it their subjects, knowledges and lifeways. The swollen lexicon used to describe the most fastidious and fleeting phenomenon and perceptions has dehydrated in favour of standardisation and cunning crafting. You see it matters what words world worlds and our world-building wordset has been trimmed and tidied by gatekeepers to prioritise what is worthy of noticing, classifying, living and dying. In the context of ecological connection order, orthodoxy and flattening has been baked into everyday parlance dulling the language that would otherwise polish our world with sparkling animacy, vibrance and vibration. Erasure in England has a long tale - even Virginia Woolf considered reinventing English in order to tell a different story… Indeed, a feeling for new words and no-words is a way of me suturing a relationship with an Isle who’s publicised values I no longer align with. This Glossary of Attention therefore is not about controlling, capturing, erasing or commodifying but thinking about whether we have the right tools to rebuild stories with as well as wielding communication as a creative communing exercise with our ecology.
We can very literally re-shape our worlds with our words if we choose to. Robin Wall Kimmerer explains “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing[…] Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?” The English language prioritises nouns over verbs implying fixity and order as opposed to the relations and change that characterise such animacy. This animacy is part of the warp and weft of the language of the Ojibwe people in North America where distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns are made (rocks are animate). Similarly, in David George Haskell’s The Songs of Trees he explains how the Waorani [people] do not give individual names to what we would call “tree species” without describing the ecological context such as the composition of the surrounding vegetation. The gifts and uses of plants are actually encoded in Anishinaabe names for species where the sounds cue in usage, taste and location. Words can be a co-shaping practice - I was jaw-dropped to learn that new analysis has found that Grizzly bears on coastal British Columbia form three distinct genetic groups that align closely with the region’s three Indigenous language families. WTF.
Robert Macfarlane’s astounding collection of lost, forgotten and suppressed British word treasure is documented in his equally treasurable book Landmarks. Through painstaking excavation and the generosity of much volunteered vocab he’s clustered synonyms that bring “new energies to familiar phenomena” referencing aquabob (Kentish); clinkerbell (Wessex) and tankle (Durham) as just a few examples of local alternatives to “icicle”. He’s unfolded from a silk cloth remarkable wordmarks that recolour how we once and could behave in the world, Eit for one referring to “the practice of placing quartz stones in moorland streams so that they would sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.” Magic.
Word-making is easier said than said but I’ve found word-splicing can literally help us return to our roots. Radicalis, radical, radicle, root. Donna Haraway invites us to revisit the etymology of words to re-think with. Companion = com panis from to break bread). Matter, mother, mutter. Meaning can be re-excavated after cutting and re-enmeshing. There’s also the delicious ability to cut, paste and play. Letter arrangements can exude a power of their own - the word ‘abracadabra’ was conceived to be written in a triangle shape creating a magical symbol alleged to decrease the effect of a disease. The Tree Ogham alphabet is an ancient Celtic system used by the Druids to encode their wisdom where each symbol corresponds to a tree. Language-making and word-foolery is actively discouraged by the establishment - puns are low-forms of literacy, alliteration too crass, portmanteaus too cringe and don’t get me started on p!unc?tuation;;! So let’s do plenty of it on our world-making adventure embracing play and a gluttonous helping of absurdity. Read lots of Ursula K. Le Guin with her ‘don’t take me for granite’ and upright / downwrong punnery and incredulity at the inability of those unable to read the lyrics of the lichen or eggplant. Stretch the sound-making ability of your mouth, use the onomatopoeia if that works, exercise those primal oooh, aaaah, uuuuh sounds, pick your own, pick an infinity for the inadequate, re-flesh the skeleton of standardisation. Ultimately above all else, when you can’t find the words - gift your attention with all your porous-self and let the words find you.
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Footnotes
David George Haskell in The Songs of Trees writes “Every species has its rain sound, revealing the varied physicality of leaves of the ceibo tree and the many other species that live on and around its massive form”.
Robert Macfarlane in Landmarks
Available at: emergencemagazine.org/essay/against-nature-writing
As popularised by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Robin Wall Kimmerer in “The Grammar of Animacy” from Braiding Sweetgrass
Ibid.
From Rache Fritts piece “‘Mind blowing’: Grizzly bear DNA maps onto Indigenous language families” for https://www.science.org/content/article/mind-blowing-grizzly-bear-dna-maps-indigenous-language-families
Ibid.