Madeleine L'Engle Herself

by Madeleine L'engle

  MYSTERIOUS DEPARTURES

  Progo is the cherubim in A Wind in the Door, who gives his life up for Meg and Mr. Jenkins. All I know is that when that door blows open when there is no wind, it is Progo. I don’t know what happened to Progo; I just know he’s okay. And I guess that’s what I believe. I don’t know what happens often, but I know that ultimately, as Lady Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well. All is in God’s hand, and God is ultimately in control of creation.” We have free will, that tiny pearl; but God is in control of creation.

  FINELY TUNED RECEIVERS

  I didn’t really want Joshua to come into The Arm of the Starfish. I am as lazy as anybody else. It meant an awful lot of extra work. But Joshua demanded to be in that book. There was no way with any integrity I could refuse to put him in.

  I think this can sound sort of woo-wooey and mystical. It isn’t. It is a way that the creative subconscious has of informing the conscious mind. But I also believe that it is more than that. There are creative ideas out there, and we are meant to be finely tuned receivers. Most of the time we’ve lost our ability to receive, and we hear static. But every once in a while we can pick it up. And what the artist does is keep tuning the receiver so that the message comes in more and more clearly. And that’s one reason I do not dominate or manipulate the work any more than I want to dominate or manipulate my friends or my children or my family, because that is destructive, not creative.

  OUR CHARACTERS CREATE US

  I learned a great deal about the human heart through the writing of my first novel. As my protagonist deepened, so did I. Now this character was at first no more than a thinly disguised self-image, but as I learned to listen to the work during the writing, Katherine Forrester of A Small Rain began to have her own separate identity. And the more real she became, the more apart from me, the more I learned about the writing of fiction and about myself. And I learned with this first novel that it was not I who created character; it was character who created me.

  Section IX

  PAINTS OF THE WRITER’S PALETTE

  Words and Symbols

  When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

  WORDS AND SILENCE

  Word

  I, who live by words, am wordless when

  I try my words in prayer. All language turns

  To silence. Prayer will take my words and then

  Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns

  To hold its peace, to listen with the heart

  To silence that is joy, is adoration.

  The self is shattered, all words torn apart

  In this strange patterned time of contemplation

  That, in time, breaks time, breaks words, breaks me,

  And then, in silence, leaves me healed and mended.

  I leave, returned to language, for I see

  Through words, even when all words are ended.

  I, who live by words, am wordless when

  I turn me to the Word to pray. Amen.

  A LOVE AFFAIR WITH WORDS

  Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.

  But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

  OUSIA, ANANDA, AND NAMASTÉ

  A young reader knowing of my love of new words, sent me a beautiful one: namasté: I salute the God within you.

  The words which have taught me most richly come in logical progression: ontology: the word about being; ousia: the essence of being, that which is really real; ananda (also sent me as a gift by a reader): that joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse. And now: namasté.

  If we accept that God is within each of us, then God will give us, within us, the courage to accept the responsibility of being co-creators.

  THE VALUE OF WORDS

  Without words we cannot tell stories. We can hug and kiss, but we cannot say, “I love you.”

  We can look at the glory of the sunrise or the brilliance of the stars, but without words we cannot ask, “Who made you?” We cannot say, “Maker of the universe and of me, I trust you.” We can feel hunger or lust or fatigue, but we cannot ask questions.

  FINDING THE REAL MEANING

  There are many words which have wonderful connotations: love, children, joy, play, sunlight, daffodils, spring, autumn leaves, trees, truth, friends, grandchildren, books, stories, freedom, compassion, responsibility, caring, healing—these are just a few words off the top of my head.

  Some words have connotations that at one time are good, at one time are negative; for instance, integrity, which is now too often a pop word for self-indulgence. The negative words that bother me most are the popular words that make us feel au courant, so that we do not have to think about what they really mean: fundamentalist, for instance!

  Not only are we asked to be politically correct, but environmentally correct. Both kinds of correctness keep us from considering seriously what we should be thinking or doing either politically or environmentally.

  WORDS CAN HURT OR BLESS

  We human beings are the creature who uses language. We put words together so that we can tell someone of our love, so that we can sing of that love in a song, write of it in a novel. We can also use words to destroy. The old adage “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is simply not true. Words can and do hurt, stinging and scarring us. But words can also be icons. How can we contemplate, without trembling repentance, this troubled century which has known two terrible world wars, as well as countless ambiguous wars? How can we remember the concentration camps, and what was done to the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, dissidents, and others Hitler considered dangerous to his glorious Aryan society, without anguish? We cannot disassociate ourselves from it, nor from the current evils. Nor can we forget it, or try to convince other generations it didn’t happen, as some people are presently trying to do. Our memories do distort past events, but we cannot wipe them out as though they had never happened!

  LANGUAGE DEFINES US

  The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think. Try to comprehend an abstract idea without words: we may be able to imagine a turkey dinner. But try something more complicated; try to ask questions, to look for meaning: without words we don’t get very far. If we limit and distort language, we limit and distort personality.

  WE THINK BECAUSE WE HAVE WORDS

  We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually. Yet another reason why Wrinkle was so often rejected is that there are many words in it which would never be found on a controlled vocabulary list for the age-group of the ten-to-fourteen-year-old. Tesseract, for instance. It’s a real word, and one essential for the story.

  As a child, when I came across a word I didn’t know, I didn’t stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens. When I started to read Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, I was determined to understand it. I read intelligently, with a dictionary beside me, stopping to look up the scientific words which were not familiar to me. And I bogged down. So I put aside the dictionary and read as though I were reading a story, and quickly I got drawn into the
book, fascinated by his loving theology, and understood it far better, at a deeper level, than if I had stuck with the dictionary.

  Is this contradiction? I don’t think so. We played with my daughter’s vocabulary words during dinner. We kept a dictionary by the table, just for fun. But when we read, we read. We were capable of absorbing far more vocabulary when we read straight on than when we stopped to look up every word. Sometimes I will jot down words to be looked up later. But we learn words in many ways, and much of my vocabulary has been absorbed by my subconscious mind, which then kindly blips it up to my conscious mind when it is needed.

  DANGEROUS LOSSES

  Vocabulary is lost during times of war because you are paying attention to other things. Literature tends to go. In a dictatorship, the first people who are put in prison and got rid of are the writers and the teachers because they think. You travel to any South American country, and it’s the writers and the teachers who are being persecuted. In Hitler’s Germany, it was the writers and the teachers. Writers and teachers are dangerous, and I think that’s a very important thing to be.

  In our own country, there is a very subversive, less obvious anti-intellectualism. It’s very much part of our culture. Look at the programs that have been cut back. Look at the library programs that have been cut back, the things that will enable children to read and read more—these are the things that are getting eliminated.

  AVOID LIMITING VOCABULARY

  I have a profound conviction that it is most dangerous to tamper with the word. I’ve been asked why it’s wrong to provide the author of a pleasure book, a non-textbook, with a controlled-vocabulary list. First of all, to give an author a list of words and tell him to write a book for children using no word that is not on the list strikes me as blasphemy. What would have happened to Beatrix Potter if she had written in the time of controlled vocabulary? Lettuce has a soporific effect on Peter Rabbit. “Come, come, Beatrix, that word is beyond a child’s vocabulary.” But it’s the right word, it’s the only possible word.” “Nonsense. You can’t use soporific because it’s outside the child’s reading capacity. You can say that lettuce made Peter feel sleepy.”

  I shudder.

  To give a writer a controlled-vocabulary list is manipulating both writer and reader. It keeps the child within his present capacity, on the bland assumption that growth is even and orderly and rational, instead of something that happens in great unexpected leaps and bounds. It ties the author down and takes away his creative freedom, and completely ignores the fact that the good writer will always limit himself. The simplest word is almost always the right word. I am convinced that Beatrix Potter used “soporific” because it was, it really and truly was, the only right word for lettuce at that moment.

  WORD MEANINGS THEN AND NOW

  It is a mistake to assume that all words written in a translation several hundred years ago still mean the same thing today. What a sad loss it is to lose the current lovely meaning given to imagination and see it as something ugly! One small child at his uncle’s burial watched the sky cloud over and rain beginning to fall, and said, “God is crying.” How beautiful his imagination! My son was given a flashlight for his second birthday, and when there was an unexpected storm and the lightning flashed, he clapped his hands and said, “God’s flashlight!”

  When words change their meaning we must be careful to understand this, otherwise story gets changed along with words.

  TRUE VIRTUE

  I do not always choose what I am going to write. Sometimes I feel called to write on subjects I really don’t want to tackle. That’s when I most need to listen to the story with humility and virtue, virtue in the ancient sense of the word, which has little to do with moral rectitude. True virtue means strength. And in one etymological dictionary, virtue is defined as that which is necessary. So let us spell it vertue, to differentiate it from self-conscious virtue. In biblical language it means creative power—creative power vs. that dominant power that Lord Acton warns us will corrupt us. When the woman with the issue of blood touches the hem of Jesus’ garment, he knows someone has touched him, because he feels the vertue drain from him. So, indeed the act of creation is virtuous, as the Word shouting the galaxies into being was virtuous.

  THE MISUSE OF WORDS

  Our whole vocabulary is threatened by the deliberate perversion of our language, by misusing of words. Turning verbs into nouns, for instance. We have completely lost the correct use of the word contact. It is not a verb; it is a noun.

  Also, the continuous powerful methods the writer has for imagery are metaphor and simile. A metaphor, as you know, is “my love is a red, red rose,” and simile is “my love is like a red, red rose.” In taking the word like and using it not as a simile word, we have lost it or are in the process of losing it as a simile word.

  USING LANGUAGE CAREFULLY

  How wonderful that we can put words together, and that they will mean something, tell a story, offer hope! But far too often we use language carelessly, stupidly, and we contradict ourselves and don’t even know it. I’m an avid bumper sticker watcher, and it is chastening how often bumper stickers show how we manage to fool ourselves. Will Campbell told of seeing two bumper stickers on one car. One said, “U.S. Army. Be All that You Can Be.” The other read, “Abortion Kills.”

  He used that not to get into an argument pro or con abortion, but as an example of how horrendously we can deceive and contradict ourselves without even realizing it.

  TRANSLATE WITH CARE

  In restricting the language in the new translations we have lost that depth and breadth which can give us the kind of knowing which is our heritage. This loss has permeated our literature and our prayers, not necessarily in that order. College students of the future will miss many allusions in their surveys of English literature, because the language of the great seventeenth-century translators is no longer in their bloodstream. I like to read the new translations of Bible and Prayer Book for new insights, for shocks of discovery and humor, but I don’t want to discard the old, as though it were as transitory as last year’s fashions.

  THE DESTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE

  Chaucer and Shakespeare both came along at times when the English language was in need of redemption, and we are at another such time, and perhaps our Chaucer or Shakespeare is yet to be born, or it may be that the English language, like Latin, will dwindle and become obsolete. The Bible becomes more difficult to read with each generation, because the translators for King James weren’t threatened by limited vocabulary. This holds true for Shakespeare, too. Recently I reread one of his early plays, written before he had moved into his giant stride, and on a notepad I jotted down all the words which I felt to be valid, useful words which are no longer in our vocabulary. There were over one hundred.

  But it is not only the English language which is in danger. It is a fear for languages all over the world. After the Second World War the Japanese lost so many actual written characters that college students today cannot read the great Japanese works of literature, because they no longer know the characters used by the classical writers. This destruction of language is a result of war and is always a curtailment of freedom.

  WRITERS ARE DANGEROUS

  When Hugh and I went on a trip to Russia I almost didn’t get a visa because our travel agent put down my occupation as writer. Writers think. Writers ask questions. Writers are dangerous. She finally persuaded “them” that I write only for very small children and was not a threat. In any dictatorship, writers are among the first to be imprisoned, and vocabulary is quickly diminished and language deteriorates. Writers, if their vocabulary is not leashed, are quick to see injustice, and rouse the people to do something about it. We need words with which to think; kill words and we won’t be able to think and we’ll be easier to manipulate.

  WORD PLAY

  I like to encourage children to play with words, to make puns. When I was a child we used to have a silly ga
me called Tea Kettle. We would take a word that would have more than one meaning, like ball, which has five or six different meanings, and we would say sentences in which whenever we came to the word which would be ball, we would say tea kettle. And the other person had to guess what the word was.

  LANGUAGE AND THEOLOGY CHANGE

  Some of the old words still have vital, current meaning. Some do not. Language changes. If it does not change, like Latin it dies. But we need to be aware that as our language changes, so does our theology change, particularly if we are trying to manipulate language for a specific purpose. That is what is happening with our attempts at inclusive language, which thus far have been inconclusive and unsuccessful.

  TRANSFORMING LANGUAGE

  If we bear the image of love in our own flawed, human bodies, it is this love which will ultimately renew language. And then perhaps we will be given a truly great writer, like Chaucer, or Shakespeare, to transform language with genius.

  Religion and language are like rivers, constantly flowing from the same source, as we respond to all that is happening in the world around us. Maybe one day we’ll get the hang of it, the yin and the yang of it. Language changes most graciously through poets and storytellers, and most clumsily when it is being manipulated by reformers and committees.