For one thing, it seems to me that the verbs are in the wrong order. You have to have your cake before you eat it, after all. I might have understood the saying if it was “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”
And then, another kind of confusion, having to do with have. In the West Coast dialect of English I grew up with, “I had cake at the party” is how we said, “I ate cake at the party.” So “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” was trying to tell me that I couldn’t eat my cake and eat it too…
And hearing it that way as a kid, I thought, Hunh? but didn’t say anything, because there is no way, no possible way, a kid can ask about everything grownups say that the kid thinks Hunh? about. So I just tried to figure it out. And once I got stuck with the illogic of the cake you have being the cake you can’t eat, the possibility never occurred to me that it was all about hoarding vs. gobbling, or the necessity of choice when there is no middle way.
I expect you’ve had quite enough cake by now. I’m sorry.
But see, this is the kind of thing I think about a lot.
Nouns (cake), verbs (have), words, and the uses and misuses of words, and the meanings of words, and how the words and their meanings change with time and with place, and the derivations of words from older words or other languages—words fascinate me the way box elder beetles fascinate my friend Pard. Pard, at this point, is not allowed outside, so he has to hunt indoors. Indoors we have, at this point, no mice. But we have beetles. Oh yes Lord, we have beetles. And if Pard hears, smells, or sees a beetle, that beetle instantly occupies his universe. He will stop at nothing—he will root in wastebaskets, overturn and destroy small fragile objects, push large heavy dictionaries aside, leap wildly in the air or up the wall, stare unmoving for ten minutes at the unattainable light fixture in which a beetle is visible as a tiny moving silhouette… And when he gets the beetle, and he always does, he knows that you can’t have your beetle and eat it too. So he eats it. Instantly.
I know, though I don’t really like knowing it, that not many people share this particular fascination or obsession. With words, I mean, not beetles. Though I want to point out that Charles Darwin was almost as deeply fascinated by beetles as Pard is, though with a somewhat different goal. Darwin even put one in his mouth once, in a doomed attempt to keep it by eating it. It didn’t work.[1] Anyhow, many people enjoy reading about the meaning and history of picturesque words and phrases, but not many enjoy brooding for years over a shade of significance of the verb to have in a banal saying.
Even among writers, not all seem to share my enjoyment of pursuing a word or a usage through the dictionaries and the wastebaskets. If I start doing it aloud in public, some of them look at me with horror or compassion, or try to go quietly away. For that reason, I’m not even certain that it has anything to do with my being a writer.
But I think it does. Not with being a writer per se, but with my being a writer, my way of being a writer. When asked to talk about what I do, I’ve often compared writing with handicrafts—weaving, pot-making, woodworking. I see my fascination with the word as very like, say, the fascination with wood common to carvers, carpenters, cabinetmakers—people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what’s been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.
Yet when I compare my craft with theirs, I feel slightly presumptuous. Woodworkers, potters, weavers engage with real materials, and the beauty of their work is profoundly and splendidly bodily. Writing is so immaterial, so mental an activity! In its origin, it’s merely artful speech, and the spoken word is no more than breath. To write or otherwise record the word is to embody it, make it durable; and calligraphy and typesetting are material crafts that achieve great beauty. I appreciate them. But in fact they have little more to do with what I do than weaving or pot-making or woodworking does. It’s grand to see one’s poem beautifully printed, but the important thing to the poet, or anyhow to this poet, is merely to see it printed, however, wherever—so that readers can read it. So it can go from mind to mind.
I work in my mind. What I do is done in my mind. And what my hands do with it in writing it down is not the same as what the hands of the weaver do with the yarn, or the potter’s hands with the clay, or the cabinetmaker’s with the wood. If what I do, what I make, is beautiful, it isn’t a physical beauty. It’s imaginary, it takes place in the mind—my mind, and my reader’s.
You could say that I hear voices and believe the voices are real (which would mean I was schizophrenic, but the proverb test proves I’m not—I do, I do understand it, Doctor!). And that then by writing what I hear, I induce or compel readers to believe the voices are real too… That doesn’t describe it well, though. It doesn’t feel that way. I don’t really know what it is I’ve done all my life, this wordworking.
But I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them.
I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.
And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are built and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework.
Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.
Papa H
June 2013
I WAS THINKING about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey.
I’m sure this has occurred to others. That’s the thing about Homer. People keep going to him and discovering new things, or old things, or things for the first time, or things all over again, and saying them. This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.
Anyhow, so The Iliad is the War (actually only a piece of it, close to but not including the end), and The Odyssey is the Journey (There and Back Again, as Bilbo put it).
I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War, by not taking sides.
The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek—maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.
Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use, I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.
1
From Darwin’s autobiography: “I will give proof of my zeaclass="underline" one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”