The haunting quality of words
Scott O'Dell // liturgies // we were created as poets
This post is a bit more scattered than my normal ones, but it’s a series of thoughts on how words stick with us, the ghosts that live in poetry books, and Scott O’Dell. Enjoy!
When I was eleven or twelve, my semi-private, Roman Catholic school nestled into the foothills of eastern France sent us to the mountains each week to go skiing.
We would pile into a trio of buses, accompanied by thoroughly-bundled-up teachers, and snake our way up the winding switch-backs that always made me feel vaguely sick. The valley would slip away below us until we were firmly in the alps, where the buses would park in snow-packed parking lots and let us stumble off to find our skis.
I have so many memories, good and bad, from those ski trips–the brilliance of snow, the irritation of ski instructors, the first time I successfully made a pun in French and got my friend to laugh.
But one quieter memory is from the buses themselves. Most of my classmates would smuggle phones in to listen to music as they went. Sometimes I accepted one of their earbuds, and we would sit, side-by-side, listening to the same thing.
But more often, I would slide into a window seat, stare out at the snow-laden trees, and listen to memories.
Audio dramas, audiobooks, and music galore filled our home. Since my earliest homeschool days, the time just after lunch had been set aside for each person to find their own corner of the house and read, nap, or listen to something.
I’ve always found it easiest to memorize things when I can hear them. Sometimes this happens on purpose, but more often or not, it’s entirely accidental. I won’t even realize it’s happened until, days later, little clips of conversations or poems get stuck in my head as easily as a catchy song.
To put it simply, words haunt me.
My earliest memories of Scott O’Dells words come from an audiobook of Island of the Blue Dolphins, narrated by someone with a very memorable voice.
As it turns out, that’s partially due to the narrator’s voice truly being distinctive, and partially due to Scott O’Dell having a rhythm to his words unlike any other author I’ve ever read.
On two separate occasions, I’ve pulled a book at random off a library shelf without paying attention to the cover, read a few lines from the middle (please tell me I’m not the only one who does this), and paused.
Wait. This sounds like Scott O’Dell.
Sure enough, I’d flip back to the cover, and there it was. Scott O’Dell, the man whose words have haunted me.
Is it something about his word choice? Is it the cadence, the pauses suggested by commas that don’t really need to be there? Or is it something else?
I can’t put my finger on it. But when Scott O’Dell picks up a pen, you can’t help but listen. You listen, and you never forget.
Lately, I’ve been more intentional about working in silence. I’ve set aside some of the music that I usually fill my waking hours with and explored what it is to study without background noise, or to do mundane tasks and let my mind wander.
One unexpected result has been that things I’ve heard will stick with me longer. My friend plays a song on the piano on Wednesday—well, I’m not listening to anything else, so that’s the song my mind will turn over for the next few days.
A single line of a book, a single stanza of a song, will stick with me for days. Before, I’d crowd them out within hours.
But now they’re here to stay, at least for a while.
The same thing, I think, is true of liturgies. Especially liturgies that are designed to be repeated, such as Every Moment Holy’s liturgies of the hours, for dawn, noon, and night. Each time I kneel and read one, a different phrase will stick with me. Sometimes I’ll wake up with it still on my mind.
(That, too, is an interesting thought—how do we wake up with a song or a memory already stuck in our head? What sort of haunting happens during the middle of the night?)
I’m surrounded by fewer words, but that means that each one has more time to stretch and settle in. A single thought will carve itself deeper into my mind than it could have before. A word, a few notes of music—they’re richer than I realized, now that they stand alone.
You never realize how bright the stars are (such little pricks of light, when all is said and done) until the moon, that great night-light, is gone.
The first recorded words of Adam are a poem.
Children, even now, write poems without thinking about it. Are they objectively high-quality? Often not. But they’re there. They’re written.
It’s as if our race cries out, from its very beginning, to remember certain things. Poetry is designed to stick with you. Where writers of prose can wax about a topic for an entire paragraph, poets are forced to whittle their meaning down to its slimmest, most poignant self.
Just look at some of these lines:
Become an open singing bowl, whose chime
Is richness rising out of emptiness,
And timelessness resounding into time.1
‘We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September.’
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.2
Foam is white and waves are grey;
beyond the sunset leads my way.
Foam is salt, the wind is free;
I hear the rising of the sea.3
Read them out loud. Listen to the way the words fall off your tongue and drop into your heart. They’ve been crafted to be remembered, to be quoted, to be shared.
They’ve been crafted to haunt us.
We are a race of poets desperately saying, with every line we write—please, do not forget this. Please, do not forget me. Let me follow you, even if only as a faint, haunting presence.
The question as the bus eased down the icy mountain on our way back to the valley was always—what will I listen to today?
Would it be Lamplighter’s The Robber’s Cave? What about some of the music my mom had played on the piano last night?
It took some attention, but I could sit there, letting my stiff limbs from skiing relax, and hear each voice, each note, each sound effect.
All the way down the mountain, I would be haunted by words.
(Who says haunting has to be a bad thing?)
Malcolm Guite, “The Singing Bowl”
Oliver Herford, “I Heard a Bird Sing in the Dark of December”
J.R.R. Tolkien, "Bilbo’s Last Song”
Wow, Karissa, this is beautiful. These words will haunt me. Haunt me like a strain of heartbreaking music, or the sound of wind in the tops of fir trees, or a story that I grew up reading so much I remember its events as if I had actually lived them. I’m so glad you shared this :)