Nouns and Verbs

I like nouns as much as the next person, but have long understood their danger, the way they make ice of water and store it in the uniform cubicles of the ice tray, where they lie captive and inert. And when we do free them up for our summer drink, they slowly melt and water down our drink, robbing it of its full robust flavor or texture. 

 

We are living verbs, ever changing, held noun-like together in our skin and body type and character, but impossible to pin down. If you doubt that, look at a photo of you at 8 or 12 and yes, some things are recognizable, but can you really remember that you you once were? Or consider your granddaughter newly arrived at the lake, almost 12-yrs old going on 18 in body, mind and emotion and try to resist wishing that she was the one you remembered at seven years-old. Or celebrate this new version (in-between the eye-rolls) as your level of conversation reaches new levels. 

 

In short, as I think Einstein meant (never did study physics), matter is energy, energy is matter, nouns are convenient summaries of common flowing energies, just as lake or stream or ocean are impossible to pin down as things, but are alive fluid processes always in flux and ever-changing. So are people, so is music, so is gender, so is health.

 

But besides an innate human proclivity toward wanting the comfort of the fixity of things— be they objects, ideas, dogma or political rhetoric— we Americans are particularly vulnerable to a noun-centric view of life. A capitalistic, materialistic society all about the consumption of things leaks down into all aspects of life. Music, for example. What we call the “music” are frozen symbols on paper that need the verb of music-making (which we don’t have—Christopher Small suggested “musicking”). Jazz musicians are much more verb-oriented, playing the notes in the Fakebook song-sheets with flexibility and originality and then departing from them altogether, swinging freely in a playground of solos that restores “play music” to its deeper meaning. 

 

In short, wherever we turn, we like to objectify and try to capture that which is free and life-affirming in its verb form, but stultifying and dull as a noun. An American music teacher, praising a teacher she admired, said “I like her stuff.” In Europe, the praise leans more toward the teacher’s musicality or imagination or process of unleashing her students’ musicality. At the end of Orff workshops, the most common question is “Is this in the notes?” or “Where can I buy those boomwhackers?”

 

This attitude trickles down to all corners of American culture, to our great distress and dimunition. Mental health, for example. Though there’s no scientific evidence that a syndrome like ADD has any physiological basis, we label kids with that limiting noun and treat them accordingly with our favorite prescription—physical pills meant to “cure” the noun we call “disease.” The Bible of turning people into nouned-disorders, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders, includes something called ODD—Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Apparently, that’s a “thing” and considered abnormal and eligible for treatment. Some of the most sociopathic examples of this syndrome? Angela Davis, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Joan of Arc, for starters. Oh yeah, another one who defied Roman law—Jesus. Had the symptoms been recognized and the drugs prescribed, it would have saved the world so much trouble. 

 

These intuitions that I’ve long held are given voice and authority by a remarkable physician named Gabor Maté in his book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Society. Halfway through it, the pages are marked with my exclamation points, “yep” and “YES!!!” I will quote some of this eloquent support statements in the next blogpost or two. Meanwhile, my grandson is begging this old bag-of-bones-noun to get off my butt and throw some active verb footballs around on the beach. More later.