On Naming Things
Clodgy. Gawm. Gubber. Ike. Pug. Sleach. The Sussex dialect apparently contains around 30 different words for mud: the sticky kind, the puddling kind, the tenacious kind – which, having spent a winter hiking in the South Downs, I can relate to. I love this mucky lexicon. They are wonderful words, onomatopoeias that immediately call to mind the sensation of the stuff, of sliding about in it or wrestling with welly boots that have got suctioned in. They afford mud a certain dignity too, which I rather like. It’s good to be reminded that even this most humble stuff comes in a greater number of variations than there are hours in the day.
In his book Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane writes about this relationship between words and the natural environment. Words, he believes, help us not only to describe our environment, but to recognise it and understand it. Naming things for Macfarlane is an act of love. His case is ecological: by giving form to nature with our language, we make it harder to destroy. He developed this idea further in a book for children, The Lost Words, created in response to the announcement that a number of nature words were being removed from a children’s dictionary – kingfisher, acorn, bluebell. It isn’t a poetry collection but ‘a spell book’. As if these words had the power to summon the things they describe, back from the edge of vanishing.
Like these natural words, one of art’s magic powers is helping us to experience our lives more particularly, and so to understand them better. Once, in Margate, I went to an exhibition of JMW Turner’s paintings, held at the gallery built in the very place where he’d stayed and looked out to sea. When I stepped out on to the promenade, I saw the water differently. What had been a dull slab of brown was transformed into a sequinned shimmer, flashing with bronze and stolen pieces of sky. It was as if his brush hadn’t touched only the canvas, but the landscape too.
More recently, when I read Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie,I was struck by her protagonist’s visit to Brixton Village, where she discovers that the Caribbean bakery she was taken to as a child has been priced out, replaced by a trendy burger chain. Now, I can’t pass through the market without thinking of the peeling layers of history in that place, and what my presence in it might mean.
It can be helpful to recall, when you’re struggling to get words on the page or paint on the canvas, that this is a big part of what artists do: help us to see things as they really are. It may be the particular qualities of the cup in front of you – the flicker of steam in the cool air, the way a triangle of light from the window catches inside the rim. Or it may be something bigger – what it means to be alive right now, in this body, in this place.
The secret is that you don’t even have to see things clearly right away. In fact, it’s much better if you don’t. Those that come to their subject with a preconception about what they’re looking at are much less likely to be attentive. Art begins when we are genuinely curious to find out what we’re looking at. Like magic, it can make visible that which is hiding in plain sight.