Night Fishing

by Vicki Hastrich

  I think words helped her. Her sewing was important too, but that mental reaching for words afforded a small window out to somewhere abstract and borderless. And at least with the crossword she had the satisfaction of completing something in a day which otherwise might realise nothing.

  Mum taught me a lot without seeming to, especially while we filled the Scrabble board together. Despite my wide reading, I was a poor speller. Look it up, she’d say. The dictionary was always at hand. It was a good one. If a customer arrived, disrupting our game, I’d browse its pages while Mum went out to serve. I loved that book, a big dictionary, bought through the post with a coupon cut from the newspaper.

  The children’s dictionaries we had for primary school, I always despised. Also the pocket Collins and Oxford hand-me-downs in high school, which kicked around in the bottom of my schoolbag, inevitably with a shrivelled raisin stuck between the back pages, spilt from an ancient lunch. Those abbreviated volumes never worked properly. Half the time the word I wanted, or the word ending, was missing. And they were miserly, never giving anything more in their definitions than a bare boring minimum. But The Age Encyclopaedic Dictionary rarely let me down. And, astonishingly for that era, it also contained Australian words, and the names of Australian people and places. To see my own country’s words included with the rest made me feel, not part of the world, but at least officially existing in parallel to it. In those pre-internet days, this was the family’s only ready source of information. But, just like now, you could still find yourself going off on a little trail when you looked something up, pursuing terms mentioned or happened upon. The book was a way to travel. While Mum talked baize or slate or cue tips to a customer, I grazed over it, allowing curiosity to snag wherever it liked. Momentarily lifted somewhere else.

  •

  The words in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary smell of the Thames and barrels of oysters and sprats. They have delightfully delinquent natures, so often bending away from the root of a word we’re familiar with to audaciously couple with a stranger.

  muckender

  fleshquake

  eyeservant

  backfriend

  blinkard

  When I visited Johnson’s house in London a few years ago, I bought an abridged edition of his famous work, which was first published in 1755. I keep it within reach of my desk. At regular intervals I pick it up, not for Johnson’s witty definitions, but for the energy of the words themselves, though I concede his blustering voice influences how I read. It doesn’t matter that these are terms I’m unlikely to use. I dip here and there, and in the process feel my regard for all language refreshed. How amazing it is, that by these small building blocks we respond to our times, we create pictures, tell stories, bring form to the formless, make known the unknown, provoke feeling for the unfelt.

  In the attic of his modest home, Dr J compiled his dictionary with the help of live-in assistants. Present-day visitors to the room encounter it largely unfurnished. Light from uncurtained dormer windows bathes the bare white walls, the wooden floors: it’s an airy space, fit for all those words to bump about in. Around the heads of those long-dead dictionary workers, it’s easy to picture them—nouns, adjectives, verbs—swooping and jostling for inclusion.

  But it’s what went on across town in Bloomsbury nearly a hundred years later that I really admire. There, a meticulous rationalist put together a dispassionate collection of words; one which shows itself on close inspection to be unexpectedly noble—and moving.

  •

  How can I make you fall in love with Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus? Perhaps you would need to own a second-hand 1962 Longman’s edition, as I do. You would need to sit next to me on the day when, after consulting it in my usual unthinking way, I idly wondered which word above all others Roget had chosen to be first.

  Look. It is esse. Essential nature or essence.

  So fundamentally apt it gives us both a little jolt.

  Of course this is the word to start with. There could be no other.

  The heading above is Existence; the heading over the next set of words is Non-existence. And that’s when it dawns on us both (if you are ignorant like me and didn’t know already) that an intelligent—even elegant—system of organisation must be in operation here. Together we immediately read the preliminary pages of the book, which include Roget’s original introduction. We like the modest man we meet, as well as his grand design. For that’s what Roget should really be famous for: not the idea of listing synonyms (in any case he wasn’t the first to do it), but their beautiful arrangement.

  Peter Mark Roget was born in London. His father was Swiss—hence the surname, which, as an Australian child of the suburbs, I’ve never felt entirely confident pronouncing. The year was 1779. Less than a decade before, Lieutenant James Cook had dropped the anchor of the Endeavour into the shallow waters of Botany Bay, an act which would eventually lead to the disruption and destruction of many of the continent’s original languages.

  This was the questing, collecting age which gave rise to modern science, and Roget was to take a significant place in it, presiding over its tail end. As a boy he was precociously bright, earning a medical degree from Edinburgh University by the age of nineteen. As an adult he was a renowned polymath, practising as a physician, but active across all of Britain’s leading scholarly societies, including the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, of which he was secretary for decades. He was busy. He lectured extensively on human and animal physiology; he wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on a cornucopia of subjects; he invented the ‘log-log’ slide rule; he made observations on human optics which ultimately led to the development of cinema. These were just a few of his activities and achievements, and it wasn’t until he finally retired, aged nearly 70, that he had the time to turn his mind to the word lists that became his Thesaurus.

  As a young man preparing his first series of lectures for medical students, Roget felt his writing skills weren’t up to scratch. He knew that clarity and precision of expression were crucial to communicating ideas successfully, but found, as he later said, that it wasn’t always easy to summon the right word up from ‘the vasty deep’. His remedy was to make lists of synonyms, grouped by subject, to help him select the most fitting word with just the right shade of meaning, tone and weight for the given task. Roget used these handy lists all his life, finding them indispensable, not just because they improved the style of his writing, but also because they helped him think. With words arranged ‘not alphabetically, but according to ideas they express’, he found that, by association, new trains of thought often came to him, prompting him to change tack or qualify his original position.

  For three or four years Roget retreated to his townhouse (which was just off Russell Square—don’t go looking for it, it’s no longer there), adding words to his existing cache and marshalling them into a hierarchy of classes and divisions. His bent towards classification was not an original impulse, nor, as one over-egging biographer would have it, did it indicate an unduly obsessive nature. It was an interest of his age. The botanist Carl Linnaeus (who died the year before Roget was born) spent the last decades of his life developing the system of taxonomy that we still use today for the classification and naming of plants and animals. Roget was well aware of it, also of calls by a prominent moral philosopher, Dugald Stewart, for the principles of classification to be applied to abstract thought. Stewart believed the development of human knowledge had been held back because too little attention had been paid to language, the cornerstone of reasoning.

  For the published Thesaurus Roget settled on six primary classes. Within the cool brackets of these half-dozen categories, words for all experience and living are collected, graded and apportioned:

  Abstract Relations (including such things as Quantity, Time, Causation)

  Space (including Motion, or change of place)

  Matter

  Intellect

  Volition

  Sentient and
Moral Powers

  Just as Linnaeus had done for the natural world, Roget gave shape to the amorphous chaos of human thought. With the delineations of these conceptual groups, the outlines of thinking were finally visible. And like Linnaeus’s taxonomy, the beauty of Roget’s system is that it’s not closed: it admits change, accommodating new entries as human knowledge expands and experience evolves. Under its shelter there is potentially room for all the words that make the world.

  I like to think of my Roget’s Thesaurus as a construction—a kind of fantastic birdhouse for words, with many roofs and windows and open doorways; where no room is a dead end, even those in the innermost reaches; where the occupants might enter by one archway and leave by another; where everything interrelates.

  Sometimes I think of the words that visit me in the night as birds, coming out briefly to stretch their wings, and of myself as a slightly wacky birder, observing from a hide.

  •

  When first published in 1852, Roget’s ‘birdhouse’ sold at a persistent trickle; enough to warrant the reprints and revised editions that appeared regularly for the rest of his life. Amending the work became a family business, with Roget’s son, then grandson, taking over. In 1913 the crossword puzzle was invented, appearing in the ‘Fun’ pages of the US weekend newspaper the New York World. Synonyms were suddenly in hot demand as the craze went global. The Thesaurus took off. It was by this means that the book found its way into so many English-speaking homes.

  Most modern thesauri have been dumbed down. In UK publishing territories the name ‘Roget’ has been trademarked, but in the US it’s a generic term for any book containing synonyms. Across thesaurus brands many different organising systems are employed. The majority have done away with conceptual groupings, relying on straightforward alphabetisation, which to my mind immediately reduces half the value of the book. Where classes are still used, headings tend to be dull and have lost the power to provoke, no longer hinting at anything grand or philosophical.

  The magnificent achievement of the real Roget’s is that words in one idea group are situated alongside opposite and correlative ideas. The set-up is useful for practical reasons, providing a browsing environment for deeper consideration of the word required, perhaps even prompting a flipping of the phrasing of a sentence in order to use a negative version. As Roget hoped, his thesaurus encourages more active, critical thinking during the process of writing. But the arrangement of related ideas is important for another reason: it makes for a poetic resonance which can inspire. Flick through the pages to do with sound, for example, and there you find headings ranging from Silence to Loudness, Resonance and Non-resonance, Human Cry, Animal Sounds, Concord, Discord, Music, Musician, Hearing, Deafness. You have sampled the multiplicity of all sounds on earth, and glimpsed their absence.

  And Existence and Non-existence, those first two headings in my Longman’s edition; what a simple pair of hands they are, holding out a mixed bag of profound complexity. In happening upon these entries we pause, momentarily reminded of the mighty notions which every day of our lives follow us like shadows.

  •

  Up the coast at the holiday house I keep a Penguin Roget’s and a very decent Macquarie Dictionary. It’s our custom to do the crossword communally, and if we remain stumped by the last one or two clues we consult them. The internet provides faster, pat answers, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying. It’s too quick, and the opportunity for ambling research and incidental discovery is lost. We’re not as good at completing the crossword as Mum was, but as a holiday ritual it’s a pleasant accompaniment to our days—out on the deck with coffee, later shoved into the beach bag to be further considered under the umbrella between swims.

  When my sister comes to visit, the Scrabble board comes out, the same old family set Mum and I used at the shop all those years ago. Di and I sit together at the table in the long verandah room, usually in the late afternoon when the western sun hits the cane blinds. It’s nice. We take turns to pull a tile out of the cloth drawstring bag that holds the letters, to see who’ll go first. Our mum made that bag out of a scrap from the bedspread she sewed for my brother when he was little: broad emerald green and royal blue stripes, the material a very strong cotton.

  I like the quiet concentration of those afternoons, the plastic click of the tiles against the wooden ledges as we shuffle the letters looking for words. Passing the heavy dictionary to each other from time to time. We play lots of ordinary words, but when an unusual one is laid out we make noises of appreciation. It doesn’t have to be terribly exotic or clever to earn our admiration. It might just be one we haven’t seen in a good while and didn’t expect to turn up in these parts.

  We play to win but not stupidly so, more in the spirit of staying sharp so that a loss is honourable and a win, even if you’ve been lucky with letters, has taken some effort of concentration, a proper engagement. Old notepads filled with scores show the wins evenly spread between us. One I kept for a while had Mum’s scores on it from when the three of us were last all together. At a point I don’t recall, just through the normal process of ageing, she stopped winning, missing words and places she could have played, would have played, in the past. I didn’t like noticing that. Or when occasionally I saw her, a little exasperated, put her fingers to her temple to think, as if to press something more out of there.

  The click of the tiles. The orphaned Q. The blank.

  Words forming and unforming.

  •

  Maybe I invite words in in the middle of the night to test if they’re really all still there, waiting and available. By day, when I’m writing, they are so often reluctant to come, refusing to line up in coherent strings. That’s when I’m reduced. To yanking them down by the collar and nailing them to the page.

  It’s a bloody way to create a society, as any dictator will tell you. And afterwards, it takes a long time to clean up the mess.

  •

  The unreliability, the mutability of words as materials. And yet the right one occupies its place so solidly.

  •

  Recently I’ve been looking at the work of the visual artist Cy Twombly (1928–2011). That guy really knew how to paint words. He understood the movement in them and the way they can travel across time. He loved poetry and quoted it extensively in his art; the enduring potency of classical myths also fascinated him, and the names of gods and mythic figures often feature in his work.

  As a young man Twombly served in the army as a cryptographer. Words appearing and disappearing must have infected his dreams. He paints them worn or scratched or faded or dripping—packed with resonant qualities. They are messages from another realm but meaning is always in process, struggling to form. Often words are not even whole: letters might be exploded, or a character might be repeated across the canvas in a scrawled flow, as if to represent the irrepressible, recurring lyric of prayer or song.

  In their repeated struggle to manifest, I think Twombly’s words enact the effort of successive generations to call out to the future. Perhaps they wish to say, We were here; perhaps they wish to say, Listen; perhaps they just want to say hello.

  Through Cy Twombly’s art I see very clearly that language operates at the threshold between order and chaos. It’s on this step humans live. From that narrow place, all our lives, we look out, trying to make sense of it all.

  Helping us manage this was Peter Mark Roget. By putting a structure around language—an architectural folly—he made visible life’s manifold variegation, and showed us it need not be overwhelming.

  •

  In the past couple of years there’s been a burst of projects aimed at maintaining and rehabilitating Australian Indigenous languages. A new optimism seems to be growing, with many participants finding the learning and sharing of language to be unexpectedly strengthening and powerful. To me, this makes perfect sense.

  I often listen in to a current radio series which asks Aboriginal people from language groups right around the country to share a f
ew of their favourite words. Who knows how old some of those words are—maybe 60,000 years or more—the oldest human words still spoken. Other words are recent; adaptive and clever. Some words describe concepts or activities for which there is no English equivalent, and so contain singular knowledge. But where there are equivalents, it’s not just about replacing the labels on things. You can hear some of the properties inside the language words moving again, declaring their nature; and in the voices of the speakers, snatches of the present world starting to make a new coherence.

  In one episode, a young man from Menindee in western New South Wales, Andrew Sloane, says that an important word for him is ngamakuuluyi. It’s from Paakantyi language.

  ‘That means my dear mother,’ he says. ‘Me and William have always said it after we found out his grandfather said it to his mother.’

  Andrew explains that he lives with his grandparents and says it to his grandmother. An unstoppable warmth enters his voice here. ‘They know what it means.’

  The words of our country are stirring. To listen is also to be changed. The more that fly through the night the better. Room for plenty under the shelter of old Roget’s Thesaurus.

  esse

  mudang

  My mother, pressing her hand to her temple.

  Coming out of the dark

  — continuum —

  Time-stretched with its double ‘u’.

  The Butcher and the Housekeeper

  When I get up in the morning and go into the kitchen of the house up the coast, I am mildly surprised to find it tidy. This is because I dreamt last night of a middle-aged couple breakfasting there. While everything is as I last left it, their recent presence is palpable.

  The man, a butcher by trade, is doing the cooking: halved tomatoes, fried—which have caught on the bottom of the pan and blackened, but not unpalatably so. The woman, a housekeeper for a wealthy Belgian family, watches without criticism. Their faces are not well defined but there is a very sure sense of the way each of them occupies space physically: the butcher standing beside his pan on the stove, a big man, tall; the woman sitting on a stool, the grounded weight of her buttocks on the seat, her head cupped in a plump hand as she leans heavily on the island bench.