A quite wonderful object has found its way into my world, a big book, ostensibly for children, called The Lost Words: A Spell Book. The work of poet Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris, it's huge - I had to prop it up on the sofa to take a picture. The book appeared in 2017 as a response to a revision of the Oxford Junior Dictionary a decade before, which had made room for new words like "broadband" by eliminating others, based on "the current frequency of words in daily language of children." Among the words dropped were many relating to the natural landscape, and as these omissions were uncovered - fern, raven, kingfisher, ivy, wren, bramble, heron, willow... - public dismay ensued. If these words were no longer much used, oughtn't one, rather, to work to make sure they came back, rather than ratifying their loss?
Hence this book, which conjures back these "lost words" with gorgeous images and, for each one, an acrostic poem - "a spell" - to restore the word to its lived splendor. It always begins with a riddle - the letters of a word hidden among natural shapes - and continues through a "spell," facing a portrait of the thing itself on gold leaf, to a double-page spread of the thing in its natural setting.
The first suite of images and poem establish the whole project. Conveniently, if shockingly, the alphabetically first of their "lost words" is one it boggles the mind anyone could have thought dispensable: acorn. This is Macfarlane's spell for it:
acorn
As flake is to blizzard, as
Curve is to sphere, as knot is to net, as
One is to many, as coin is to money, as bird is to flock, as
Rock is to mountain, as drop is to fountain, as spring is to river, as glint is to glitter, as
Near is to far, as wind is to weather, as feather is to flight, as light is to star, as kindness is to good, so acorn is to wood.
Sublime, profound, and such fun to say... Without ever even having to use the word "oak," we see the worlds which acorns open to us in meaning and promise, microcosm and macrocosm, change and charm. Macfarlane challenges us to consider how important acquaintance with acorns has been for human thinking on all those things - and how bereft we would be, not only of oak knowledge, were the word and its world to vanish. What were those Junior Dictionary editors thinking?!
What I was thinking as the book took me from rapture to rapture was a bunch of things. First: the magic of acorns! But then also: How English! Were some of these words dropped because British children noawadays live largely in cities, and bring memories of countrysides far more diverse than the familiar watercolor landscapes of Morris' paintings? (I'm put in mind of Winnie the Pooh and Watership Down...) But surely there are oaks in cities, too, and chestnuts with their marvelous conkers (a word I needed this book to learn!!), and certainly ivy and dandelions. And all these plants and animals are native to Albion, just as these children are. (Macfarlane's involved also in initiatives to involve children not only in nature appreciation but conservation and care.) Yet reading these I felt a strange pang as part of an English settler colonial society - my forebears brought many of these things to the New World, with their words. While I can feel an anchoring in the worlds of, say, Robert Frost or Annie Dillard or Mary Oliver, I'm haunted by the sense that all of us are displacing something indigenous, on a gilt background meant for someone else.
Which connects to another set of thoughts. This wonderful book restores twenty English words with a rush of resources. But whole indigenous
languages, not just words, are perishing,
one every fortnight.
The Lost Words gives a taste of what vanished. Would that there were comparable projects for all! But what is comparable? The traditional ecological knowledge disappearing with these languages wouldn't look like this. Indeed, this book isn't about ecological knowledge at all, as the absence even of oaks from the
acorn poem attests! (Its imagined readers would learn how to care for, to live with, other species in a next step beyond the book.) What these spells conjure up are knots in a great net of human meanings, the one and the many, not this one and the other ones who share a specific ecology with it, as pollinators or predators, friends or food. The symbiosis we are baptized in here is poetic, one of words and ideas and feelings, not ecological.
For that matter, there are no humans in any of these images. (Starlings do perch on electric lines, though, and in the raven poem all sorts of city stuff is gathered up.) The relationship this book offers us with these other than human species is estranged but real, ruptured but perhaps restorable; thinking of nature as best apart from us may be a particularly American aberration. The book as a whole suggests our lives would be greatly impoverished without all the non-human peoples around us, and I suppose the idea of spells points to interactions and relationships, not just further rhapsodies. And what spells they are! They are far from just spectatorial. Try speaking aloud otter and willow (below) and see if they don't take you somewhere vital, nature enticing our bodies and transcending our imaginations.
