Vacca

Oct 13 2015

It seems that nouns

have always itched

to turn into verbs,

plating food

impacting anything.

Because it's hard simply to sit

while all the other words

are in on the action

having fun.

Proper names, of course, resist;

privileged, smug

capitalized.

Notwithstanding

bobbing for apples

    ... petering out

           ... miking the band.

The verbing of nouns

can tell us more

than we might ordinarily wish.

How it feels to be mothered

loved, cared for.

And how to father a child

can simply consist

of conception,

end

at giving birth.

To father.

A verb

that keeps its distance

or disappears.

To vamoose, vanish, vacate;

from the Latin for "cows"

who stray from the herd.

Wandering-off, in search

of greener pastures.

I'm a purist about language, and tend to scoff at innovation. Which is ridiculous, of course, since that is precisely the strength and beauty of the English language: its vitality and creativity; its ravenous ability to steal words from foreign tongues (both "veranda" and "bungalow" from Hindi, for example). Which is a big reason English has become the universal language. And which is so unlike French, with its snobbishly prescriptive Academie Francaise; with its jealous guarding of purity, uncolonized and uncontaminated by English, the insidious natural enemy of French.

One way English is so creative is this relentless tendency to turn nouns into verbs. For me, this first became most evident with the widespread use of "impact" as a verb: a practice I always regarded as lazy and imprecise, until I was told that "toast", like hundreds of other verbs, also started life as a mere noun. And also became evident when it was pointed out to me that "parent" was rarely a verb when my generation was young. Which brings me to "father" and "mother": how, as verbs, they so tellingly illuminate what we think of the traditional role of men.

The poem started out as light and punny, and then somehow took a serious turn into deadbeat dads: the idea that to father, at its most reductionist, is to be a donor of sperm; while to mother implies so much more. I'm not at all sure this abrupt change in tone works. On the other hand, it offers a certain misdirection, which might be even more impactful. (...A word I do truly hate, and vow will only ever use ironically! Much better: " ...which might have even more impact".)

"Vacca", by the way, is the root of "vaccinate": a natural, since Jenner's original smallpox vaccine was based on cowpox. My understanding is that the Latin root "vacare" -- which is the basis of "vacation" and "vacancy" and "vacate", and meant emptying-out, being free -- has a similar derivation: that is, it reflects the nomadic nature of herd animals in the wild, which became the seasonal migration between highland and lowland pastures of domesticated cows. ...So if it turns out that vacate isn't from the Latin for cows -- that it isn't also based on vacca, which I've always assumed -- then I guess the poem also doesn't work!

This poem started off as something completely different, and all that remains of this is the word plating. I saw a picture of a renowned chef bending over a plate in deep concentration, carefully arranging the food. This idea of presentation is very big in the culinary arts: after all, we eat as much with our eyes as our mouths. A few days prior to that, I'd heard a bit of a radio interview with an artist who makes disposable sculpture: out of ice, out of things that quickly decompose. Both these impressions came together in the idea of the purity of the artistic impulse: that the artist's creativity is expressed not in the final artifact, but in the actual doing; that it doesn't matter what happens to the work once it's put out into the world. A poem, of course, has the advantage that it can be memorized: the impoverished poet may have nothing material to sell; but there is also nothing material to be eaten, melt, or decay. ...Which, it turns out, has nothing to do with this poem; but maybe will with another, some day.