Don’t Break My Name

Ben Lerner discovers the power of linguistic repetition in childhood games: “every kids know the phenomenon that psychologists call ‘semantic saturation,’ wherein a word is repeated until it feels emptied of sense and become mere sound – ‘to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind,’ as Poe describes it in his story ‘Berenice.’ Your parents enforce a bedtime and, confined to your bed, you yell, ‘Bedtime’ over and over again until whatever meaning seemed to dwell therein is banished along with all symbolic order, and you’re a little feral animal underneath the glowing plastic stars. Linguistic repetition, you learn from an early age, can give form or take it away, because it forces a confrontation with the malleability of language and the world we build with it, build upon it. Most horrifying was to do this or have it done to your name, worst of all by some phalanx of chanting kids on the playground—to be reminded how easily you could be expelled from the human community, little innominate snot-nosed feral animal too upset even to tattle. And what would you say? ‘They broke my name.’”

It’s the secret of childhood torture—and of apophaticism, as the mystic encounters a reality beyond language by stripping his prayers of all terrestrial significance.

(Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, 80-1.)