the elephant in the living room eats its words

First thoughts: I saw parts of two things on telly this evening, one being the film Spellbound, about the contestants in a National Spelling Bee in the USA, and the other being a documentary about the famous photograph of the man falling out of the World Trade Center on September 11. (Should I say September 11, 2001?) The programme was based on an article from Esquire by Tom Junod, who tried to identify the man in the photograph, with an idea that if he could tell the man's story he might somehow make something okay.

All week I've been ignoring the anniversary of that day. I find that people have been - even though the legacies of it are what forms the very shape of our world. We just want to stay in the present: we certainly don't want to go back there. But it is sitting in the living room. This programme I saw pretty much showed that, even though it focused on people who were in the Trade Center, and who are now dead, and thus did not explore the attendant paradigm shift.

One thing you almost sort of forget, just looking at the pictures which are getting more and more familiar, is how big the buildings were. They were HUGE. I remember my first reaction when I heard the first tower had collapsed was disbelief, because it was so big and heavy and solid. (Oh, and full of people, and let's not go there.)

So, this new paradigm has brought with it new language - new meanings of words, and also new words themselves. Bush and his henchmen are doing to the English language what the Nazis did to German. It took two generations of poets half a century to reclaim that language, and people my age are still hard at it. Now, because Bush isn't oppressing poets (as such) they seem to think he's leaving them alone. But what he is doing is making the public arena in the US a place of such crude expression that the nation is forgetting how to perceive nuance, and without nuance poetry is useless. It's like a car on cinderblocks outside a house where no one has a driving licence.

This quality is the reason I had to stop watching Spellbound: 'heartwarming' as it may well be, the film depressed me. All those little egghead kids, studying obsessively for up to ten hours a day even in the summer holidays - sometimes with tutors cramming them every weekend, hired by their get-ahead parents - and not one of them expresses any interest whatever in what those words can do.

Above, I used a name we never use any more; when discussing 'the events of September 11' we say "the Twin Towers." And in the programme I watched there was much debate over the term 'jumpers,' which the newspapers were using to denote the people who fell out of the burning towers on that day. The New York City coroners office outraged Tom Junot by saying no one "jumped" out of the Trade Center; they "fell," they "were blown out." Junot was determined to put the record straight, to salvage the humanity of the poor souls (sods; blokes; chicks; sweethearts - they were very specific people you might see in the street any day & indeed whom many had seen that very morning, clutching their Starbucks cups or whatever) who may have jumped out. He wanted the nation to recognise them, not erase their memory by silencing the word.

Of course, this way of using language protects from other layers of meaning. The family of Norberto Hernandez, who was first identified as possibly the man in the picture, felt it couldn't him, because of their Catholic faith. To say he was that man was to say he was burning in Hell. It meant he had broken a pact of love.

The coroners were playing a slightly different card. By ruling accidental death on those people they allowed relatives the privacy of their own belief and interpretation of whatever evidence there was - and they kept insurance policies intact (though some night say an open verdict would have accompliushed the same thing).

The sister of Jonathan Briley, the most likely candidate for 'Falling Man', says that as she sees it the significance of the picture is not that he can be identified; it's that he can't. She says he stands for something more than one man. And that also, though she didn't say this, means she gets to 'keep' her brother. She doesn't have to turn him into a universal symbol.

So sometimes choosing not to use the words (especially if they're abstract nouns) is the best way to keep their meanings safe.

Those spelling-obsessed kids are right: we do need to know as many words as possible. But rather than learning their dead characteristics by rote, they need to start using them, keeping the shades of meaning and the historical nuances alive, setting the words loose among their families and friends.

We're all, well at least some of us are, and I guess part of me is, still stuck in that wordless day five years ago. We need to remember that, what it as like to have no words. It wasn't nice. And I'm not sure America's got them back yet.

Rambling. And I may be the only person who could ever see a connection between this little spelling bee movie and 9/11. But there it is. The most depressing thing, no, one of the most depressing things - among the many depressing things in that film - was the mother who was touted as loving words, and what they could do, and playing with them - and her idea of what words can do' turned out to be a fridge magnet that said "Bee happy!" with a picture of a bumblebee on it.

Great news for the future poetry/fascism ratio.