Possessing the Language

I am admittedly critical of words like "beautiful" and "aesthetics." I have been thinking a lot lately about "beautiful language" in a story or a poem. What does it mean to "possess the language" ? Of course, one needs to have a complicated mastery of the language one is writing in and should be familiar with its nuances. But what does it mean to "have" the language but not much of anything else? This is making me think because it has come up with discussions with friends and within the works of some of the writers I am reading. Especially the poets. Yes, it's true that the language in poetry can dazzle a reader, throw him/her into a maze of words, and undeniably, that's precisely THE power of poetic language. But I am also thinking of what does it mean to be enmeshed within language without experience?

And I have been thinking, whenever I have tried to learn a new language, the hardest part had been to use that language in describing an experience which I haven't really tried to narrate in that language before. So, literally, it's the attempt of the learner/speaker to narrate a specific kind of experience that expands his/her command over the language. What if the process is true for language itself? In other words, a language itself goes through certain kinds of expansion when one tries to write/narrate/describe in it an experience or a body of experiences that have not been described/written about in that language so far. In the same way, a poetic/artistic form needs to expand when an artist weaves in new experiences, new subjectivities within its format. This is what I would call putting pressure on the language itself, and would also claim, that no good art survives or can appeal to anyone without engaging in this act of pressurizing the existing language or form. Of course, this means that the writer/artist needs to know the history of the language and the form, what they have traditionally and historically been capable of accommodating, and what they have left out. In other ways, every serious writer/artist needs to engage with the politics of the language and forms in his/her own way.

So, to me, what matters mostly is not whether a particular writer "possesses" the language or not. But rather whether the said writer's works are putting pressure on the language and how. The thing is, I happen to know quite a few poets, who it seems, often hide behind the so-called beautiful language, playing with words, with the resonances. And it's often tricky for me as a reader, because as someone who does love language, the web of words does invite me in. But I can never really take up residence within such a web of beautiful language for too long, because I do think, at the end of the day, it's not a poet's capacity to play with language alone that creates that kind of pressure on language. But it's more about her historical imagination. Her sociological eye. The capacity to see how metaphor itself is political. The understanding that each and every word brings in a specific history and politics to the poem. For me, the so-called beautiful language can never really come to replace the poverty of sociological imagination and sense of history. And in the same way, I think, a lot of the beginning fiction-writers hide behind supernatural or non-linearity, so that they won't really have to explore further the contradictions of the material they are writing about, beautiful language works as an escape route for poets.