My good friend Bill’s mother was first generation Italian. She grew up grazing the family’s sheep in the mountains of Northern Italy. She had an idiom regarding the correct way to make Risotto. “The rice must first die in oil, to be borne again in water”. And that is one of the secrets to good Risotto.
Rebecca Solnit
22 December 2021
My mother had a bunch of old axioms on hand, and among those I remember: Strike while the iron is hot (which I thought was about clothes irons, not blacksmithing, until I met a blacksmith). A stitch in time saves nine. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb (a nice thieving expression saying go big). You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Old sayings about making by hand and about the rural world.
Long ago, in A Book of Migrations, I wrote: The majority of figures of speech that make the abstract concrete and imaginable are drawn from animals, human bodies, and spaces, from the wolf at the door to the arms of chairs and shoulders of roads to the excavation of buried memories. It’s the animal world that makes being human – catty, dogged, sheepish – imaginable, and the spatial realm that makes action and achievement – career plateaus, rough spots, marshy areas – describable.
…most of the discussion about nature and the environment emphasizes a purely physical or spiritual need for it, not its imaginative role. Not long ago, I noticed an art magazine misspelling the bridle reins of the phrase on a tight rein as reign, because although they understood royalty, they had no clue about horses and their harnesses – so even the world of domestic animals was lost to them as a way of describing the human and the phrase was becoming meaningless on its way to becoming extinct. (More recently, I found myself going to ride a horse with a few carrots and a stick as aids, and the phrase became resonantly literal again.) I wonder if generations of being without contact with such spaces and beings will eventually strip down English into a kind of newspeak. After all, how many people now know how a mule kicks, or have seen bees make beelines? And when speech goes blank, imagination will have preceded it.
Language is humankind’s principal creation, a pale shadow of Creation, and one that needs to come back again and again to the nonhuman world to renew itself, to draw strength and color. It requires contact with the natural worlds of the landscape, the body and the animal kingdom to connect its creations to Creation, and makes contact by metaphor.
Image: her great-granddaughter and a horse contemplating each other.