I Am Always Drunk on Words

A linguistic stim in eight paragraphs and seven footnotes

In the golden age mystery book Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey takes Harriet Vane for a drive. Too fast, too fast, the driving, the relentless marriage proposals. (He asks her every day on April Fools. She says no.) Today, he is elated; she has agreed to let him take her through the countryside outside Oxford, England, where she is staying because she is at work solving a mystery of dense academic interest (don’t forget this is a detective novel) and where he is staying because he is like a moth¹ to a flame.

Vane’s suitor has slowed down, finally, after six years of smotherment, and is now beginning to realize what high school lovers and also salesmen never do: Smothering somebody never made anybody want you. But gosh, he’s as high as a kite, and who wouldn’t be? Harriet’s in the car, and she’s the cat’s meow, and—wait. This isn’t the scene I meant to be talking about. You’ll have to trust me; in some similar moment of exuberant happiness, Harriet asks about a particularly spectacular string of Peter’s syntax and he answers, “I am always drunk on words.”

Still, there is an undeniable aspect of inebriation to what Peter actually says on the car drive: “There comes a moment when one must cease voyaging through strange seas of thought alone. Will you speak first, or shall I?” A penny for your thoughts. In the kitchen of my parents’ house some years ago, my mother asks what is on my wool-gathering mind as I stare at the window but not at it, or out it, either, if you know what I mean. Seeing nothing and everything. (What sweet modulations people my—No. That’s for later.) She says: “You're thinking too hard!” I say: “That’s not possible.”

This may be the core difference between the way my neurons fire and the mad capacity others seem to have for linear processing. I wonder if Lord Peter has similar thoughts about himself. He deploys such extraordinary habits of speech that he cannot possibly never have met with that familiar look of confusion on another person’s face. (I am not armchair diagnosing him. I’m just sayin’.²) You know the look. [See “brow furrowing” in Paragraph Six.]

You might be willing to believe that Lord Peter also declaimed, “Oh heart lost / within me, in my own investiture, / what sweet modulations people you!”…but you would be wrong. It was Pablo Neruda! And not Neruda at the beginning of his life (love poems) or the middle (political activism) or later on (Communism), but at the very tip-most end as to have been published posthumously,³ as to have returned to universals, to delight and completion and the everyday world right in front of him.⁴

On my wedding day, I held a small bouquet of flowers from a garden belonging to a very dear friend: orange daylilies, lantana, which attracts butterflies, and the one named after preachers, with fronds. The holder was plastic and green, with a longish downward handle that widened out to a cone at the top, from whence the foliage unfolded. I felt in a separate space that day. I was together with my love (“I and you in this solitary zone”⁵), and I was also in my own mind, sensing and watching everything I was doing (“Oh heart lost within me!”). Feeling my forefingers curved around the front of the green plastic cone beneath the woodland blooms and my thumbs wrapped beneath, I said aloud: “It feels like I’m holding a water gun.” One of my bridesmaids furrowed her brow⁶ and said, “You’re feeling a little loopy.”

That wasn’t quite it. Neruda’s heart isn’t lost as in “unable to find its way,” but more like “clothed in awe”—all those modulations! Sweet ones! Peopling his life and mind! Is there any other option but to be drunk on words?

Lord Peter Wimsey takes Harriet Vane for a drive. Oh heart lost within me, oh “voyaging through strange seas of thought alone” and bursting-forth water gun of blooms, oh lover who agrees to a ride! Please always, always say the things that are true and beautiful.⁷ Oh reading sprees and spontaneous verbalizings forth, oh stimming on the page and in the electric neural pathways that link to the heart. Oh sweet, sweet modulations, decadent as you can possibly be. I’m just sayin’—I am always drunk on words.

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1. In the opening chapter of Gaudy Night, after posting an RSVP to her college’s class reunion (a.k.a. “gaudy”), Harriet Vane watches a tortoiseshell butterfly get caught in a web at the window. For further research: had Dorothy Sayers (b.1893) ever read Virginia Woolf’s (b.1882) essay “The Death of the Moth”? Note: after a completely unnecessary and extremely satisfying link through Woolf-related topics, the answer is no. The essay ran posthumously. It occurs to me that I already knew this; later I might share my opinion about drafts that pretty obviously aren’t finished but are published after an author’s ability to consent as though they are words the author would have wanted to put forth into the world but for some reason didn’t.

2. When I was in my mid-twenties and in grad school and hadn’t yet met the roommate who introduced me to Dorothy Sayers mysteries and also became my best friend, I had beer every Friday evening with a crowd of friends and one of the men would say - on purpose - “Don’t worry your pretty little head” and we women would groan which was the whole point and on other occasions any one of us would finalize any given debate (we were all graduate students) with the phrase: “I’m just sayin’.” (Italics included) I continue to consider it a phrase that says everything it needs to.

3. See footnote #1, except I don’t know enough to know if I’d have an opinion about the poems included in Neruda’s after-death Jardin el invierno. Note to self: leave open browser tabs on Woolf and Neruda for later investigation into potential connections and meaning for which you won’t have time. Beware. You’re getting away from the point at hand. Do not search the etymology for “at hand”!

4. “Garden is in the title of the posthumous collection whence these lines of Neruda’s derive. The poem is called “The Egoist,” “El egoista” in the original.

5. also from “El egoista”

6. Eyebrows Drawn Together = not a compliment

7. From the found poem “Notes from the Spectrum” by Tania Runyan, which is based on Daniel Bowman, Jr.’s “Notes from the Spectrum” essay series at Ruminate Magazine, which is the most accurate autism poem I’ve read yet, which means, yes, there is a wealth of autism poems out there!