The language you're born with

Old age is an accumulation of unsolved problems I told SK, a woman poet I admire the other night at dinner.

She asked me if the line was mine. I said it might be but I that I thought it originally from Mary Baker Eddy and that maybe I'd added the word 'old' all on my own.

I was born and raised a Christian Scientist and much of Mrs. Eddy's language has become part of my brain. I can quote whole passages from Mrs. Eddy, either from Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures or Prose Works. For instance, There is no life, truth, intelligence or substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite Manifestation, for God is All-in-All, are the first two sentences of 'The Scientific Statement of Being', Mrs. Eddy's manifesto for the religion, as published in Science & Health.

By the time I started reading poetry--in my early 20's--I was already drifting away from Christian Science. A personal epiphany that Mrs. Eddy's spiritual construct denied experience, coupled with the observation by Robert Bly that as interesting and poetic as Mrs. Eddy might be it was impossible for a poet not to believe in matter, furthered the rift.

I can understand how writers might get confused about what's their's and what's not. I'm reading My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates, a pretty deft send-up of the celebrity/tabloid culture and the de-construction of childhood. Oates quotes Mary Baker Eddy wrongly, attributing "there's a sucker born every minute' and "you can't go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" to her when in fact they're attributible to others. Were these deliberate mis-attributions, I wondered as I read the book, looking at Oates' author photo on the dust jacket, trying to see deep into her mind. She's kind of an inscrutable writer though, an industry unto herself, the kind of writer one can imagine working on three books at one time, each written in a different style than the other.

I watched my granddaughter's play with their dolls last week in Portland. Each had their own way, their own manner of approach and expression. Both of them talked to their dolls; one of them has enough of her own language now that the doll is able to talk back to her.