The Grammar of Imagination: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

After reading the chapter titled Learning the Grammar of Animacy in Braiding Sweetgrass, the memoir by Robin Wall Kimmerer, I am full of questions. She taught me that English is a noun-based language “somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things.” Her native language, Potawatomi, is verb-based. 70% of the words are verbs, whereas in English only 30% are verbs.

Some of my questions: Do I think largely in objects/things rather than in actions? Could this be why getting beginning fiction writers to think in scenes is so difficult? Is my imagination driven by objects/things or actions?

I have no idea.

To explore this, I got out some poem drafts (that seemed an easier exercise than prose). I tried to change half the words to verbs. Difficult. This did change my thinking, helping with concision. But my imagination stuttered over the conversion because the process required not simply changing words but images and action.

Action requires imagining a “do-er” of the action, as my English teacher used to say. Verbs require some subject to be doing the action. In Potawatomi, the trees, sky, water are not objects, they are subjects. As Kimmerer writes:

"A bay is a noun only if the water is dead. When Bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores, and contained by the world. But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores….Because it could do otherwise – become a stream or an ocean, or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is a life. Water, land, and even a day, the language in mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that passes through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.… This is the grammar of animacy.” (page 55)

If you want to shake up your imagination, give this exercise a try.