“At dinner we light the candles and sit in the dining room, often quietly, kything, rather than talking.” (Madeleine L’Engle Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, p. 157)
“We have not talked a great deal about it verbally, Hugh and I. But we have talked enough. Better, we have kythed, that silent communion which deepens between two people as they live together for many years. When our fingers are touching, we are communing as well as communicating.” (Ibid, p. 162)
I’ve been reading this memoir about a marriage – a subject that deeply interests me, at least in part because I am anything but expert at it. I pour myself into the mystery and craft of marriage, devotedly but all too often fecklessly. And so I search about for wisdom in, and example of, the art of it; wanting and needing to grow in the practice of it.
It was, then, in the course of her telling that twice L’Engle used the word to describe the comfortable communication into which she and her beloved had settled over time: “kything.” The first time I thought it a typographical error and skipped past it. The second occurrence caused me to reach for a dictionary. It is an old verb of Scottish derivation that means, “to make known by action; show; demonstrate; prove."
And so it is that the couple talk with their touch; their communion a deep and voluble communication.
I love the tender warmth of the idea; the quiet, companionable intimacy. But it is a difficult proposition for a guy like me who hungrily nurtures an infatuation with words. Words are the stuff of poetry – the nuts and bolts and sheetrock and paint of my days. Words are powerful enough to create new worlds if the book of Genesis is to be believed, and capacious enough to hold the very manifestation of God according to the Gospel of John. Words, I want to insist, matter.
But it was, of course, the word itself that drew me to it and invited me to linger with it. So there is that. There is this word: Kything. It feels good on my tongue and lands well in my ears. It is a lovely, provocative word. But I cannot dodge the definitional reality that even in the speaking and the hearing it is already nudging me beyond the confinement of the vocalization. Eliza Doolittle’s cockneyed protestation in My Fair Lady musically haunts my practice:
Words!
Words! Words! I'm so sick of words!
Don't talk of stars
Burning above;
If you're in love,
Show me!
Tell me no dreams
Filled with desire.
If you're on fire,
Show me!
Sing me no song!
Read me no rhyme!
Don't waste my time,
Show me!
And the admonition dubiously attributed to Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”
Perhaps, in the spirit of kything and in the present context, we might render it, “Love each other at all times. If necessary, use words.”
It is the essence, now that I recall it, of the winsome country song by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, “You say it best when you say nothing at all.”
It’s not, I suspect, that I shouldn’t speak. A muted love, after all, would starve me and, I suspect, malnourish my beloved as well. But I am at once chastened and inspired by the symphonic capacities of the vocabulary of tenderness and touch; pronouncing by proving. Not so much talking without words, but beyond them.
Perhaps that is the Valentines gift to bring: flowers, yes, and chocolate, of course; but then “I love you,” spoken with lips, and hands, and, grounding and amplifying it all, a kything kind of life.
This day, and all the days beyond it.
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