Babies start to understand language at eight or nine months—maybe earlier, who knows?  One day, someone catches a babbled syllable, recognizes it as a word. The doors of the world open a little wider.

When we begin to acquire words, they are rare and magical to us. There can be understanding in a glance, meaning in a gesture, but words are, quite literally, a spell. 

“The poets made all the words,” writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay “The Poet,” “and therefore language is the archives of history…For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer.”

Our relationship with words, though lifelong, grows transparent, like a pane of glass—invisible until it gives back a flash of light or we catch a glimpse of our own face reflected there. As when, walking through an open doorway, you brush against a spiderweb: sometimes the word itself, and not the meaning of it, catches your attention. 

*

For twenty years, Lea Feinstein has been working with Tyvek, the sheets of polyethylene material, manufactured by DuPont, that are used to make FedEx envelopes and to wrap buildings under construction. Lighter and stronger than paper, Tyvek resists water: to hold paint, its surface must be prepared with a skim coat. 

Tyvek can be folded and crumpled, and Lea’s work often explores the behavior of this industrial material and its interaction with paint. In her large-scale paintings of succulent plants—some as tall as seven feet—the drips and runs of the acrylics evoke a blurred and living freshness. As the surface resists paint, the paintings resist the illusion of immediacy. Standing in front of them, you see the layers of argument between the surface and the brush.

Lea is interested in resistance, in difficulty. She is right-handed, but for twenty years, she has been painting with her left hand.

*

Now, though, she is using her right hand, the hand she has been writing with all her life. Her new text-based paintings do not begin with a blank canvas. Like all words, hers are layered onto what already exists. She is painting over the older paintings of succulents with words. 

In her studio, Lea thumbtacks the Tyvek sheets to the wall. When they are dry, she hangs them in overlapping stacks. 

The word page comes from the Latin word pagina, a column of text. According to my dictionary, pagina is also one leaf of a double door.

*

From German Ohrworm, an earworm is a song that gets stuck in your mind. Sometimes a line of poetry sticks like that: When I have fears that I may cease to be. Or He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone. 

On a chilly February morning, Lea is thinking about Ophelia’s song from Hamlet, and about her brother Tom, who died in 2020. It is his birthday. She hangs a small painting of a plant on the wall: gouache on paper, mounted on board, one of a set of four, all with light green backgrounds. “From last summer in Maine,” she says. She turns the board ninety degrees to the right, so that the plant seems to be growing sideways. She selects a vinyl emulsion paint in a color called terre verte claire—”light green earth,” mossy and subdued—and, over the painting, in large bold capitals, begins to transcribe the words of Ophelia’s song:

HEISDEADA

NDGONEL

ADYHEISD

EADANDG

She has to go over letters twice—up, down or down, up. “It’s sticky,” she says of the surface. “More like plowing a field than painting on Tyvek, which is like ice skating.” The letters crowd the paper. The lines begin neatly aligned to the left margin, but often run off the side of the paper, as though they are moving beyond its edge, leaving the room. When she gets to the lower right-hand corner, she turns the board ninety degrees, so that the letters are standing on their heads. She hangs another plant painting and continues:

ONEATHIS / HEADAGR / ASSGREE / NTURFA 

THISHEE / LSASTON / NEATHIS / HEADAGR 

ASSGRE / ENTURF / ATHISHE / ELSASTO

It is hard to read letters as shapes only. Words keep emerging: THIS and HEAD and ASS, as though a mischievous spirit were teasing us through this colorful, chaotic Ouija board. 

(Google Docs suggests that where I typed the middle part of “dead and gone”—EADANDG—I really meant to type READING.)

*

His beard was white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll…

The sun is higher now. The studio is brighter, warmer. Lea returns to the first painting—back to square one—still hanging upside down. She opens a jar of golden color: jaune de Naples, Naples yellow: HISBEARD / WASASWH / ITEASSNO /WAFLAXE / NWASHIS // POLLHEIS / GONEHEIS / GONEAND…

The earlier lines of the song begin to disappear under the newly painted lines, but I can still see their protruding limbs. I think about what I read once about the evolution of the alphabet: how the Egyptian hieroglyph of an ox head came to stand for the first sound of the word ox, became simplified into a Phoenician letter that looks like a sideways A. The Hebrew aleph, the Greek alpha, the Latin A. And now, here on the canvas, the A is sideways again, is green, is gold, is disappearing under a third layer of red ochre. The visible crossbars and curves and verticals of the previous layers are adding a visual static, so that a C can be misread as a G or an I behind the curve of an S can make it look like a D or the edge of the painting makes a D look like a T.  Amid the contesting letters of 

GODAMERCYONHISSOULGODAMERCY 

I see: GODAM BEYOND SOULS GOT AMERCY

When you concentrate on the word, you don’t see what reveals itself through the letters.

When you listen to people’s words, you don’t always hear what they are saying.

*

Lea turns the paintings again. Now she’s adding dark strokes that follow the shapes of parts of letters, sometimes the layer on top, sometimes the layer behind. Sometimes these strokes are the shapes of letters themselves—a V nestling inside an N. And what comes into my mind is about voices—the way they aren’t smooth, the rasps and cracks and ridges in them. The way they overlap. 

Lea is speaking to Tom through her painting. And Tom is speaking to her.

The studio is silent. And loud.

*

Many of Lea’s paintings are based on poems—her own and those of others. She began her first painting in this series with a Denise Levertov poem, “Living.” In the layers of the paintings, the words seem to travel through time, as words do. The source text influences the painting’s color, the size and style of the letters.

Lea shows me the painting, layered over one of her succulents on Tyvek, that she made of my poem “Loss”:

She calls the painting “Losss.” I can see how the letter S comes forward, how the hiss of nothing at the end is made visible in the letters. How HISSON, upside down and disappearing into the right edge, looks like the word LOSS. (Later, I will show this image to a friend whose son has died, and she will see nothing but HIS SON.) Or the whole line like NAH IS SO. How the whole poem—given a shape, a size, colors—looks, sounds, like a closing mouth. 

How small our language is. Just twenty-six letters. Just forty-four sounds. 

And also how vast.

LOSS

A thousand-year-old word is a loosening, too.
The human hand opens eventually,
lets go of what it held.
A thousand-year-old word escapes the mouth,
the l rolls off the tongue, the vowel splays wide,
aww, the teeth close on a hiss, on nothing.

“Loss” is from a chapbook I wrote of poems of thousand-year-old words—loss, spell, hand, home—words that have been in English since at least 1000 C.E. These words seem like objects to me, worn smooth from use. A thousand years of strangers using them, yet they are perfectly recognizable, like an ancient Egyptian pitcher or a medieval buckle.

Looking back through my drafts of this poem, I find a brief quotation from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Winter, translated by Ingvild Burkey: “While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost.” 

These paintings recall lost conversations: the ones we had, the ones we didn’t. The thoughts that filled our heads one day and not another. The way we treasure words and also carelessly spend them. How we remember, how we forget. On these pages, we start to see the way we live in language, and alongside it.