An email exchange with loyal OnWords listener Steven Johnson led to the following meditation on the word “turn.”
A turn in poetry marks a dramatic shift in emotional tone or intellectual consideration; witness the end of a sonnet: a longer landing at the new notion in the last six lines if Petrarchan, and a swift shutting in the last two lines if Elizabethan.
We once marked our emotional shifts with lists of turn-offs and turn-ons, before all such rapid-cycling was declared disease and drugged away.
A “turning” is what is pared away when a lathe works away at metal or wood, and in that way and others, a turning is also a leaving, a loss necessitated by the way the way wends: leaf fall at the turn of autumn.
Those leaves, in turn, turn, losing their robust, photosynthesizing green and revealing the rich reds and golds beneath: beauty in the letting go.
We get upset when others fail to signal a turn, the surprising movement reminding us that it's not just we who own a will.
The turn of the year is cause for celebration, but it's also a wake for the last year passed, as a boat's wake leaves water turned upon itself, the perturbation of the surface that buoys us up.
And though we celebrate turns, to turn on someone is a betrayal, as if all directions are better shared.
In the end, we hope, it will all turn out all right, recognizing even in the tritest of phrases the incessant necessity of change.
