Words fail. What is lost in translation:
We are, you and I, propelled to know and yet we are forever dwarfed by the immensity of that which surrounds us. Though sometimes awed by it, aren’t we also uncomfortable with our smallness? Isn’t that why we tend to focus instead, in our fuzzy way, on how well we are able to describe? We illustrate in order to inspect, to clarify, to master. It may be that human knowledge is fueled by our curiosity and wonder, but perhaps it is the terror of being unseen, unknown, or left behind that causes us to paper over everything with descriptors, clichés, tropes, and classifications.
In psychology as well as literature, in the aftermath of devastation and grief, in the stories we tell ourselves and each other--we utilize narrative to make meaning out of experience. Though the benefits of this are clear, the intolerance of non-narrative on a larger scale can lead to an interpretation of some untranslatable moments and their encompassing silence that takes on a troubling texture. What of the experiences that we circle around, flailing in our attempts to contain? What of the mysterious, the resistant, the lost?
Words transcend. Words fail. Our parents do not name us into being, they name us into a shared storyline. Everything is mediated by language. Despite this, there is an exquisiteness to finding your story in the words of another, which is why we are here, isn’t it? I look for you and you look for yourself in these black lines--so broken, so delicately arranged.
Language is more than simple communication. The words we use are, in fact, symbols that become vessels between us. We map the world through the words we choose. We are imprecise, but verbose. We aim widely and hope for the truest truth to emerge.
The writer, in particular, relies on language as connective tissue. If I verbalize myself, I am made more real. Somehow, the gauze is lifted; the problems of physicality and its inevitable borders are solved, the messy ambiguities are sharpened just a little. I make myself familiar. The trouble occurs when narrative becomes blubber--insulating, layered, removed.
Alternatively, the sounds of our bodies are universal, rhythmic, animal. We are located in the rumblings and squeaks. It is the immediacy of the body’s call that takes us beyond the alien echoes of the external world and leads us back to the unmapable reality of our most unmasked selves.
In moments without language, there is faith in something larger. In a determined sort of silence, it seems inevitable that the individual stories we subscribe to be washed away by the boom of blood throbbing in our ears, epic as any part of the grand chorus occurring around us.
Babel is reversed when one sits, quiet as an animal, among other animals. In the Quaker tradition, meetings for worship involve silent meditation. Unsurprisingly, the Quakers are also committed to equity--social structures fall away and it is impossible to justify hate or oppression when navigating the defenseless contours of your own expectant heart.
It seems inevitable that silence can equal tolerance and humanity, so why should it equal a murky, bubbling swamp of ignorance, hatred, and fear? Silence as what we should say but don’t; silence as the stories that never get told; silence as the ways we are made less than human. How can something be so divine and debasing, simultaneously?
How else can I say it, writer or not? Perhaps language is to blame.
It is language that gives us the capacity to tell our stories, which allows us to claim them. However, isn’t it the specificity of our stories that make us separate? This parallel truth exists in all of us. I tell myself who I am and, therefore, I am. I tell you who I am and, therefore, you know me. But you will never sit with me in a gravel parking lot outside of Pittsburgh and watch planes land, as I did with my best friend many times in high school. We smoked cigarettes and barely spoke. Did he know me then better than you do now? It is impossible to tell. Though we passed much of those years staring out windows and sharing space in moving cars, my favorite memories of our friendship are the ones where we spoke to each other about that which mattered most to us. Over the harmony of all that silence, our words carried such gorgeous meaning.
So, this is what I try to tell you, now: the reality of the details, so you can imagine with me. You, too, can understand the way a warm Pittsburgh summer evening could be perfectly pitched to the story of a couple of high school misfits in a beat up old Toyota with a portable CD player playing through the tape deck. I want you to see the way the outline of the chain link fence through the windshield looked menacing after dusk, how we never knew if the people pulling up beside us were there to make out or drink beer or hassle us, how maybe it was all of this not-knowing that prompted us to notice the way the quiet we welcomed so completely could sometimes give you the creeps. I want you to see us out there in our t-shirts, windows down, a light breeze moving the hairs on our heads. I want you to believe me even though I am making this up, even though I don’t remember, really, more than a passing detail of those nights many years ago; I want you to remember what you don’t remember, too, I want you to understand me and I wish I had something more to give you, something tactile and exact but I only have this paperboat and this water to float it on and this fire to set to it so of course
I do.
