twenty eleven
Tonight clouds crowd together as if huddling to warm themselves on the light from the moon. I drive home late after I close up the coffee shop, sit on boulders at an Evanston beach with Nathan, a lanky, quiet, alley cat of a friend, all angles and bone. As I talk more his silence responds. A sure quiet. One that could calm tempers, plant fields, or build things. Like the sailboat with the lantern idling at the horizon, it’s sail blushing with the light that beckons. I am sure, when I look out, that someone is in love on that boat. Either with themselves, or the person they’re with, or the night that is curling like ivy around the light.
Noam Chomsky argues that language is the only way to gauge experience; that we are not alive, we have no experience, if we do not have language. It makes sense, especially today when everyone is plugged in to this universal dialogue. Everywhere wires and words. But this is an aesthetic, something to look at and perceive and be satisfied with, but dig deeper than an inch and there is an emptiness so vast and gaping, it terrifies us, so we fill it with cell phones, computers, electronics that allow us to not study faces or feel flesh, but separate our minds from our bodies and pretend we are close to people we are physically distant from. No one looks you in the eye anymore, unless they want to buy something, unless they’ve got something to sell.
In truth, we do not have words in our language for the kind of thing that happens to us. How do you say “that person that I touched last year is dead”? How do you describe the feeling you had when the woman you do not know put her hand on your arm- a heat you almost cried to need. How do we explain the fear we have, or the love we had that left, or that the other day being alone felt like erasing yourself, as if it would only take a wrong thought and you’d become part of this nothingness. How do you say I loved him and now I can’t, or I needed to protect myself and didn’t. How do we say it when it is so much a part of everything that it is not one thing, it is not how we feel or who we are, this feeling, this experience we have is a small bud in an overwhelming forest.
And then how can we explain the forest for the bud. It is so much easier for someone listening to say “ah, buds will be buds” or “that is hard that you feel that way” or “I am so sorry”. We have no language to say to this response “no, no, this is who I am, this is what this means, this is the ache that opens inside me and it is right to be there, and I need you to please understand, by please putting your hand out, feeling this weight, hold this”. There is no way to say what we mean.
So Noam Chomsky’s theory makes us want what we cannot explain or define, and in not being able to do either we isolate ourselves within this theory. We struggle with authentic experience, we put on our wires and pretend a greater thing is listening to the short stories of our lives. God, or “they”, or others. This thing with big ears that makes all of us important. With a silence not unlike Nathan’s.
We grow invisible ears that listen for moments. True moments have tiny mouths and are incredibly shy things that shouldn’t be noticed, but noted later. If you look too hard or try to create them, they run from you and hide. Later when we are alone we submit words to autopsy and find them strangely empty-- cadavers without hearts, but true moments resist the morgue. Some come back to you years later, not having grown older but turned strangely younger in your mind; they age backward and are still just as flighty when you try to pin them down.
As I drive home eating a ham and cheese croissant and driving stick shift, I listen. I hear the growing dark spilling into the streets, the leaves that line gutters like open hands, the pavement cool and dark and indifferent. A cab driver pulls up next to me at the stoplight before Lakeshore Drive. We exchange looks. He rolls down his window, and I point and say “full moon”. The moon, so filled with people’s words, comparisons, metaphors, and so empty for all of it. “It is lovely,” he says. “Like you”. He is from Bulgaria, and will go back there soon. It is lonely so far from anything you know, the moments abroad are unfamiliar and brash. There is no language to make it right. These words do not make us closer. I want to say so much more than “full moon”, I want to explain this ache away, I want to curl into myself until I am full as the moon tucked and knotted into my own muscle and skin, round as an egg, I want to hold and be held; I do not want to be touched at all. Every contradiction is translated, every longing bent into two words: full moon. He does not mean to tell me I am lovely, he means to tell me he is lonely, he means to tell me that he misses his home, or that he does not know how to stay here, or perhaps he means none of these things. It is difficult to know. We do not have the words.
The moment shifts and stretches, leaves as quickly as it approached. I am alone again in a dark room writing. I am trying to write with a quiet. I am trying to give words to the fact that we do not have any. If I sneak up on this idea and pounce on it, I can put it in a jar and know it, but it moves too fast and I am left hungry for something I cannot name.
Noam Chomsky argues that language is the only way to gauge experience; that we are not alive, we have no experience, if we do not have language. It makes sense, especially today when everyone is plugged in to this universal dialogue. Everywhere wires and words. But this is an aesthetic, something to look at and perceive and be satisfied with, but dig deeper than an inch and there is an emptiness so vast and gaping, it terrifies us, so we fill it with cell phones, computers, electronics that allow us to not study faces or feel flesh, but separate our minds from our bodies and pretend we are close to people we are physically distant from. No one looks you in the eye anymore, unless they want to buy something, unless they’ve got something to sell.
In truth, we do not have words in our language for the kind of thing that happens to us. How do you say “that person that I touched last year is dead”? How do you describe the feeling you had when the woman you do not know put her hand on your arm- a heat you almost cried to need. How do we explain the fear we have, or the love we had that left, or that the other day being alone felt like erasing yourself, as if it would only take a wrong thought and you’d become part of this nothingness. How do you say I loved him and now I can’t, or I needed to protect myself and didn’t. How do we say it when it is so much a part of everything that it is not one thing, it is not how we feel or who we are, this feeling, this experience we have is a small bud in an overwhelming forest.
And then how can we explain the forest for the bud. It is so much easier for someone listening to say “ah, buds will be buds” or “that is hard that you feel that way” or “I am so sorry”. We have no language to say to this response “no, no, this is who I am, this is what this means, this is the ache that opens inside me and it is right to be there, and I need you to please understand, by please putting your hand out, feeling this weight, hold this”. There is no way to say what we mean.
So Noam Chomsky’s theory makes us want what we cannot explain or define, and in not being able to do either we isolate ourselves within this theory. We struggle with authentic experience, we put on our wires and pretend a greater thing is listening to the short stories of our lives. God, or “they”, or others. This thing with big ears that makes all of us important. With a silence not unlike Nathan’s.
We grow invisible ears that listen for moments. True moments have tiny mouths and are incredibly shy things that shouldn’t be noticed, but noted later. If you look too hard or try to create them, they run from you and hide. Later when we are alone we submit words to autopsy and find them strangely empty-- cadavers without hearts, but true moments resist the morgue. Some come back to you years later, not having grown older but turned strangely younger in your mind; they age backward and are still just as flighty when you try to pin them down.
As I drive home eating a ham and cheese croissant and driving stick shift, I listen. I hear the growing dark spilling into the streets, the leaves that line gutters like open hands, the pavement cool and dark and indifferent. A cab driver pulls up next to me at the stoplight before Lakeshore Drive. We exchange looks. He rolls down his window, and I point and say “full moon”. The moon, so filled with people’s words, comparisons, metaphors, and so empty for all of it. “It is lovely,” he says. “Like you”. He is from Bulgaria, and will go back there soon. It is lonely so far from anything you know, the moments abroad are unfamiliar and brash. There is no language to make it right. These words do not make us closer. I want to say so much more than “full moon”, I want to explain this ache away, I want to curl into myself until I am full as the moon tucked and knotted into my own muscle and skin, round as an egg, I want to hold and be held; I do not want to be touched at all. Every contradiction is translated, every longing bent into two words: full moon. He does not mean to tell me I am lovely, he means to tell me he is lonely, he means to tell me that he misses his home, or that he does not know how to stay here, or perhaps he means none of these things. It is difficult to know. We do not have the words.
The moment shifts and stretches, leaves as quickly as it approached. I am alone again in a dark room writing. I am trying to write with a quiet. I am trying to give words to the fact that we do not have any. If I sneak up on this idea and pounce on it, I can put it in a jar and know it, but it moves too fast and I am left hungry for something I cannot name.