[OS] Talk and Talk and Talk
A screed and an ode
The sound of the sacred is not thrumming chords, groaning pipes, or belting choirs—it is silence. The songs are calls to worship, pleadings with the holy, or hopeful incantations. They are not the sacred itself. All the pomp of the grandest temple is worship: the actually sacred is silence. It is presence. It’s the pressure of all the world, all the people, and all the bottomless inwardness of yourself just being there. Not grasping at something else, but merely being what is.
Every word breaks something holy; it stains silence. It must, therefore, justify itself. It must be worth the breach. It never is.
Every word is a violence upon the world, forcing something real to twist into your pitiful vocabulary. The world contains beasts older than English, older even than when English was a true language instead of the limpid pidgin it has become after adopting ruler after ruler, each extracting some compromise from the tongue of the folk, each compromise losing some connection between the organic original immediate connection of [that] with “this.” The great oaks are cut to meager cylinders under the word ‘oak.’ ‘Butterflies’ are spread, scalped, and stuck to paper like thin caricatures of the actual floating, fluttering hypostasies of winding fancy.
Do you want to know why so many writers are tortured? It is not because of genius, or empathy, or because sorrow somehow constitutes fertile ground for the page. That may be true of this writer or that, but not necessary in the main. It is because they have chosen to attempt expression in this most unforgiving, flat, and unlyrical of media. Musicians go insane because they affront silence even more directly than writers. Painters because they have found that the world is not enough. Writers go insane because the words never get there. Each sentence destroys an image—devours it and spits it back covered in bile. Every blade of grass becomes nothing more than a sickly letter on a page, every actual thing worth existing a mere paragraph. A brilliant spring day is nothing more than flaccid lines and curves doing nothing more than pricking the multitude of multitudes.
‘Butterflies’ are spread, scalped, and stuck to paper like thin caricatures of the actual floating, fluttering hypostasies of winding fancy.
Look at this sentence. I hate it. I hate its confidence, its ego. How dare it even attempt to describe something so important.
Everything I write falls down under a breath of inspection. Every expression crumbles under a mere shift in moods. My arguments become limp excuses when the barest hint of the honest myriadic world shines through. There are too many fantastic possibilities in ourselves and the world for these grotesque simulacra to justify their intrusion. They aren’t the truth; they’re just something I’ve thrown upon a page like a baby giggling at its own shit.
Speech demands a monopoly—but a single voice more and it all becomes mere noise. Some strange reduction of the world hooks onto your life and demands a follower, demands precedence, demands to be heard. It’s all chatter thrown upon the rocks, spraying the abundant, solid earth with salt. Eroding it.
The Positivists believed that language could be complete. They believed that if they merely brought its essence to the fore, they could create something in communion with the world: logical, rational, holy. Only late in life did Ludwig Wittgenstein reveal the terribly mercenary nature of language, its inability to be anything more than a wrench in our mouths. Language gives us some advantage, some signal to someone else to get something done. Language is practical—thuddingly, nihilistically practical. Any attempt to make it something more is asking a river to run toward the heavens.
The truly disgusting thing about it all is that I know what it feels like to pin a word onto the page, bloody with struggle. It writhes, it escapes—if it is worth using, that is (only the tame, domesticated, utterly boring and anodyne of language comes willingly)—you grasp, you look behind doors and through mazes, like some dumb orphaned loinclothed minotaur. “Where are you? I need you” each word slurring out of a mouth half-formed. The word breathes, its heart warbling. Once you have the scent, the hunt is short. A short, thrilling moment later, its neck snaps to inattention. Your ugly, thick hands fumble with a limp body and a pin until there, finally, on the page, next to scores of others. And what's left? Just dumb, ugly you.
Even worse are those husks flayed from the rotten, overripe flesh of vocables stripped bare by the hooked tongue of every speaker too languid to hunt their own. These husks sit over the top of life, ready-made straitjackets to tie down any experience which threatens the unusual. The world’s wonders reduced to a dreg of what was once a mediocre thought. The complexities and idiosyncrasies of individuals are drained of their soul and spirit. These masks sit over something beautiful and rare and good, trading all of Creation for the faux-surety of a maxim so drained of its inventive spark that you can no longer trace it back to an author just as petty and unimaginative as you. Language is a translucent patina we have laid upon the world not despite but because it obscures.
Every word you say kills. It shuts out the stupefying miraculous world all so that you can speak just a twisting icon of it. Everything said is an untruth because it leaves out the uncountably many other untruths which together make up the truth, which only together are worth saying. So, you have two choices: say Everything, or say nothing.
I don’t really believe all that. Not all the time, at least. But it is, as it itself attests, a mood. Perhaps when I am ashamed of something I have said, or tired of others’ chatter, I feel a touch of this. Or when a bullet-pointed page taunts me into making my thoughts serviceable for others. Maybe in those bleak periods of inanity beyond the proper life expectancy of small talk, or perhaps after an errant word or phrase has led to me being misunderstood or guilty, I think something like the above. Sure, the above is an expression of a true sort of thing, I think. But so is the below.
A proper sentence can give you the faintest brush of a soul, an instant where your mind touches another’s and you remember what the old invention of ‘humanity’ meant and could still mean. There is a reason we talk and talk and talk: it is love. I want desperately to grab a hold of you, for you to grab a hold of me. And language is a way to do that across a street, across a continent, or across a century.
The strangest, faintest nonsense is a spirit just a bit too far to reach; it is an infant babbling so that one day it might sing. Silence is holy, but so too are our dances and songs—the pleading and the joy. The thrum of a crowd, together, chanting the words, maybe even believing in them. It takes two to sing a harmony.
These are words handed down carefully from mother to son, words whispered between fathers and daughters. Words that stretch back so far the eye can no longer catch that first spark, that luminous soul which yet still imparts its bounty to another generation with each reverberation. If you tire of it, let it rest; it will be there when you return to it. Prose, in its perpetual patience, will remember you so long as you remember it, so long as someone keeps it.
Words: the possibilities are beautiful and clever and absurd and endless. If they are hateful, it could only possibly be because we don't do them justice. When language sings, it sings. When it plays, the world tumbles along with it. Prose becomes music, painting, life itself. A phrase takes a sharp turn and breathes new life into the world, you find something you always had in your vision but which you never saw.
Immanuel Kant believed that without concepts—without words—all of experience would be a buzzing confusion. Words bring resolution to the world, they help form it and connect us to it. Words, concepts, ideas: they help you see. They bring the flower to the mind and the mind to the flower. They take the grass from a clamorous bed of blades to a rolling wave, fluttering to the rhythm of the wind.
I hope someday I can write a book. Oscar Wilde once said that he spent the morning taking out a comma and the afternoon putting it back in. I enjoy these blogposts, but invariably I slip into thoughtless slogans and hand-me-down phrases. I’d like to go back sometime and look at my previous posts. I’d like to count the times I chose a phrase merely because it was the one at hand which would dutifully bring the chain of language to my next idea. These prearranged bits of words, the echoes of all the books and articles and essays and poems and brushes with the language of another, are lovely too in their own homely, servicing way. Nevertheless, there is something grand about giving each blot upon the page its due. Maybe a steadier hand than mine could find such care within a month, but for me, I think the extravagance of a book is necessary. Words come in fits and spurts, holding forth from the ether; I may give direction, but I do not have command.
I can see the other side of the world through words. When I am down, words can comfort me. When I am bored, they bring something new, or, indeed, something very, very old. Words break bread between strangers and commune the living with the dead. They bring glad tidings and warm novelties and grand traditions; they turn life’s mill to a new day. And the best part, of course, is that they are so close: worlds live and die on the tip of a pen. Your next devotion is just a few sweeping marks away.