Everyone must wonder sometime...

September 15, 2009

I wanted to write today, but I feel like I have nothing to say, really. It's funny that it's when you have the energy to express everything that's been weighing on you like a fine-tuned migraine that you don't have anything to say. Those terribly tiring, headache-inducing themes that seemed to have required compositional processing have faded, and have been replaced with whatever noun's meaning is correlated with the sincere answer of "Fine!" when someone asks how you are doing.

Only a writer would complain about life feeling positive: it feels more exhausting to think of something to write about than to find a way to properly articulate that which lays so heavy on you. Maybe that's why so many artists seem to sustain self-imposed neuroticism in order to create. Those aren't the smart ones, the truly creative. I'm probably one of those.

I guess I find that I discover what is good and what makes sense in those things and people that surround me, and I'm contended in that. The urge to capture and share has subsided. That is the question, really: how does the writer convey the things that compel her to know the world without falling prey to acquisition? Which is ridiculous--how funny that we humans believe that suddenly by imposing language we suddenly can own a thing, an idea, a person? Who among us has ever uttered, "Thus", and then beheld? None.

Yet we think that if it is written, it is; a written contract is more trust than a verbal, the marriage license more recognized than the vows exchanged. Yet documents are more vulnerable than those who composed them, or whomever they are about, as they are reduced to ash at the first match strike. And, how much more life is exchanged when language is notably absent!--an embrace between two friends, two partners sighs of love, the wag of a dog's tail at the sight of it's master, the clearing skies right after a storm. I could never capture these moments in words without subjecting them to a severe reduction of meaning, robbing them of what they truly are. All because language wielded requires severe accommodation--most of all from the one who utilizes it as a tool of interpretation.

That's all we do, really: interpret. Funneling that which is beyond and beside this structure of sounds, inflections, and implied meaning into something we can name and thus own. How odd is it that we name--how audacious! Perhaps that's the problem: the implied ownership that the act of name implies. Parents conceive, birth, name, and thus own a child, even though they participated in the miraculous emergence of life only through incubation. Yet, for nearly two decades, they can itemize them on their taxes along with their second house in the mountains.

Maybe we are just irresponsible with our language; we categorize things prematurely--and often incorrectly--in order to understand them. Aristotle said the natural world was ordered thusly, and we nodded our heads in comprehension and conceded. "I name, therefore I understand." I wonder if it's the reverse that's true--that true understanding proceeds naming. If so, we would find ourselves in a wordless world, our eyes wide as we gaze at each other. We understand little and comprehend nothing, and so we build four-walled structures around us to shield us from the EXPANSE that surrounds us everywhere we are. I am anxious standing in the expanse, so much empathy is extended to she that fills up the expanse with thousands of four-walled structures and millions of implied-meaning-sounds to everything she sees in order to qualm her anxiety of the vastness of the unknown.

If only we could open our anxieties and buildings and words to prayer--that instead of burrowing ourselves away when facing the expanse, we life our hands to God and wonder, "What is it?", with no expectation of an answer! What if a mother's first to response to hearing the cries of the new life that had just emerged from her body was, "Who is this?" before declaring a name to call the child? If we wonder before we we build and name, then perhaps we will remember that it is not we who understand, and therefore cannot own.