Words Fail
There may be times in your life when you make a statement with great emotion, believing it to be very important; and then, later- maybe many years later- you realize that you didn't really understand the meaning of what you were saying when you said it. You realize that as important as you thought your statement was, it was yet a far more serious thing to say than you knew. And then this amazing thing happens: you discover that despite this, despite not knowing the true meaning of this important thing that you were saying at the time when you were saying it, you meant it anyway.
Marriage vows can work like this. When I was fourteen years old, I told my father I would never trust him again. I did not understand what that meant at the time; never the less, without intending to, I ended up doing it. Words are funny like that.
I ask myself, very often, "What should I say? What needs to be said, and how should I say it?" This question is a source of a great deal of frustration in my life. And the lesson I have learned from it, against my will, is the same that guides the advice of a wise and compassionate person on comforting the grief stricken: do not try and converse unless they ask you to; only make your presence known, and be with them in silence.
There are times when there is nothing to say.
What to do then, when words will not serve? Faced with the task of giving someone terrible news, and wishing to find some way of not hurting them with it, should you not speak at all? Of course not. Why does it hurt so much, then, if this is clearly what we must do? Why is there a heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and a heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it? Sometimes I have thought:
The Universe is Shoddy.You can get sick of words after awhile. You can hear people talk and talk for years without doing anything, and then you realize that talk is not action. Talk is cheap, plastic crap turned out by the slave-wage Indonesian child factory workers of our brains and shipped out to our mouths and our own ears to keep others placated and our minds fooled. Except, sometimes it is not, sometimes talk is finely crafted, slow aged
poison made with intent to
hurt, to
wound deeply, to
scare, to
terrorize; to do the worst work of action without the raising of a finger. And then sometimes talk is just lies.
Talk and action. Talk, and action. It makes you want to never speak again. Cannot talk sometimes be action? It seems like it ought to be. It seems like speaking up ought to be taking action. It seems to me like taking a stand and saying what must be said over and over in the face of incredible opposition and threats to life and limb ought to be worthy of being action. I admire anyone who does that. But maybe it is just talk.
Sometimes, I think I might have something to say. Sometimes I think that there might be important messages out there, waiting to be discovered, and that if we could just find them and give them to each other then things would start making sense. And much better than that: we would know what we should do. And then sometimes I see people sneer at truth; I hear them mock ideas powerful enough that they force others to stop and think; and then I think, there are no messages for these people. They cannot hear.
At these times I find that I stop speaking; I stop writing; I stop believing in words.
What do you write about after you learn that words fail?
What do you write about after you learn that some people
will not listen; that good words can be meaningless and bad words can be meaningful; and that sometimes words will not serve simply because
there is nothing for you to say?The Universe is Shoddy. Language is to truth as the sea is to a ship. Speakers and Sailors embark at their peril.
Still, it may not be the
best way to get there; but it
is the
only way.
Alright then, if that is the way it is going to be. I can deal with this. I can
accept it. I have the serenity for that; just as I have the strength to make changes. We can arrest
language and strip from it the title of
communication; we can seize
words and divest them of their assumption of
meaning. We can construct a dialogue which is tenacious and supple, that falls like a hammer but cuts like a knife. We can learn to tell the differences between
what is said, what is done, what is thought, and
what actually is; and when we find truth we can fire it with speech and forge it with action.
What do you write about? Do like they had you do in school. First, make a list. Now,
Pick a topic:
