ESSAY : What Can’t Be Written

Maybe it’s my imagination, but I’ve always thought that out of all people who have no faith in words, writers have the least. I’m not sure who has the most, maybe preachers and politicians and salesmen, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t another group more disheartened by what can’t be said than those whose business it is to say it.

Of course this makes perfect sense. Just as any good auto mechanic can tell you that your water pump isn’t going to make it another thousand miles, and an animal trainer knows just how far to push that lion, so every writer I know begins the task of writing absolutely convinced of the utter impossibility of saying anything even close to what they’d like to. Or as Beckett put it, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.�

And even though poets, with their habit of letting half the page be taken up by white space--with what isn’t said--are probably the kings and queens of the unsayable, certainly it trickles down to every writer, including, I’m pretty sure, those creators of action-adventure romances. Their dashing characters, if they had to sit quietly for a moment, emulating us, their readers, completely overwhelmed by the confusion of everything going on in our lives all at once, would probably keel over in a second, deader than any bullet or broken heart could ever make them.

So maybe that’s the point. Every work of fiction exists just to remind us of what isn’t there--as when we prospect for gold (or buy a lottery ticket) every small success only serves to remind us of everything that still eludes our grasp. Thus those writers, even great ones (Kafka comes to mind, Hemingway, too) who retell nearly the same story over and over aren’t really repeating themselves, but are only trying to narrow down, eliminate everything that isn’t the elusive tremor they know they’ve never captured.

Still, this writing business cuts both ways: On one hand for all of us, there’s the sense we have that no language in the world is complex enough to convey the wavering, contradictory, profound stream that is our impression of ourselves and the world. But on the other, for me at least, there’s also a sneaking, smirking, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that anything I think, no matter how personal, private or prodigious, once I tell, will be recognized as the pathetically banal, ordinary, and yes, even boring, un-bon mot it really is.

So these, then, are the two sides of the unutterable. One: my hopelessly romantic wish to say something so true and original, that for the first time, like some prince or princess abducted by Gypsies at birth, my true station will be revealed at last. Two: the fear in equal parts that once I say it I’ll be exposed as not only not a prince, but not even a Gypsy.

All this, I’m told by those smarter than me, is a language problem: the signifier is never the thing signified. The word is never the object, they say, and I believe it. I remember once, years ago, I was visited in the office where I teach by an earnest and distressed middle-aged man who told me he was sorry, but he’d had to drop out of my class because, as he said, he was “involved in a triple death situation.� The phrase puzzled me; it turned out what he meant was that his wife and two daughters had been killed by a drunk driver who swerved into their lane on the freeway. “That’s OK� I told him, “you take care of yourself.� And what could I have meant?

Approaching the impossibility of language from the other direction, a while ago I heard a mother who had survived the loss of her child describe the feeling as “a hole in my heart.� I was moved by its aptness, and then, strangely, a couple days later, I heard a father use the same phrase to describe the same loss, and then a week or so after that, still another grieving father used it, and this time, or maybe I only imagined it, he spoke it with a slight smirk of satisfaction for having found the proper phrase: “A hole-in-the-heart situation.�

We speak a single word, and no sooner is it spoken than it disperses to join all such identical words, and each time one of those is used, each time we say love, or good, for example, its power is diminished by some tiny increment, becoming, although never reaching, some theoretical level of pure meaningless that must be, after all, the same as the unutterable.

So maybe it’s all impossible--this entire life, every minute of it, when it comes to reporting what actually is going on. Yet of course, we do nothing but blab about it, every blasted minute, creating a fabric which, though may not be our lives, must, like Old Man River, mean something--be a stand-in, a double, a surrogate self, behind which the real self must lurk.

Years ago, when I first began to try to write, an older and wiser friend kept telling me, correctly, that I had to drop the false mask of competence. I had to put into my poems the real messiness of my life, which, because I was young, I didn’t want to admit. My friend, on the other hand, had chosen to construct his own mask almost entirely out of his own pain and groping need and blind apprehension. What his mask hid from the world was his formidable intelligence, ambition, critical judgment and naturally, his competence.

There was a time not so long ago when I would walk down to the edge of the ocean every day. Once there, on the Styrofoam-flecked, wrapper strewn sand, I would climb a ladder to a lifeguard station and sit, my back pressed against the light-blue, weathered enclosure where the guards hung out in season, and stare at the water. This was not in order to think--in fact I thought nothing--but there was something soothing in the parallel emptiness that I was staring at and the one I carried in my life those days. Of course, the sea was not really empty, nor was my life, but it pleased me to think of both of them that way.

So it was that I was sitting there, on that lifeguard tower, one winter morning about 11 a.m.; I tried to levitate, and may even have succeeded, because certainly I felt nothing beneath me but space and air. The self who was sitting there, whoever I was then, seemed as transparent as the spray of waves blowing in from the west toward the land. A little later, I climbed down and headed back home, no different than before I had begun.

According to the Theory of Gases, if I remember correctly, we are all a single gas--the glass of water we hold, the air we breath, our cat, our begonia, our VCR--us and our world together--with some lumps simply more dense than others. The gas of Anna Karenina suddenly becomes dispersed by contact with a rapidly moving, denser gas we call a train. The gas of little Marcel Proust drifts, mixes with other gases like it, forms a small refined cloud, and then goes on its way.

What stays whole then, for those of us who write and those who don’t, is the medium of silence, that unchanging broth in which all words float. What finally can be said--what can’t be said--perhaps they are the same in the end. And for the person foolish enough to write about such a subject, Ortega y Gasset reminds us that one day in the 1st Century BC there was a sculptor named Pasiteles who was busy sculpting a panther for the decoration of some temple or another. Of the kind of day it was, or how the man felt we have no record, but the important thing is, as he chipped and chipped away at his stone, in one way or another, the panther ate him.