"Thank you is not enough. But there are no words."
What happens when words fail us? What takes their place? How does this affect communication, moreover, communion? In many ways, language has always been a boundary against which we push—a “boundary of the unsayable,” American novelist Marilynne Robinson calls it.
“Learning how to disassemble the gaze that I was wrestling with (the habitual but self-conscious writing toward a nonblack reader that threatened and coated much African American literature); discovering how to eliminate, to manipulate the Eurocentric eye in order to stretch and plumb my own imagination… Achebe’s work liberated my artistic intelligence as nothing else had ever done.
Against it pushes Joan Didion when she tries to express grief at her daughter's death. Against it pushes physicist Alan Lightman when he stretches himself in the universe seeking place and meaning, and Edward Lear as he hollowed out a nonsense verse that made sense of the nonsensical.
And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind. Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. […] Sunflowers themselves are far more wonderful than any words about them.
From Mary Oliver’s Upstream
I wish I could transport Mary Oliver, a poet who wakes early to hear the unspoken words of nature, to the space adjacent to Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh painted sunflowers, his favorite flower, again and again. A man who spoke many languages had many words on his lips and felt he needed to paint to express himself.
We act when we cannot say.
Five years ago, during the onslaught of Covid-19, windows in London were full of rainbows. This country agreed rainbows express what we cannot say to all the frontline workers saving lives—a giant arc of color, a small thank-you.
We make rainbows. We act. But how do the health care workers self-express? Do they make rainbows for each other?
In her memoir, English nurse Christie Watson admits that the language of kindness is practiced daily. It is something shown, not spoken. How do you thank someone for returning your life? Returning the life of someone you love?
Watson shares a note she once received:
To the bereavement midwife. You helped me through the worst time of our life. We will treasure the memories you let us make during Annabelle’s short time. Thank you is not enough. But there are no words.
From Christie Watson’s The Language of Kindness
But we cannot always act. What if we have negative feelings? What if we hate and fear to the fringes of our body such that we pulse? Should we act?
Anger is an outsized emotion, “the deepest form of compassion,” concludes poet David Whyte. “The internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect.”
When the word is not enough, violence becomes the act of expression. “Words!” they might as well be yelling, “We need more words!”
Will the words we use ever catch up to our need for expression?
“The human experience,” argues German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a keen observer of our human connection, “is not describable.” In his 1976 work To Have or To Be? the German social psychologist separates the human experience into “having” and “being.” In the having mode, everything is a thing, describable. But the word is not enough in the (more preferred) being mode.
One could write pages of description of the Mona Lisa’s smile, and still the pictured smile would not have been caught in words—but not because her smile is so ‘mysterious.’ Everybody’s smile is mysterious (unless it is the learned synthetic smile of the marketplace). No one can fully describe the expression of interest, enthusiasm, biophilia, or of hate or narcissism that one might see in the eyes of another person, or the variety of facial expressions, of gaits, of postures, of intentions that exists among people.
From Erich Fromm’s To Have or To Be
The shortage of language, argues Fromm, stands between one person and another, between our communion.
None of these experiences can be fully expressed in words. The words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. […] Hence, being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience.
From Erich Fromm’s To Have or To Be
Human separateness, our desire to commune and connect—is there anything more profound or urgent? The shallowness of words as vessels can never be overcome, argues Fromm.
But there is a means to understanding one another, what Fromm calls “mutually alive relatedness.”
“It is through this mutually alive relatedness,” promises Fromm, “that we overcome the barrier for separateness.” Mutually alive relatedness. I cheer at this term. I cheer the concept of this term.
It is a bit maudlin (even sinister), but it strikes me that humans in the pandemic had something that connected us in “mutually alive relatedness.” Not since the last world war have we ever experienced something so universal, so everywhere. (I greatly fear our country's total environmental devastation will be next if only we would pay attention.)
I might not read your anger, sadness, or joy, but there was a time when I could read your pandemic fatigue fluently. In the lines by your eyes. In the slope of your shoulders, how you kicked your feet forward when you walk, as your skin helds you up.
Will this mutual experience upset our language and reinforce our communion?
“It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love.”
American novelist Marilynne Robinson delights in the abundance of words and how they push the “boundaries of unsayable.”
France drew my attention to the enormous number of English words that describe the behavior of light. Glimmer, glitter, glisten, gleam, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine, and so on. The old words are not utilitarian. They reflect an aesthetic attention to experience that has made, and allowed us to make, pleasing distinctions among, say, a candle flame, the sun at its zenith, and the refraction of light by a drop of rain.
[…]
How were these words coined and retained, and how have they been preserved through generations so that English-speaking people use them with the precision necessary to preserving them. Somehow the language created, so to speak, a prism through which light passes, by means of which its qualities are arrayed.
From Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books
Robinson believes that language evokes a reality beyond experience and imagination—that our scientific forays into quantum mechanics, dark matter, and dark energy demonstrate “the extraordinary power of language to evoke a reality beyond its grasp, to evoke a sense of what cannot be said.”
Whether our reality outstrips our words or vice versa is irrelevant. They are in close pursuit.
Let’s not abandon language. It has been with us since the beginning. But it is time we challenge language. New words. New things. New utterances. New hybrids. More understood, less misconstrued.
Five years ago I was tired, sore, contracted, and retreating. Yet, I felt safe. And any minute, I'd switch to being eager, enthusiastic, and energetic. But that happiness was bound by fear and insecurity and, underneath it all, murky anger.
I still lack a word for this feeling.
