A Loss for Words

translating the howl

How to write when facing The Big Grief (known aliases: The Big Fear, The Big Rage, The Big Panic, etc)? How to write as the news harpoons us daily? I try to write with purpose; to bring clarity, precision, and the swell of uplift to a fractured world. I try to offer readers a tasting menu of ideas and phrases; an array of digestible, nourishing notions to savor. Food for thought.

But in lieu of words, right now there’s a captive howl within me: pounding on the door, bellowing for release. This howl is neither tidy nor tame, and it isn’t in the business of offering narrative meals. Instead, it offers the plate where the meal ought to be: like a question mark, a cocked head, a gauntlet, a dare. What will you place on here, I wonder? If the howl deigns to touch food at all, it does so only to instigate a food fight: hurling everything in sight, making the “civilized” senseless. In other words, the howl mimics its surroundings. Meanwhile, I cry and write. The words that emerge have no grandeur or revelation in them; all of their eloquence rode in on the tides of pure feeling. The refrains are simple:

I don’t understand.

Why are we doing this to one another?

Is this what we truly want?

We’re all one.

Photo via patwelsh.com

It appears that clichés are all I have in stock at present. But perhaps words don’t wish to be adorned right now. Perhaps words strip themselves bare to honor the activists who wear their symbolism on loud. Or perhaps words just want to inhabit facts:

Over 50,000 people— many of them children— have been killed in Gaza. Almost two million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

In the United States, the words “Black Lives Matter” are considered a political slogan, not an enshrined fact.

In the United States, at least 56,000 immigrants are being held in ICE detention.

Despite centuries of lessons, we are still hurting each other.

The howl increases as I shrink from the blank page’s gaping maw. Why burden you with more tales of grief? Why add more plate to your plate? I’ve spent hours treading water between two contradictory impulses. One: to let the howl be a howl and abandon language altogether in favor of the body’s bellowing syntax. Two: to embrace humanity’s linguistic birthright and do the grunt work of making sense of our own minds and the world. Step by step, word for word. In the end, I attempted both. Below is my meager offering of language: the cliché-bouquet I place upon the altar of this complicated present.

WE ARE ONE

I don’t want to proselytize. I only want to share what I know, which is that we share the earth with roses, and wombats, and snails, and arias, and poetry, and each other.

We are consciousness fractured: oneness cleaved to engage with itself. How exquisite! And how exquisite that such engagement can include fighting! As fellow humans, we can wrestle and tussle all we want. But the frequency of fight or friction (erotic, life-affirming) feels different than the frequency of hate; of banishing our kin (spiritual cannibalism). If a major political or religious platform revolves around: “get rid of all of those people,” please let’s get rid of the getting-rid-of-ness. This is what we need to eradicate from the human race: the hatred of the other that is ultimately self-hatred. Racism and sexism are rejections of our first homeland and our common humanity: of Africa (where all Homo sapiens trace their lineage) and of the womb (where all Homo sapiens emerge), respectively. Why deny our birthright, our sacred home, our shared human-ness?

When we engage in the delusion that we have “underlings”, we decline the invitation to Universal Oneness— and that’s a party none of us wants to miss. In fact (as far as I know), it’s the only party in town. Holding dominion over underlings may be generative in cases of childhood make-believe (pretend) or BDSM (adult pretend). In this socio-political moment, people engaging in cruelty are merely playing a stale game of pretend; indulging in the illusion of separateness and superiority. But guess what… we can imagine too. Existence is just one big game of “yes, and”... and we have a voice in that game.

Lately we’ve taken to prancing around like little gods, aspiring to immortality and omniscience. But tales of Greek and Roman gods are tales of immortals who, in their antiseptic and static perfection, must destroy to make meaning; filling their eternities with wars and grudges. By contrast, we humans inherited the gift of mortality, and therefore we get to create to make meaning: filling the brief hiccups of our lives with art, philosophy, connection. In our fear of death, we fancy ourselves gods— and therefore spend our short time on earth destroying instead of creating, warring instead of connecting.

We’re all creatures in the eyes of god.

We’re all creatures in the eyes of one another (which is still god).

We’re all creatures.

That’s enough. That’s the gospel uniting us all. And on this vast cosmic dance floor, I hope I find you. I hope we recognize each other and smile (whatever smiling means to you) or bow (whatever bowing means to you). It would be such a shame if we two fragments of existence never got to break bread together in this lifetime; never got to play in the rain; never got to pray together (whatever prayer means to you). That is my prayer: I hope we find each other in time.

HEARTBREAK AND HOPE

Our inter-being is our downfall and our salvation. The same impulse that makes swaggering bullies interfere in global affairs is the same impulse that makes empaths keen and wail over the fate of people an ocean away: the shared instinct of all, of us, of one, of minding each other’s beeswax.

We are in this together. We’re here. None of us chose Life, but we keep choosing it everyday nonetheless; writing breathless love letter after love letter, anguished elegy after elegy. Can we save each other— and continue saving each other? Can we insist that this human thing is still worth doing— and doing with dignity?

Our heartbreak, our disbelief, our anger: these are all vital signs of our heart and humanity. Our despair is a pulse; a flare in the darkness of an anesthetized world. O, little Heart! You can bear it! You won’t stand for this, even as you bear it! Look at you— bearing it— as you wade into the terrors of the day, with its many nips and lances. O tender Heart, you will resemble a coral reef when this Life is through: textured by all the ways you’ve served the world with your breaking; with your refusal to mend and your capacity to expand.

That Heart— that deep, collective Heart that trills within us all— cannot be fooled by pageantry and propaganda. We know what true Beauty tastes like (hint: some of its synonyms are love-art-god-nature). We know what epiphany tastes like. We know what grace, humility, and revelation taste like. We cannot be fed PEEPS® Brand Marshmallow Candies after biting into a fresh peach and letting its juices shimmy down our chins. We’ve seen what happens when we choose cruelty, insularity, numbness— nothing but PEEP city, even for those supposedly at the top. Do any of the people clinging to power right now look happy or fulfilled? No; they will always be scrambling to protect something within them that is weak and in need of defending. It looks exhausting.

So let’s populate the world with peaches; with the stone-filled sustenance of summer. Let’s keep being touched by what grows, and let’s keep growing from what touches us. We have breath. We have eye contact. We have our feet on the ground. We have crying and laughing and dreaming as much as we damn well please. We have Life’s intoxicating sense of possibility that remakes itself in every moment: through us, as us, with us.

Here is my little peach harvest from this week:

1. Yesterday, two sparrows alighted on my park bench and graciously allowed me to eavesdrop on their conversation. Their transcript is as follows: We’re here! We’re one! We’re here! We’re one!

2. This morning, I tasted the first cherry of the season. It executed a perfect cartwheel and then recited a pert little sonnet inside my mouth.

3. This afternoon, a young mother stood in front of me in line at the coffee shop. In the middle of placing her order, she turned to the (presumably) unhoused person in the corner and asked: “Want anything?” Cool as you please. Not an ornamental or self-aggrandizing remark, but as if the two already shared an established rapport (which perhaps they do). “Want anything?” May we all walk towards Death consciously together with this same level of familiarity: “I’m heading out; want anything?”

4. This week, I read A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains by Max Bennett. This book is brilliant, thrilling, sure-footed, generous, and devotional. In his final chapters, Bennett writes that humans have inherited the singular gifts of “joint attention” and conceptual, abstract language unmoored from genetic hardwiring. “Concepts, ideas, and thoughts, just like episodic memories and plans, are not unique to humans. What is unique is our ability to deliberately transfer these inner simulations to each other, a trick possible only because of language.” Bennett argues that“the power of language is not its products (better teaching, coordinating, and common myths) but the process of ideas being transferred, accumulated, and modified across generations.” For humans, “our language, our unparalleled altruism, and our unmatched cruelty all emerged together in evolution; all three were, in fact, merely different features of the same evolutionary feedback loop”. Language is our birthright, our opposable thumb, our flint in the cave. We humans can howl, but we are also uniquely positioned to speak into the heart of the Great Mystery with our words as little lamps, little bridges, little salves.

This era is a loss for words. And, thanks to billions of years of evolution, we humans have words. So I will use my human words here:

What is happening in Gaza is unconscionable.

What is happening in Ukraine is unconscionable.

What is happening in the United States is unconscionable.

I believe in us. I believe in you. I believe in the tantalizing promise of this battered, bewildering world.

Whoever “they” are, and wherever “they” may be, I am determined to see the best in them. I am determined to learn why they are here, and to trust that they, too, are here to create.

The earth won’t be here forever. Neither will we. Every single human being is an idea held together by myth and molecule and nothing more. But together, we have language. We have the horizon of an limitless linguistic canvas. We can populate the world with extraordinary ideas. We can inflate them, breathe life into them, wave them off at the pier with as much and as little of us— their makers— in them as possible. Our human ideas are all we have: these dear, improbable, hopeful, necessary emissaries. Which ones challenge us? Which ones ennoble us? Which ones immortalize us?

This is it: this Life is the one song. Let’s compose our full-throated epistles to Life and send them out to sea, out past our Deaths— even as the page disintegrates— for that is the most human act we can ever know.

___________________

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Read my other pieces about human existence here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

If you feel hopeless about the state of the world and are looking for ways to contribute, here are some reputable organizations: Alliance for Middle East Peace, Anera, Palestine Children's Relief Fund, One Acre Fund, The Sentencing Project, National Parks Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Black Girls Code, Planned Parenthood, Choose Love, United Help Ukraine, Grow Medicine, and The Sierra Club. If you have found other ways to help, volunteer, donate, or contribute, please comment below. I would love to hear from you.