Everyone has told me, since I first began to hold a pencil, that I am a writer. As a result I have forsaken nearly all other forms of expression. My life has been littered with abandoned notebooks and half-written novels. I have not taken up a paintbrush nor snapped a photo. I have dealt exclusively in words. I have played with them and worked with them and lived among and through them. My world is words, so much so that it took me a very long time to understand that thoughts, for many people, do not arise in an infinite series of phrases and snippets of text waiting to be written, flashing at a quick clip across the mind as if displayed upon a teleprompter to be read aloud — a process some might normally call speaking.
The world is a text that I read to myself, or it was, but I understand now that this has always been wishful thinking.
Where before words sprang to mind, bubbling up from some deep place within me, at the sensation of anything remotely thrilling, touching, or even mundane, I now draw blanks. This unsettling phenomenon began to appear when I started to learn German. For an entire year, I have spent hours each day concentrating on picking up the difficult-to-learn language of my host country and my partner’s family. It has been both fun and terrible, both amazing and gruelling. And now I can speak German tolerably well. It has come at a price. My languages now stand beside each other, vying for my attention and the world fades away in the background.
To efficiently learn a language, one must begin to make equivalences between phrases and words. Good:Gut. Blau:Blue. Wand:Wall. Feld:Field. This works at a small scale, word:word. But I’ve started to realize that the richness of my words has dissipated in service of this simple translational act that I must perform to get through the day. Blue did not always correspond directly to any one concept, and it certainly did not correspond to Blau. Now the two words stand relation only to one other. I have lost the fragile thread between sky and blue. Between grief and blue. Between water and blue. Between my favorite jeans and blue. Between my father’s eyes and blue. Where this web of comprehension once rippled with each iteration of the word, only a one-to-one equivalency stand stock still. This stillness I find to be a harsh and incomplete truth.
Sometimes I see something clearly in my mind; an image of an experience I’ve had, or the particular character of a painting I want to describe, and I know there are words for this moment. In fact, I have wielded these very words deftly in the past, but now they do not come to me. They remain still in the cool, placid space of my mind where language pools. I stand across from my experience, watching it, drinking it in, longing to pass it along, but unable. At first I had thought I had become a sponge. That for now I must be content soaking in all the world about me, to be transformed some other time into the language I long to give it.
But I lost hope when I read about pumice stones, which float and only very slowly become waterlogged before sinking. They do not wring out. They do not become light again. They drink in water and it burdens their once foamy form.
These porous remnants of volcanic chaos take on water incrementally before drifting slowly to the bottoms of bodies of water. The stone cannot be called a sponge despite its appearance. In fact, it is actually a form of glass. It floats atop water, occupying a mysterious space of non-liquid, non-solid. Perhaps there is a further form of matter.
I am a pumice stone, slowly sinking into that deep lake of words within my body. I am apart from the language around me, but I sense it and perhaps draw it slowly in. I fear I will not relearn to pass it through myself and onwards. I cannot wring myself out, cascading words upon the page. I become heavier and heavier.
For a long time, I have understood myself as a translator, taking the world as I find it and wrapping these transmissions into a language that others share with me. But for the first time, I am beginning to learn the limits. The borders that the tongue and pencil pressed into the hand cannot trespass. I think of Julia Cameron, “Creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well-observed or specifically imagined.” I wonder if there is a word for what I am experiencing: a wrapt, one-sided attention. The unspecifically imagined, the merely witnessed.
Later in my life, I began to see my writing as a form of conversation. No, I had not translated the brilliant hue of the swaying grass into the poem. Rather, I had seen what there was to see in the field and responded with the instruments available to me: my words. Sure it held meaning in the same way, “Turn right” can mean something, but what it communicated was not a set of a concepts or instructions or knowledge, rather a way of feeling myself into and back toward my world. These types of expressions are not 1:1 translations, these are exchanges of a form beyond language, made possible through its usage. The fields talk to me in yellows and spindly shapes, I respond in the hushed tone of scrawled words: I see you, I seem to say, not in so many words.
Perhaps it is the result of my confidence being shaken: in English I could give extemporaneous speeches and articulate new ideas without losing a beat, but in German it takes me several moments between sentences and I often have to start and stop, beginning again from the top. It is exhausting and I can see boredom flitting across my conversation partners’ faces as I struggle to find the correct forms of verbs or decline adjectives as they ought to be declined. It is painful and uncomfortable for me, a wielder of words, to be speechless and sluggish and slow. To be stumbling around in a landscape I used to traverse with my eyes closed. Worst of all, when someone completes my sentence for me, unwilling to wait until I have come all the way myself. The satisfaction of a completed contribution, ripped from my mouth as if I have been done a favor.
I worry the world will soon forget me, or stop showing me it’s wonder. I cannot respond the way I used to. Perhaps the bright buds in the meadow think I have grown tired and restless and will begin to fade. Or the butterfly I stumbled across today, who spoke to me earnestly in the elegant blue of its wings and the skirting flight of its body, will not be there tomorrow. I have not accepted the invitation, the imperative, and I worry I will lose the thread of our long conversation.
Perhaps it just takes practice. Perhaps if the pumice stone would only try to spit the water back out.
I see you. I see you. I see you. I seem to say, not in so many words.