Tears/Sorrow/Song
photograph Brianna Breaux, Kinsale, Republic of Ireland 2017
Tears
The way home is eight miles through the wind ripping off Lake Ponchartrain after eight hours of stacking dozens of layers of fragrant yellow cake with double-fistfuls of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, mascarpone cheese, and occult symbols in raspberry goo for hungry mothers on Mother’s Day. It is the beginning of the twenty-first century in New Orleans, Louisiana, where this work is worth about eighty dollars, or roughly the price of two manicure-pedicures, my mother’s preferred gift.
I didn’t see her today, but like any decent human being, barring James Joyce, I call her while I haul my ass, bike, and personal slice of crumbly Chantilly cake across Gentilly, up the stairs, and into my apartment all at once. I’m so stealthy with my bike lodged under my armpit and my phone between my cheek and shoulder and my crinkly Whole Foods bag my roommate doesn’t hear me come in. She’s bawling in the shower. Her first short story, ever, is due in a week.
Sorrow
The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Oh, it’s true,” says a former United States soldier, overhearing me going about this. “If you don’t have a word for it, you don’t feel it.”
Now, she writes war stories, journalism, fiction. She claims she couldn’t write a letter when she got out of high school; it stands to be seen whether she meant post mail or script writing. And she is telling me that language is the single access point to the subtler flavors of human experience.
But isn't this why new words are invented in the first place, why we don’t just call everything “Everything"? Words are the by-ways of translation, of accuracy, of struggling to actually say what you are knowing and feeling into words. They are objects, flat and mute. The life of a word is in the mind, eyes, and ears. That’s why they say the author “dies”—a metaphor about the peculiar position an author occupies, there but not listening, and the reader, listening but lost.
Communicate your legitimate sympathy to a grieving person without a) eliciting their pity or b) using pitiful nothings like You’re in my prayers. It could be that the tired strings of words work because they are as base as the feelings they represent. Or else our sense exceeds our sensibilities. Sometimes it’s more expedient to talk with one’s hands, etc.
This theory doesn’t explain the mathematical click of recognizing your thoughts in someone else’s words. Or when someone tells you a word exists for a feeling you are trying to explain.
Sorry if I’m getting a little out there; talking is complicated, even with little simples like “love” and “respect.” There’s no word for love-like-you-love-Jeff-Buckley, love-like-you-love-Jesus, love-with-reservations, love-with-ample-dislike. I get psyched out on it: what kind of people would we be if we had words for things like respect-because-of-pity or mournfully-longing-for-the-past. Would I be different if I loved in French?
A better question than whether the limits of our language is the limits of our world, is whether we can disabuse ourselves of the worldview that our language comes pre-loaded with.
Song
I met a black Irishman as I traveled the country. There aren't many. In New Orleans, there are mostly. The Irishman asked me what the best song of all time is. I don't know. He tells me it's "Niggaz in Paris" by Jay-Z and Kanye West. Now he has my attention. "Why?" I ask. It's because both black and white people can turn up to it, he explains. It's genius.
"Poor baby," I laugh. I laugh so hard and for so long at the idea of living in a world where "Niggaz in Paris" is the only jam everyone can get down to, that, to bring me back down, he tells me we have no taste. "And yes, I'm lumping you in with the other black people." There's a first for everything.
Tears
Reasons Why I Cried in the Republic of Ireland (by amount of H2O—ascending)
Elliptical geometry. Not studying it, just the idea of
My twin brother won’t drink responsibly
A video of a bunch of chandeliers shaped like galaxies rising and descending from the
ceiling of a huge, empty theatre screening at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
Mom never been to Europe
I have to write an essay about James Joyce
A blurb about the aftermath of a storm that destroyed my home, hometown, divided
family, traumatized mother etc, recalling the smell of petroleum-soaked ham rotting in the dim of a miraculously still-standing refrigerator, the bones of my twenty-five-year-old parents’ aspirations gnarly and black; “It had a happy ending for me.”
My dim prospects of paying off my mom’s student loans
Shower
I don’t remember how I came to be there, but so the first thing the man says to me as I wander around his apartment, blind, asking bizzarro sleep-steeped questions, is “I just washed my shoes. They're looking nice.”
I squint at the beautiful man. He is admiring his clean brown suede.
The surrender of my specs by the colorful ether of Ireland reveals floor-to-ceiling penthouse windows through which brilliant Cork is laughing, looking me straight in the face.
He had a lovely accent, like a horse galloping through a glen or some shit. Ungrateful skeez I may be, but I let on soon enough as I could that I admire a serious, silent type.
--Oops, I meant “Sorrow.” The theme is Sorrow.
Sorrow
“The human body is the best picture of a human soul,” is a quote I read on the train from Kilarney. I sent my friend a picture of my face at the optimally flattering angle to commemorate my first successful “scramble” up a "mountain", Torc Mountian, a glorified hill.
“So u almost died huh. I see a train outside u,” Nishan responds. “Where are u going?”
This funny turn of English makes me look around the train outside me. It occurs to me that this perspective is totally interior; this vision of a dirty train car exists momently, and inside my body only. A boy in the corner kind of stares at me across his three litres of Coke. Wouldn’t it be really pretty if he wrote me into his essay—two figures in each others’ dreams? Is Ireland outside me or am I in Ireland? I fiddle with these Oriental handcuffs until I fall asleep.
I hear a sharp tap on the glass and move the curtains to see a large, emerald hummingbird at the window, watching me expectantly. My curiosity is quickly smothered in a wave of grief as I realize it’s Nishan. I see another, smaller bird in his mouth. He killed it. The shock of this lurches me awake, abruptly closing the curtains on that weird theatre.
Nishan loves me but he doesn’t say nice things. He doesn’t believe in them—I mean; he believes words carry no weight. This might be because his father is a high-ranking communist propagandist in Nepal, spreading the myth of maximum human self-realization under a sharing economy. Or maybe he loves better in Nepali. The thing is, music dissolves into thin air like words, too: notes don’t all occupy the same space. A song is a procession; melody isn’t a by-product of time. It’s the other way around: the mood-colored passing of notes in and out of existence weave together a succession of instants. No single word makes a book, no single speech makes a man but the sum total of these. Maybe he just doesn’t understand music. What is radiance? It is cadence, a cadence.
Song
If I could write by taking deep breaths or running my fingers through someone’s hair or watching the country from a speeding train, I would never, ever, ever stoop to words. I would do what all those people do who are not writers, with the same joy and anxiety as those who are, and with those same inconsolable disappointments.
