A command of language
I am not in control
When I sit down at my desk to write, I am confronted by the terrifying behemoth of all that needs to flow from my crowded head down to the narrow tips of my fingers in order to crack meaning open like an eggshell and clear the way for a golden yolk to reveal itself. How can I control a thing like that? How can any one person clear the slate for that kind of possibility?
On the list of my favorite authors, most often they are the ones that the blurbs on the cover describe as having a command over language. Words bend to their will. They weave them together and magnify them in opposition and hide them inside other words and explode them into shards, scatter the carcasses so their ghosts might (and do) haunt a piece of work. They command the words. Command. I picture a tall, rigid figure looking sort of genderless in a crisp, tailored suit of the palest green. They point with authority, sending words down paragraphic rows in marching order. Language does their bidding. We call them masterful. What a masterful command of the language.
I don’t know. I’ve always wanted this to be said about me. I want another person to read the words I’ve labored over and see them gleam with a sort of effortlessness, a glossy sheen that laughs in the face of the real toil it takes to pen something of note. I want a reader to be relieved with the feeling that I am in control of the words more than they are in control of me. The sort of trust that must be blindly placed in the pilot to get us there without the reminder of turbulence. I don’t know. That’s what I’ve always wanted. Control, I guess. Isn’t that stupid?
The intentionality of words is important to me and to my heart. The control I desire is a reflection of my deep fear of being misunderstood, misinterpreted, misdiagnosed, missed entirely. In conversation, I pause a lot in between my words, draw them out long one into the other so the sentences spill slow, sometimes contradict and double back on themselves as the feeling of the thought evolves or devolves or gets lost entirely. On a date recently, the man I was with told me I roll my eyes a lot which I found sort of embarrassing. As we went on talking, I realized it wasn’t that I was rolling my eyes, it’s that while I’m speaking, my eyes drift here and there, all around, scaling the contours of my mind in search of the right words and it’s slow, meandering. The probing of my eyes against the dark corners of my head mad me look careless to this man, I suppose. Just rolling my eyes like a valley girl, so over it. All my desire to be understood properly and even that gets misunderstood. Go figure.
But I’m thinking about that turn of phrase. Command of language. I don’t know. It sounds like dominator rhetoric, doesn’t it? There’s a way of talking about things that is rooted in colonialism, capitalistic demand, what the indigenous call the dominator mindset. This inherently American/Euro-centric concept that we can and should control every aspect of our surroundings, bend every last inexplicable bit of matter to our will so that we might make it our comfort at the expense of all else. That genderless person in the pale green suit, it’s a rather fascistic scene, one that I don’t like very much and one that doesn’t at all feel true to the act of writing.
Language is an inevitability. There’s always a need to clarify, to root inside, to split apart all meaning so that it might hold more. I don’t know. How many ways are there to say that I am so grief-stricken by all the love I have known and will know before I die? It’s a daunting task to take all the gurgling guts inside of me and spin them into something understandable using only lips and teeth and contracting throat.
I don’t have any sort of command over language. I imagine myself donning that pale green suit and pointing in rigid lines, telling all the words I’ve learned what to do and where to go and how to break themselves apart so that they may break a person apart–and I can’t help but laugh. Words are the thing that have command over me. I am physically moved by them. They have weird, spindly hands and they grip me and hold me down underwater until I understand. They have me by the corneas. They’re telling me to look and to translate, meagerly, all that I see, to make the inexplicable explode with precision. I don’t know.
I’m not in control here. Haha. Haha. Haha. Do you understand what it feels like to admit that? I have a weird eye infection right now because I rub my eyes too often and with too much need, and there are soft hot tears spilling over the red, flaky skin. Releasing my desire for control to this otherworldly, invisible thing that is the imperative to write, it makes me feel like a baby. Perhaps even the iconographic dumpster baby. I’m on my back in the cold rain, abandoned, unable, left to my own devices and those devices are obsolete. I’m not in control here–each time I put those words next to one another, I start crying again. I don’t know.
The words are always putting me to work. They know what it is that they want, the shape they’d like to take but they won’t just offer that secret up to me, freely. I’m not in control here. I have to work to get the formula right–and then, I hate that turn of phrase too, but I will not backspace on it because it’s the point. The idea that there might be some formula, however many numerals and representative letters that equate to understanding language and making it evoke something—a repeatable thing that brings it all into perfect resolution–it doesn’t exist. I’m not in control here.
It’s difficult to see through that effortless sheen the absolute loss of control that a writer must submit themself to in order to make the words do what they desire. What the words desire. My desire has very little to do with, or everything to do with it, in that it must be discarded to make room for that thing that moves through the artist. I am not in control here.
Language is no colonizer. It may take up space in the body but it's essentially impermanent. Words are migratory creatures, they may stick around for a season while the conditions are ideal but there always comes a time that they must move on, when they no longer serve or can be served. They move. From here to there, or from where to I don’t fucking know. Do I need to say it again? I don’t think I can.
The most masterful writers are nothing more than servants. We all know the magic of it, whatever that word might mean. It’s why I call myself a ‘spiritual’ person. Not because there is a god I kneel before, or a sense of divinity that compels me. There’s just magic. The way a river running or a child babbling will smack you upside the head and possess you with the words needed to explain it. The most masterful writers are nothing more than servants to this strange force. Words come and go and they can be denied or ignored or scorned but never commanded. You are not in control here.
Sorry to make it kinky, but if you’d like to write well, you’ll have to submit yourself to this force. Get compelled. Stop grasping at an ethereal thing like you can tie it down to your astroturf with a plastic party balloon thread. Slippery, buggery little words, they do not want to be held by you. They’re on the move, places to be, people to possess. I’m looking for them now, mining the periphery of my vision with these big baby blues and all they do is pet me gently like a docile creature and tell me the thing I will continue to forget. Not kindly or unkindly or with any importance. Whether or not I let the language command me and put me to work is of little consequence to the words. They will go on and on shifting their meaning or staying the same or exploding and laughing at their entrails. But they tell me anyway, because I must hear it:
I am not in control.
Well, it helps to say it.
That’s what all the words are for, I guess.
Their command is benevolent.
Still—I’m going to keep falling apart over it.
jw
But with all my education I can't seem to command it / And the words are all escaping, and coming back all damaged / And I would put them back in poetry if I only knew how / I can't seem to understand it
Inspirations
I know, I know I just said like two weeks ago that I don’t really do podcasts but this is actually and truly the one exception. Song Exploder is this phenomenal podcast where Hrishikesh Hirway invites artists to come and talk about the process of making one specific song from their discography. They talk about the conception of the song, the stages it went through, break down demos, the recording process, what the song is about and then strip back the layers of the official track. I got the chance to go to a live recording of an episode with singer songwriter Fenne Lily and it was genuinely incredible.
I’ve followed Fenne loosely for a while now. I saw her live last year on a whim and was deeply entertained by her humor and her grace as a performer and I’m also a huge fan of the Song Exploder podcast so this was a wild collision of forces in close proximity to my home. The podcast episodes are typically 20-30 minutes and usually recorded with a bit more privacy but we, the audience, got to watch the entire two hour interview that Hirway will edit down for the episode. They chatted about Fenne’s song Lights Light Up off the record she released last year.
I’ve become a bit of a music nerd in my adulthood so it was really fucking cool to watch an artist break down a song from its conception to completion and to truly see all that goes into just one song on a singular record. Fenne is deeply funny in a very English way but also massively insightful about how she looks at songwriting as a healing outlet and a form of making sense of her life. This song in particular was a form of storytelling, putting a difficult period of her life into a condensed form capable of making the feelings around it a little bit more manageable. I’ve talked a little before about doing the same thing with collaging and writing so it was very cool to see an artist I admire doing the same thing.
The condensed and edited episode won’t be out for a while but this is a great episode with the incomparable Lucy Dacus talking about one of the most fucked up songs of all time. I recommend it with high praise.
I also can’t stop listening to this album. On loop. The guitars go so hard from top to bottom. Not much more to say than that.
Collaging Round-Up
No weird art this week. I spent most of my weekend out in the sun and I’ll be spending this Memorial Day combing through all my books and records and journals in search of stuff I can tear apart for future collaging. I’ve been reflecting on my artistic process quite a bit for the past week and I’m realizing I’ve been turning myself into a workhorse for really no reason. Trying to pull back on constant output and make sure I’m creating things that feel urgent and necessary to my current heart. More next week, maybe.
Your writing is wonderful and your words very relatable. Thanks for sharing.