on the tip of my tongue

there are times when i think i’d do anything to find the words i’m looking for. i’m starting this one the same way i start them all: staring at an empty screen, writing, deleting. writing again. deleting again. i’m trying to write, at least. the words are just out of reach. i can taste them, sink my teeth into them. i feel like i’m cannibalizing my own thoughts.

at times like this, i think of the bodymind. the words that immediately come to mind: ache. haze. unwilling. strangely, wise. i wonder where, if not in my mind, my words disappear into my body to hide. i feel like a hunting dog, flushing rabbits out of burrows. this wasn’t supposed to be about pain, but i suppose all things in my life trace their way back there eventually.

in her introduction to the body in pain, elaine scarry writes: “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” i think of her phrasing often when i am struck by a flash of it and for a moment my world is reduced to nothing else except it. even to name it pain feels disingenuous; in the moment it is simply an all-consuming something. i liken it occasionally to a brightness, or a sort of feeling like a blooming in the center of my chest. sometimes like a screaming that may, in fact, be singing. none of this, of course, does it any justice.

i am sitting down to write again about a thing that itself defies all attempts to capture it. what am i left with? i turn again to the bodymind. is pain not its own sort of language? it colors and defines my days, my hours, the way i walk lopsided now even with a cane. a doctor asks me to describe my pain and looks confused when i speak it, but understands when i flinch away from her touch. her flesh finds in mine an explanation that neither of us have given words, yet it exists in our bodyminds real as anything else. that proves something, doesn’t it?

i am reaching here towards an explanation that begins to coalesce around the divine. what unthinkable thing exists beyond the bounds of language yet is understood by those it touches in some near-alien kind of way? your guess is as good as mine. i have been saying lately that the times i feel closest to g-d are when i am in the most pain. if you ask me to describe divinity most often the description that rises to be spoken is this: a brightness growing in the center of my chest, or perhaps a screaming that may, in fact, be singing. is it starting to make sense?

this great question now becomes: what language do i have when pain, a constant companion, becomes a caustic acid that has, over months and weeks and years, dissolved my words and thoughts and mind into an uncertain, incomprehensible haze? sometimes it feels as though there’s a secret place within me where everything else is distant and muted. it’s here i retreat to when i am tired of trying to force myself to come up with new and delicate metaphors to describe my world. it’s here that my bodymind comes alive inside itself. i can feel it most deeply then, this language-without-language. it sounds wrong to admit that i relish in this feeling, when i can sink into the place where this brightness lives and allow it to reduce me to nothingness. it is here that the waves come to head and crash on the shore. if i could live forever in this dream-state i would. but the world of words is an insistent place and for all my efforts it will not leave me in peace, so i am once again trying to bridge the gap.

it is one thing to understand pain-words and another entirely to understand pain as a living, breathing thing that inhabits the spaces in your mind where words should be. there is no guide, no translator, no rosetta stone. there is no speaking and no listening. i am back where i started. writing, deleting, writing again. i cannot tell you what these days are like, when words fail me and i sink into the liminal, ethereal place of pain, where nobody else can find me. at the end of the day all of this is just as indescribable as it was before.

published july 21, 2021

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