Originally, I was only trying to explain the subtler nuances of the moment to my friend.
In the explicated memory, I had quit smoking weeks previously and my sense of smell, deadened by the habit, had returned all at once, all while I slept in on a March morning. I knew something had changed, but hadn’t yet identified it as an olfactory reinvigoration. Later that afternoon, under a wet city sidewalk sky, I shambled across a desolate and sloppy Ohio plain, alone and soul-moldering. When the wind picked up and buffeted me from behind, I rolled my shoulders inside my coat, prepared to become discomfited in addition to being disgruntled, but my malaise was preempted when I noticed it. That wind—air chilled by blowing over the vastness of a nearby frozen bayou, air now so cold it felt in my lungs as if it were composed of the absurdest molecules: geometric figures comprised solely of corners—filleted my throat and nose with every inhalation and the stinging retreated only when I became distracted by something else. It, that something else: a piggyback scent; redolent, sweet and round. At first, it was subtle but potent, like a kiss between two truant teenagers, inexperienced and excited tongues only present enough to put to bed any notion of absence. Then it exploded inside of me, koala-hugging my cilia. I couldn’t avoid or ignore it, stuck in my nose, and I could hardly believe I’d missed it heretofore.
Human, I knew what I had to do: I had to name it.
A thick and aerodynamic odor, music familiar but too faint at first to figure out, I stopped in my steps to consider it. Pensive and mesmerized, I sank past the soles of my sneakers in the pale, clay slop beneath me before I solved the scintillating riddle. Pine: the ruddy, prickly and velveteen scent of natural pine. I turned and spotted the source. On the outskirts of that icy quagmire, a small copse of trees stood in the spillway of scree that had dribbled down with the first thaw of the season from the nearby slope of a construction site. I smiled wider than I had in half a year: I never would have caught the scent if I had still been smoking. A stolen singular moment, I pocketed it and slogged away.
A simple moment, useful as payment of the sometimes steep toll for a serene smile, over the years I had sometimes summoned it, sometimes been surprised by it when fleeting recall jettisoned it to the surface of a murkier consciousness. It became, however, one-thousandfold more complicated when I detailed it to the brunette on my bed that night. At first blush, it didn’t seem the story had touched her as I felt it should, and so I elaborated. Stutteringly and with winding, wild gesticulations, I gasped my way through the tale again and tracked her green glassy eyes for the faintest hint of a smile. “It was just barely there,” I said, “until I figured it out. What it was. It was almost nothing and then it positively reeked of pine.”
“Reeked?” she asked me.
“Well, I suppose that’s not quite the right word. I mean it was overwhelming. The fragrance. Overwhelming, but good. I suppose I could have said ‘redolent,’ but who uses a word like that out loud?” I replied.
“You could,” she said.
Here I must interject and, albeit briefly, digress. Had anyone else suggested such a thing, this essay would never have been written. I’d have ambled on through my evening adventures and, if my audience hadn’t been amused by my Ohio pine story, I’d have arrogantly assumed the fault was theirs. But this brunette, this exclamation of a woman was the prime mover of a half-decade in my life. It was for her I eventually enrolled and achieved my collegiate degrees. It was for her my drink of choice became scotch, rocks; for her I read Gustave Flaubert and Beckett’s Unnamable oeuvre. In my mind, she never uttered an accidental syllable; I would, on occasion, reply to offhand comments she had made months earlier as if no time at all had passed. In those instances, she seldom remembered the statement I’d spent so long considering. I had sworn to myself to tell her nothing but the barest truth about absolutely everything and had not, at the outset, expected what an exhausting pledge that could be. Absolutely everything, it turns out, requires a great deal of ponderousness and research. She was, in short, the one I spent six years surviving; my Beatrice, the Compeyson to my Miss Havisham. She was, in short, the one that that got away and, in the process, took most of me with her.
And so when she suggested that I could be such a man as might use the word ‘redolent’ in casual conversation, I studiously considered the reasons why I hadn’t. Some time later, I replied.
“I suppose,” I said, “my vocabulary is tragically skewed to the negative.” And it’s true, I realize. It is.
Words are so precious to me, so important. When I commit them to the page, when I offer them to the ether in the recounting of some story, I select so carefully. I fancy myself quite the raconteur and choose the component pieces of my sentences as a oenophile selects her most important libations; I discriminate and pair in accordance with the mood of my palate, the palate of my company and the inherencies of the ordeal at hand.
Picture the mind, the soul, the consciousness—whatever your preference for nomenclature—as an all-encompassing black cloth at birth. Every insight, every single sensation and emotion creates a void, a hole in the fabric of the interpretive experiential consciousness of its receiver and, if one takes the time to scrutinize, one finds that said hole has a most specific shape. If a man delineates his every endeavor, he quickly learns that the barest effort reveals those perforations in consciousness as conspicuous absences—those vacancies one tends to notice more readily than coexistent presences—as determinative and consequential negative spaces. And with suitable scrutiny, one eventually becomes capable of reading these die-cut shapes, this mirror writing on the mind, the soul; one eventually comes to recognize the curled, prehensile tail of a lowercase j, the flying buttresses of a capital M, the insistently elegant and baroque coattails of a lowercase q.
With suitable scrutiny and the requisite desideratum, one discovers that each experience and imagining in a life is only ideally conveyed by its own very specific and perfect lexicon. Read as: things, experiences, feelings, imaginings lend themselves to words, but not just any old words.
(It should be stated here, that I am essentially a Derridean in the sense that I believe language is a construct without center, that language is always in play and is, in fact, the way in which we construct our experiences—pretty much the precise opposite of what I will continue here to insist upon. On my more cerebral days, I will rail against the Saussurian idea of the Signified and, hence, raise the Jolly Roger on the good ship Signifier. All of this, I believe, is ultimately true. But I am seldom concerned with how things are. I am concerned with how we experience them. With how they feel. As all extant human beings were born into a society, a language, I’m forced to assert that language is an existential phenomenon: its existence precedes both its essence and our own essence; that the words of one’s language are, in fact, floating around in the air, so to speak, for one to notice suddenly, as if each word was a constellation, every letter a star. So even though Derrida and I assert opposing truths, they are identical and corresponding truths. Thus, I continue unapologetically and reproof my readers by saying that if this paragraph was or will be upsetting or confounding to you, then you shouldn’t have or should never read it.)
Words, to me, are tumblers in the complex combination lock of communication. Only a single number selected from the dial’s face at the appropriate moment will allow the proper gnashing of brass teeth to occur; only that one single number among one-hundred, one-million, will allow the message to pass either unadulterated or at all. One number selected from myriad choices allows true communion, interiority, comprehension. A well-composed sentence allows a coupling every bit as intimate as a slow fuck. Language, at its best, is the longhand of telepathy. And, to extend the metaphor, not only do I fancy myself a perhaps often hapless raconteur, but I aspire to be a safecracker.
Once, during my salad days, I suggested that nothing is ineffable. That everything is explicable. That if you find you can’t accurately describe something, you’re not trying hard enough. I was headed in this direction: a crafty safecracker can open any lock, can pilfer any strongbox and spread the wealth inside. For a good long time, I believed this. Experience, emotion, imagination: these are locked-up loot that only the scofflaw storyteller, the logomaniac, the sesquipedalian can steal, then carefully and accurately convey. Now more seasoned, I remain undecided on the truth of the former and have become, if anything, more insistent on the latter. Regardless, language, I think, is more complicated than all of that. These days, though still certainly a naïf of sorts, I find myself supposing that we, ourselves, are the safes and those words we use, use, and reuse are the permissive symbols scratched by the hash marks on our dials; the words to which we most adamantly cleave are those that allow for the proper placement of the tumblers that open the strongboxes where our souls are secreted away.
People, I think, want more than anything to be understood. To be felt from the inside. People, I think, are simultaneously horrified by and hopeful for real interiority, true communion. And people, I think, portray themselves (most of them do so unconsciously, of course) as if drawing a map to buried treasure and a reader’s or listener’s close attention to any given individual’s vocabulary makes that reader or listener an able cartographer. Listening to someone about whom I care, I find myself perpetually preoccupied by questions. Why that word? What does that word mean to her? Connotation, in the end, is so much more important than denotation.
A boy raised in Kansas loses his father to a thresher and finds that the word wheat tastes bitter and unpalatable, tastes different on his tongue than it appears to taste to the city girl from Illinois when she utters it. A girl who finds a real and urgent need to use the word malady at least once during every one of your infrequent exchanges is either too acquainted with or terrified of meeting pestilence and pain. That brunette on my bed, the one who spurred all this articulation, she found a way to work the word asymptotic into our every dialogue. Portentous. A word used and reused: the careful reader can see clearly where the writer pays his attentions. To the most careful and considerate of readers and listeners, every paragraph or conversation is comprehensible as a collection of sentences, sure, but most intriguingly revelatory when viewed microscopically, as a collection of holophrastic communiqués.
My vocabulary is tragically skewed to the negative, it’s true. Whatever else I can say of her, the brunette was perceptive and smart—much smarter than I. And, like those hypothetical individuals from two paragraphs above, I was and remain simultaneously horrified by and hopeful for real interiority, true communion. When, years ago, I shared these reflections and revelations with that perplexing girl who so often found her way to my bed, she responded with another of her accidental koans, about which I deliberated for six or so weeks. “You have favorite words,” she said. “I’ve noticed that both reading you and listening to you.” That fiery Irish pixie, the enigmatic instigator, she never told me what they were. Post those six or so weeks, I returned to her with my short list.
Threnody, husk, hibakusha; rubicon, triage, sobriquet. Deleterious, palimpsest, halcyon. Revenant. Oubliette. Denouement.
If I were forced to anoint the elect amongst the vast congregation of my vocabulary, they would be those. That dirty dozen, they’re the sounds and concomitant concepts to which I, admitted logomaniac, most romantically cleave. I find them aesthetically beautiful: typeset in serif fonts, as reverberations titillating my tympanic membranes. I savor the tingle of my tongue where their interdental fricatives are concerned; I often close my eyes to enjoy the self-kiss of their plosives; I absolutely live for the silent but never forgotten t in denouement.
I find these words ludicrously useful. They are the mirror images of the negative space experience, emotion, imagination has cut from the black cloth of my infant consciousness; they are those words which I find so often pertinent and perpetually intriguing. They are the brightest constellations in the linguistic space I can see over my English horizons. They are the words I most favor and, like an apostolic following composed solely of Judases, they are the words which betray me. The elect of my short list: Used in the right order at the right time, I suppose, these words would open my heart like Tolkien’s cellar door, uncover its musty recesses in the light of day and lay its grotesqueries plain for all to see.
Threnody, husk, hibakusha; rubicon, triage, sobriquet. Deleterious, palimpsest, halcyon. Revenant. Oubliette. Denouement.
My vocabulary truly is tragically skewed. Indeed, these words are by and large dark, moribund and melancholic. But to me this means merely that they have hidden depths; they maintain a certain mystique in my mind and, thus, are endlessly entertaining. They are sexually inventive lovers who keep me crawling excitedly back long after others have dully given it up. What can I say: as a boy, my favorite action figures—the only ones with which I played—were always the villains and, in the kingdom of makebelieve, I made them heroes.
But I wonder still what sort of sentence could be strung together with those words. I wonder: if each person alive said one single thing in summation of themselves, what ghastly and compact communiqué would I be capable of sending forth with only these twelve as my emissaries? If the words a person will use, use and reuse are actually the holophrastic apostles I assume them to be and have personified them as; if the most ubiquitous words in the transcript of my life are truly those proverbial numbers on the dial which crack the combination lock to the hidden fifth chamber of my heart; then I wonder: what am I really saying? What rough beast sleeps inside?
