The following is an excerpt from my 2018 bookBlessed Twilight: The Life of Vincent van Gogh; however, the words are his from a letter he wrote to his brother Theo in 1888. Often, an artist who excels in one genre dos so in others as well; Vincent was no exception. I believe his writing to be as artful as his paintings.
Vincent van Gogh: March 30, 1853-July 29, 1890
From a letter to Theo:
It certainly is a strange phenomenon that all of the artists, poets, musicians, writers, and painters are unfortunate in material things—the happy ones as well. Maupassant is a fresh example of that. It brings the eternal question: Is the whole of life visible to us or isn’t it rather that on this side of death we see one hemisphere only? Painters, taking them only, dead and buried, speak to the next generation and very often several after in their work. Is that all or is there more besides? In a painter’s life, death perhaps is not the hardest thing there is.
The earth has been thought to be flat. It was true, and is today, that between Paris and Arles, it is. But science has proven the world is round and nobody contradicts that nowadays. But notwithstanding all of this people persist in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life too is probably round and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present. For my part, I know nothing of it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on a map of France? If we take a train to get to Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtably true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive, we cannot get to a star any more than while we are dead we can take the train. So it seems to me possible that cholera and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion just as steamboats and railways are the terrestrial means.
To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.
I feel more and more that we must not judge God on the basis of this world; it is a study that didn’t come off. What can you do in a study that has gone wrong if you are fond of the artist? You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue. But you have a right to ask for something better. It is only a master that can make such a muddle as this, since then we have a right to hope that we’ll see the same creative hand get even with itself. And this life of ours, so much criticized and for such good and exalted reasons—we must not take it for anything more than what it is and go on hoping that in some other life we’ll see a better thing than this.
This past Monday morning I returned to classes at Old Dominion University for the first time since the day before the shooting which killed ODU professor Lt. Col Brandon Shah. On Thursday, March 12th, a gunman entered Professor Shah’s room in Constant Hall, where he taught ROTC students, and killed him. Classes were cancelled, Spring Break followed, and everyone left campus for ten days or so to process—or not process—what happened.
During break we received a stream of emails from the college president, the dean, the counselors, a colleague who has training and experience in trauma recovery,and more, all updating us on the actions of the college and reminding us of the availability of counselors, some of whom were set up across the street in the Chartway Arena. When I returned on Monday, a colleague sat with a counselor at a table in the lobby of our building and made themselves clearly available to anyone who wished to talk. They handed out blue ribbons of support, and their presence along with similar setups throughout campus reminded everyone that not only did something happen here, but not everyone will handle it the same way.
The very notion of yet another school shooting is actually somewhat abstract when it doesn’t occur in front of you; when the information you receive comes from the same devices which deliver the weather and Fortnight updates. While the incident occurred just a football field away, it is apparently only relative to those who were there when it happened, otherwise it might as well have been across the country.
At a table in the hallway on the floor where my classes meet sat a chaplain who wore a vest stating as much. I introduced myself and asked if anyone had spoken to him, out of curiosity. “They’re still processing” he said, which meant no. But my fears were about to be realized. They’re not processing this at all.
In some of those emails we received, experts, including counselors trained in post-traumatic situations, suggested how to discuss the events with students who might still be in denial, scared, in defense mode, or worse. One of the suggestions was to simply make students aware that it’s okay to talk about it but not necessarily talk about it then. In other words, business as usual but with a sense of awareness to the tragedy which played out just two hundred feet to the north.
I decided to go to my classes, pull my chair into the center of the room, and talk.
For too many years too many times on the news I have heard so many reports of how “counselors will be available” and “assistance will be available throughout the campus” or high school, or elementary school, and now this school, ODU, which is both one of my alma maters as well as my place of employment. Nine years of higher education and thirty-seven years as a college professor, yet this is the first time I experienced the presence of those aids. That’s a good thing, of course. I returned to campus and scattered throughout the buildings and outdoor areas were tables, counselors with identification about their necks indicating who they are, chaplains in yellow “Chaplain” vests. Blue Ribbons, Blue wrist bands. Boxes of Klenex.
I met one of the trauma specialists who introduced himself to me before class, who told me in front of everyone that he will be in the hallway if anyone wanted to talk.
I pulled my chair to the center of the room and I asked how their break had been, who had traveled, who stayed home. No one was going to bring it up, so I did. I said, “Listen, I didn’t know Lt. Colonel Shah. I have taught in Constant Hall several times and I know where the classroom is, but I was home when this happened and this is my first time back. But this hits close to home, doesn’t it? It does for me.”
Silence, of course. Honestly, at nineteen I don’t think I’d have a clue what to say either. So I put it out there. “Does anyone want to say anything about how this effected them?”
Oh my:
One girl was pissed because her math tutor is in that building and she had to miss her session that day and she has a midterm and isn’t doing well.
One guy shrugged and said he heard about it and was sorry for the loss, but it didn’t really affect him at all. “I’m not in ROTC.”
Another: Shit happens.
Laughter.
Complete indifference. It’s a reality show episode. It’s a reel on Instagram. It’s a minute ago so move on already.
During a break I asked the counselor, who could hear the entire exchange, if this was simply denial and some sort of defense mechanism, but he said he didn’t think so. That sure, for some of them, they truly are still in the denial stage and haven’t processed it enough yet to understand the implications of what happened, but for a growing number in his experience, the new norm is indifference. It isn’t a lack of compassion or even empathy; those are situational responses and they’re not necessarily ready to dial them up in a writing class. It is more or less “just something else that happened last week.”
Inside I wondered why everyone wasn’t outraged that one of their professors was gunned down closer to us in that class than their dorm rooms were. It’s not easy being a student today. Aside from the barrage of instructions and technology and demands, they are also part of a generation which grew up with shootings as daily news, guns in backpacks, violence as an alternative behavior, and media from movies to games which inundate us all with killings and destruction as entertainment.
I thought about one of my previous jobs as professor at Saint Leo University on the Little Creek Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach, where nearly all my students in thirty years were retiring or active-duty military who had served in the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and some in Vietnam. I remembered how some didn’t come home, and some came home unable to function as they had before. I remembered one student who had been in three of my classes who went home from class one night and shot himself. But I always, absolutely always, felt safe in their presence, on that base—one of the most secure in the world. It never crossed my mind that anyone would come into the room and shoot me. But there, they all had stories like that, horrible and unforgettable stories which redefined their life’s narrative and reset the trajectory of their existence. At St Leo’s one time in 2009 or 2010, we talked about an incident in Camp Liberty, Iraq, when a solder went into a training camp during a seminar and killed five soldiers serving with him. In that class, everyone opened up about how they felt; they had been there and knew the value of sharing those emotions. On that night, one solider said, quietly, “I was there. I was at the clinic that day.”
The entire class at St Leo’s talked for an hour about how he processed it. Was still processing it.
Monday, I went back into class and some read their phones, some stared at the counselor, wondering, perhaps, if they should talk to him. I wondered if anyone wondered if they were supposed to feel more disturbed than they do and are worried about that.
I sat down and after some teaching wrapped up class. But before I stood up I said, “Listen. Seriously, everyone, please.” They were uncharacteristically present. “You’ve got three or four other classes still. It’s quite possible that you’re going to be in class next to someone who was in the room that day.” I waited. “It is possible that someone next to you in the next class was in the next room and heard the gunfire, heard the screams and chaos as other students your age subdued and killed the assailant. They may want to talk. They may just say that they were there, or maybe they’ll say more than that. They might want you to listen. So if that happens, listen—take the time to let them talk. Don’t say “I understand.” We don’t. Just say you’re sorry and listen more.
Two students broke down. A few others sat longer than they should, lingering like maybe they did want to say something after all.
Later the counselor told me that since they weren’t there, the indifference was prevalent. But when I suggested some friends of theirs might have been, certainly someone in a class might have been, their empathy rose to the surface and it became, perhaps for the first time, quite real to them indeed.
The world is a war zone, a failed project. These students sitting through their writing course with another four years ahead of them before “life actually starts” as someone once told me, are in it for real, wanting to change things, wanting to be part of something. I was glad to know that when it came to their peers, they were very much negatively affected by the possibility of violence.
Because they don’t know if at some point some other disturbed person will confront someone they know in some class and kill them. They do not know. Two weeks ago it seemed a mostly ridiculous notion.
Now it is part of their narrative. This is not the education they came here for.
I’ve run out of words. Out of ideas. Out of patience and interest and desire. I’ve run out of stories to share and any sense that any of those stories are remotely worth writing about to begin with. I’ve grown tired of getting it right, of editing, of restructuring and developing and trimming down. I’m over the clarity thing, finding the right noun, the more specific verb, eliminating obtuse modifiers, over the placement of pronouns and split infinitives.
I’ve said what I wanted to say.
Except to say this:
Every instance is miraculous to me. Every nuance of life, the breezes and stillness of a summer night, the aroma of honeysuckle, lavender in the air, the yellow of forsythia, the hints of orange and rust low on the horizon. All of it and more of it strikes me speechless and as often as I’ve tried to write about this I couldn’t do it justice. Time and again I ripped up or deleted the prose out of protest to my own lack of focus and ability. I should have been a photographer, bought the equipment and peddled my pictures to magazines and couples on the beach just before dawn–you know the shot, two people in the sand leaning against each other watching the sky lighten in the east. Before cellphones, couples remembered the moment by their presence, but now the moment is ever present because of the picture from the phone, so they no longer know if they recall that moment or simply the endless stream of “love this picture of you two” comments which flood their feed. But what of the shot from behind? The one of the two of them three feet from the water’s edge when the quick ray of dawn hits that small solstice space between their otherwise entangled lives. I could have done that instead of writing about dead relatives and other love songs.
It turns out what I’m best at is simply being present, watching the river run past, a heron searching for minnows and the osprey teaching her young to fly. I have mastered the art of taking it all in and the constant state of miraculous now which engulfs us every moment. But I tried writing instead because I couldn’t make money simply being alive, though I came close; but I could make money writing, teaching about writing, showing people some places I’ve been and what happened along the way, hoping they would sit back and say, “Yes, I know what you mean.”
Instead, I’m out of stories. I am starting to believe my last book took forty years to write not because it was so difficult but because I knew once that story was told I would have nothing left to say.
The story is told and I was right: I have nothing left to say.
Except to say this:
I have been working on a book about teaching. Well, it’s not about teaching, it’s about the best of and worst of what happens when you spend thirty plus years with twenty-year-olds and some of them go on to wonderous things while others die by their own hand, or their ex’s hand, or the random drop of evil. So I’m dealing with a publisher about that manuscript, but my mind is entangled in something that is a bigger deal to me, and that’s the “who gives a damn” factor which plagues writers from time to time, only this time the plague has spread into sentence structure and transitions and now its damned near everywhere. Even the pronouns are complaining; it’s always “I hate” this and “You suck at” that. And I’m also stage-deep in a play, a tragic play about the glory of hope, a one person play which I’m planning to premier in upstate New York but I ran into the “this kind of sucks” part of the writing process and if the book were not out I’d totally use the play as an excuse to avoid the book and most likely would finish the play, but instead the book is out and the play is pointless now. And my book about traveling, about the philosophy of being somewhere for a week or a month and being 100 percent present so that years later we remember every moment—that book, it is out there waiting for me to gather all the words and slap them into the correct order. But not today. It’s rainy and windy and there’s a possibility of tornados today, so maybe next week after coffee one morning.
You see what I mean? It just might be that all the other books and essays and readings and articles I’ve done in the past thirty plus years was a way to avoid finishing the book, and it worked, but now that that the book is done and out, everything else seems to have been a distraction from what I wanted to do originally, before the writing, before the planning and scheming and blind ambitions of a teenager, and that was simply to “live in the world, not inside my head” with thanks to Jackson for the line—to just take it all in at this rest stop as I pass through nature. Wordless. Anonymous. Present.
Maybe I’ll just head back to Spain.
After I get back from Oregon of course.
And Paris.
I feel as if my point—if I ever had one—has been made so I have no reason to go on with these unalphabetically disorganized letters.
Except to say this:
Everything I do seems to be prep work for something that I have not yet figured out. Or, to return to Jackson again, “It seems I’m just a day away from where I ought to be.”
Letty’s birthday would be Wednesday. Dave’s next week. Mom’s and Dad’s in two months, Dan’s a month ago, Cole’s in ten days. I’ve written about all of them. And about Joe, whose birthday was the day my last book, the one about him, kinda sorta, launched. So it can often feel like I’m all out of words, but this time it’s extreme, like the alphabet hasn’t even been invented yet.
But then a hawk flew by my window here at Aerie, and I read something about the Oregon coast, and I saw a clip of Lady Gaga singing “La Vie en Rose,” and I woke up. See, there’s no such thing as writer’s block, there’s only the lack of wind and the empty sails and that sense the doldrums are a permanent state of being. Then, softly at first like a fragment, like a clause, the wind picks up, then more, and suddenly you’re sailing wing on wing through compound sentences and everything, I mean all of it, falls into place and, as Dan notes, “There’s nothing left to say but come on morning.”
Sandy stands at the cash register waiting for Jimmy to finish pumping gas. She knows he will come in and ask for two packs of Marlboro Lights, make some off-color comment, look her up and down, smile his creepy grin, and wink as he leaves, calling, “See you later, Babe.” So she gets the cigarettes ready and is glad for customers getting coffee and picking out food from the grill. She doesn’t need to be nice to him for very long if there’s a line.
Harry is standing at the rack of novelties near the door; trinkets such as lighters that look like fishing poles, key chains with toy turtles, and some stuffed animals on the lower shelves where kids can see them and grab them with slushie-coated hands and the parents will have to pay. Harry reads the headlines in the paper while sipping his coffee which he rests on top of the stack of Gatorade cases, and when it gets crowded, as it does every morning around seven, he carries his coffee and paper to the counter, places down exactly two dollars and eight cents (never in her hand, few people are polite enough to actually hand her the change, she thinks), says, “Thank you Sandy,” and walks out to talk to the younger watermen in the parking lot gathered around Billy Ray’s truck backed up to the pile of bags of logs for sale. It’s like this every morning. If it rains, they sit on the logs under the overhang.
“See you tomorrow, Harry,” Sandy calls back to eighty-something Harry, and is sorry he leaves before sixty-year-old Jimmy comes in since Harry usually engages the creep long enough to distract him so that by the time he turns his attention back to Sandy’s twenty-five-year old body, she’s waiting on other customers.
Jimmy enters and gets to the counter just before another customer, Patty, with her coffee and a small bag of donuts, as usual. Sandy puts the cigarette packs in front of him and rings them up. “Anything else, Jimmy?”
“Oh darling!” he says, a slight sound of drunk in his slur, but it’s just his way. He turns to Patty, “Look at how my girl knows me! No darling, just the cigs today.” He pays and starts to talk when Sandy looks toward Patty, who places her donut bag on the counter in front of Jimmy. “See you later, Babe,” he says and leaves, a chill running down Sandy’s spine.
Every damn day.
Tracy the manager mingles with the customers near the cooler getting their cases of Corona and Bud Light and only once in a while some dark beer worth the money, with her small iPad strapped to her neck like a server’s tray at the old fifties style roller skating drive-in restaurants. She scans sandwiches and bagged pickles and some small cakes. The chips and soft drinks and alcohol are counted when the men who carried those cases in and out deliver them, like the chip guy, Gus, who rolls in six or seven cases of varieties of bagged potato chips in familiar and disgusting flavors. He leans on the boxes waiting for Tracy or Sandy or anyone willing to take a few minutes away from the constant line of customers at the counter so they can count the delivery and he can be on his way. “I’m leaving in three minutes” he might mutter sometimes, but, really, no he’s not. It just makes him sound more in control instead being forced to wait for the old woman at the register holding a twenty-dollar bill who seems to gain gratification by standing over the lottery tickets for far too long, saying, “Sandy, I’ll take a number three. How much is that? Oh, no, no. Maybe instead a number twenty-five. None? Oh okay, well let me see then…” and a line forms, so Sandy will say, “I’ll be right back,” and she counts Gus’s bags, sends him on his way, opens the other register and gets others on their way, sips her Red Bull and moves back to the old woman who still hasn’t landed on a number she likes. Eventually, the woman says, “Oh just give me the number three anyway. I came in for that so I should know what it costs!” and everyone in line lets out a sigh of disgust.
It is eight-thirty am. It should slow a bit now, briefly.
The last customer to check out for now is Casey. A “true gentleman” Sandy always says, both to him and to her coworkers who have a penchant for making fun of every single person who enters the store. “He always buys the same damn thing,” one will say of whoever just left. Or, “He never buys the same thing twice.” “He is such a smoker!” “What an alcoholic!” “Dear God! I wish he’d shower! He smells like fish all the friggin time!” and on and on. Sandy stays silent, most of the time, except for the more than occasional exhales of exasperation when dealing with guys, and the occasional woman, hitting on her.
But there are some, like Casey, who make it worthwhile. He’s always polite and always has a compliment. Today it was, “My Sandy, you really have beautiful eyes, and today they seem more alive. Enjoy your day!” and she smiles. Casey isn’t that old, fifties perhaps, still too old for Sandy. But there’s something about him that makes anyone who hears him know he isn’t trying to pick her up. He is just a nice guy. There are others, too, both men and women, a scattering of fine customers who like it when she works and make it known to Tracy. Part of it is how sharp she is and how she can clearly correct a problem almost instantly, and part of it is her pleasant disposition and even-temper despite those problems and despite the jerks.
There are moments when their rudeness gets the best of her. She might ring something up twice by accident, or, worse, tell someone they are out of something the customer is determined to have, and, of course, it is Sandy’s fault and they’ll let her know what a crappy human she is. Once, when she came in to work late, Brenda, a co-worker, though usually on a different shift, asked if everything was okay at home, knowing it almost always isn’t since Sandy’s boyfriend, Tim, usually rags on her each morning. Sandy said, “Yeah, sure, Tim let me know how lucky we are now that we must wear masks since my face looks gross in the morning. I cried for twenty minutes.”
“Geez,” Brenda said, “you can get that abuse here!” and walked out to head home after her shift, but when it slowed down and Sandy stood sipping her second Red Bull and watched a woman fumble with the gas pump, she thought, No, no. At least here, Casey comes in, or some of the other guys who always say how nice I look. Or that lawyer who comes in sometimes and tells me this job is fine, but I have it in me to do so much more. And even Jimmy, the pig, clearly thinks I’m attractive. There’s some good here, some chance to feel good about myself. Not at home. Luckily, she is usually too busy to think about it since her sharpness and friendliness placed her right on the busiest parts of the day. No, she likes it here. She is needed and appreciated here and it gives her a sense of purpose, which, at twenty-five, can be gratifying, but, as Sandy is beginning to figure out, can be a death sentence. For now, though, she enjoys her job.
Until Ben comes in at noon for his shift, the POS as he’s referenced when he is not in the store. Not because Ben isn’t nice—he calls all the men “Brother” and all the women “Ma’am,” no matter the age—something left over from his military service and subsequent jail time, his early release for good behavior, and his subsequent non-violated probation. But he is known in the convenience-employee crowd both here and at several stores up and down this stretch of highway as the Piece of Shit because, as Brenda likes to point out, “No one, anywhere, ever, knows more than this prick.” How to do inventory, how to check people out faster, how to pick the best lottery tickets (“you really have to watch the news to see what’s going on and find the equivalent reference in the cards”), how to lose weight, how to talk to your boyfriend at home when he is constantly putting you down, or in the case of Brenda, how to raise three boys properly since he raised a teenage girl for at least a couple of the years he was around. He knows it all. What’s more, they will point out, it doesn’t matter how correct one of the employees is about any given subject; he absolutely must outdo. If Brenda tells a customer that the beef and cheese tacos on the grill are fresh, Ben needs to let the customer know not only the same, “Yes, Ma’am, they are absolutely fresh, freshest we’ve had in a while,” but he has to add his imagined contribution to that: “I was just telling Brenda we need to make sure we only serve the freshest ones so she went ahead and made them for me just now,” even though that never happened and he has less seniority than anyone else in the store save Old Peg who comes for four hours every day to make coffee and clean the counters, and has been there since it was a “Dave’s Stop and Go,” back in the sixties when there was nowhere else in town to get anything to eat except the IGA.
Sandy, to the point, does not like working with Ben. It isn’t the work—Ben is efficient and can be left alone to do most anything, and, she likes say, at least he can count, unlike many who have spun through this job. No, she doesn’t look forward to shifts that overlap Ben’s because he both gives her a headache and makes way too many personal comments to her, especially about Tim. Tim may be an asshole, she thinks, but he’s my asshole.
Other than that, they all get along well. Ben has to be there because no one else will hire him, and this is walking distance to his home, albeit a long walk, and he doesn’t drive. He is there because he accepts his fate that this will pay the bills and he has learned to live on what me makes. Brenda is terribly smarter than the job, smarter than this life she’s living with overdue rent and three kids who constantly need things, one of whom is special needs, but she knows that, and has, to her credit most people say, taken it on one hundred percent. She will be manager someday and is already assistant, which means she makes a bit more money than she used to, and is given more responsibilities, like access to the larger bill section of the safe, the ability to check in deliveries and make orders, and even the ability to hire if they need help. Tracy is there because she started there in high school, worked her way up, proved to be efficient, honest, and desperately even-keeled in any situation, and never had ambitions to do more, though managing a corporate convenience store is demanding enough—she loves running the store, gets paid well, and even won Manager of the Year at the annual corporate convention in Orlando, which came with it a generous financial reward. She treats the other workers like offspring, and she is still young enough at fifty to work for many more years. Her and Brenda make a great team.
Then there’s Sandy who simply shouldn’t be there, knows she shouldn’t be there, everyone else except Tim knows she shouldn’t be there, but like so many twenty-somethings in the last twenty-something years, had trouble emotionally moving much past high school, just eight miles away. She has always lived in the small town, knows everyone and everyone knows her, has been with her boyfriend forever, and is respected and appreciated by Brenda, Tracy, and everyone that comes in, and a position like that in a small town on a peninsula far from any city doesn’t always happen. God knows what it might be like down in Richmond or up in DC, she thinks. No, this works. “Someday” is her mantra. Someday. “If Tracy cared about her,” one regular, a lawyer who works over in Richmond, said one day to Harry at the Gatorade cases, “she’d fire Sandy and force her to move on, find her potential.” But Harry has observed far too much for far too long, and since the lawyer has only been in the area for fifteen years, he’s still a come-lately and doesn’t know better. But Harry does, and told him plainly, “Tracy isn’t the problem. Not even Tim’s the problem. Sandy’s the problem.” They both nodded at that cold truth.
Sandy glances at the clock to note her shift ends soon, so she offers to help Tracy do inventory after work for some overtime. Tracy says okay, not because she needs the help or because Sandy is that ambitious, though both of those things are true, but because Tracy understands Sandy simply doesn’t want to go home.
At the coffee counter, Peg wipes down a spill and complains about how messy everyone is these days and it wasn’t like this even during the sixties, and she starts ranting about how much more courteous customers used to be, and an afternoon is dedicated to this subject. Every day it is a different rant—sometimes the way people are dressed or not dressed, sometimes the cursing so common in convenience store lines, and sometimes about how the shelves are left in disarray. Her voice grows louder to outdo the rattling of the drink machines, and Sandy regrets her offer to stay noting a headache coming on. Ben comes over to explain to Peg how to better clean the counter, but Peg, the woman in her eighties who just a few days earlier complained about the cursing, tells Ben to shut the fuck up, and Tracy and Sandy laugh so hard they lean on each other, and suddenly Sandy knows that is exactly why she stayed; the laughter she doesn’t have at home. It takes her mind off of her pointless relationship. But, damnit, she thinks. It’s hard to get motivated when everyone’s fine with where they are now! The watermen are content. The old men and women who come in for coffee and lottery tickets are all content. Her co-workers, her boyfriend, hell, even Jimmy is content. She sees this and knows being surrounded by so many satisfied people is going to destroy her. She needs to quit. For now, though, she counts egg salad sandwiches.
This piece was originally written for the Jewish Mother Sessions with Tim Seibles, and then published in several journals and the collection Fragments: Flash non-Fiction. It has since been anthologized twice. It crawled out of one of my thumb drives this afternoon.
A
BCDEFGHIJK
LMNOP
QRSTUVWXY
Z
26 letters.
That’s it.
In the beginning. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. To be or not to be—that one just six letters. Jesus wept—seven.
I can’t write, my students say; my mother said; my very own demons say when something needs to be said but I’m at a loss of words. The history of English has turned and spun back on itself, argued with endings and double negatives, trampled meaning, treasured nuances, made murderers of us all, and unearthed muses to slipknot a string of letters, tie together thoughts like popcorn for a Christmas tree, individual kernels only able to dangle dutifully due to one common thread.
I do. Rest in Peace. Go to Hell. I quit. Fuck you. I love you—7 letters.
The English language, more specifically the alphabet, was not alphabetical at first, made that way in the 1300’s on Syria’s northern coast. Today, we slaughter its beauty with a cacophony of sounds whose aesthetic value is lost in translation while simultaneously softening hardened hearts with poetry and prose for the ages. For nearly a millennium this alphabet whose letters lay the way for understanding in multiple languages, has dictated decrees, is uttered by infants one syllable at a time until by age five they’ve mastered the twenty six consonants and vowels. What circles of wonder are children’s faces when someone’s tongue pushes out “toy” “treat” “your mommy’s here” “your daddy’s home.”
Plato said, “Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because they have to say something”; Socrates said, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” The sins of our fathers forever condemn us to hell but for confession, penance, and absolution.
Forgive me father for I have sinned—14 letters.
Of all the languages on the planet, English has the largest vocabulary at more than 800,000 words, all from those same 26 symbols.
There are roughly forty five thousand spoken languages in the world, about 4500 written today but almost half of them are spoken by less than a thousand people. English, though, is the most common second language on Earth—translate or original, the Magna Carter, The Declaration, The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the tablets tossed by Moses and a death certificate all reassembled versions of the twenty-six.
I have a dream—eight letters.
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country—fourteen.
We the People–seven
Teeter-totter, gummy, Mississippi, and Utah—four.
Billowy is one of only a few seven letter words whose six letters remain alphabetical. Spoon-feed is the longest, at nine letters, whose seven letters are reverse-alphabetical.
We can talk, us English. We can spin a yarn, chew the fat, beat the gums, flap the lips. We have the gift of gab, we run off with the mouth, we can spit it out, shoot the breeze, talk someone’s ears off, or just talk shop, talk turkey, talk until we’re blue in the face, be the talk of the town. We can, for certain, at just seven letters, bullshit.
My point (7 letters) is that (3 letters) sometimes, despite our skills (4 letters) with the English language (6 letters), we are often left, at just six letters, speechless.
Like in the lobby that day.
You texted me well less than 160 characters, which is the alphabet 6.1 times, that you were in the lobby. I stood, lost, staring at strangers, until one more text; seven letters long—turn around.
I had aged twenty three years, you not one. The sun settled through lace curtains and bathed your face, your hair, your smile, my God your smile, and when you saw me, you leaned forward just enough like you used to when we laughed at some private joke, and there, for the first time, I knew I knew nothing about language, that Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, would be worth nothing to me had they been muses in my mind feeding me phrases to capture what I saw when I saw you. There are no words. No language has been invented to allow me enough expression that others can read how I felt, how every moment returned, every hope, every single possibility, the innocence, the honesty, the complete oneness of two. No. It has never, can never be captured with twenty six times twenty six letters.
It isn’t love, exactly, and perhaps some symphonic phrase might come closer then the limitations of language. This is the frustration of poets, the complete sense of ineptitude of writers and lovers throughout history. To define that smile, the slight lean forward, that light through laced curtains at just that moment all those years later. We can’t impose such limitations.
We say hello. We say soon after, perhaps, so long.
a view from this wilderness 