The lack of words to properly express horror or happiness has been experienced for most of us. Whilst being under pressure –like post-traumatic situations– or utterly stressed –as it usually happens in public speech or when romantically proposing to someone– words seem to vanish out of our vocabulary as if some sort of magic had erased them from our mental dictionaries. Under such conditions it would be considered as normal due to the chemistry of our brain. But when such a thing happens to great minds whilst writing literature, poetry or narrative, one has to think about whether language is able neither to evoke nor even to transmit what soul and mind wanted and needed to.
More than a century ago, Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass. By then, he had achieved some experience and his own voice already. Even though, it seems he did not find the words he was looking for in order to express his feelings after the astonishment produced by America’s progress and development in culture, technology and society. His poetry may even sound redundant upon the most patriotic or breaking feelings of rejoice or deepest sorrow due to war or mourning glories of heroism and justice. Thus his words remain unique and pictures of a time when a nation was stepping forward to a future yet unknown.
In the grand constellation of five or six names, under Lincoln’s Presidency, that history will bear for ages in her firmament as making the last life-throbs of secession, and beaming on its dying gasps, Sheridan’s will be bright. One consideration rising out of the now dead soldier’s example as it passes my mind, is worth taking notice of. If the war had continued any long time these States, in my opinion, would have shown and proved the most conclusive military talents ever evidenced by any nation on earth. That they possess’d a rank and file ahead of all other known in points of quality and limitlessness of number are easily admitted. But we have, too, the eligibility of organizing, handling and officering equal to the other. These two, with modern arms, transportation, and inventive American genius, would make the United States, with earnestness, not only able to stand the whole world, but conquer that world united against us.
Whitman wrote of love to each other, of hard work and fine entertainment, of manhood and comradeship, of loyal and fair women, and of patriotic warriors who made a country. But here and there it seems an uncompleted landscape from which one could still expect some secret message or any hint towards an almost prophetic vision about straggles to come.
Years later, a writer from Missouri, Thomas Stearns Eliot, self-exiled to the United Kingdom, looked for different lands and languages and literatures trying, among other objectives, to find those words which America seemed to have denied to him. Yet, Symbolism was also uncompleted to express those experiences and feelings which had leaded the author to a foreign land. Mr. Eliot achieved great compositions and a unique voice of his own, but just like Mr. Whitman’s poems in Leaves of grass, The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock seems to have inner secrets yet to be discovered, thus it seems the poet could neither find nor invent all the words and pictures he needed for one of his greatest creations.
In 1968 the United States faced the event which would change warfare forever. The greatest North Viet Nam military campaign ever in history, which resulted in many casualties and troopers missed in action for both sides. The lost of control of many cities, villages and provinces in South Viet Nam for the U. S., even Saigon fell under control of the Viet Cong –Victor Charlie as phonetically known– forcing the U. S. Military to increment forced recruitment at home and bombing missions in Viet Nam’s countryside.
Whilst these events gained for the V. C. the respect of the U. S. troopers and pilots to the point that many who used to refer to the V. C. combatants as Charlie started to refer to them as Mr. Charles or Sir Charles, American civilians saw the napalm bombing effects on television. Adrienne Rich was one of them, and among others she longed for a way to express her pain and sorrow through words and active action against the war.
Yet, the horror of children being burned to death in Da Nang, Syracuse, Saint George’s, Pyongyang, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Hyères, Veracruz, Mendoza, Montgomery, Bannockburn, Jerusalem or Rome, has been and always will be a reason for the lack of words to properly express indignation, pain, mourning, sorrow and terror after had experienced such things, even through pictures or films.
What happens between us / has happened for centuries / we know it from literature // still it happens // sexual jealousy // out-flung hand / beating bed // dryness of mouth / after panting // there are books that describe all this / and they are useless // You walk into the woods behind a house / there in that country / you find a temple / built eighteen hundred years ago / you enter without knowing / what it is your enter // so it is with us // no one knows what may happen / though the books tell everything // burn the texts said Artaud
She longs for a creative way to depict her frustration after a lack of words, using words, just like a religious person uses prayers or a soldier uses push-ups. Those are the only tools they have. Still, it seems words are not enough to give form in a material way to the complexity of the experience. Just like the prayer who does not achieve understanding for Holocaust. Just like the Marine who does not achieve peace of mind after having lost a friend in battle.
Words, being symbols to represent and interpret reality, when used as coherent and compact concepts of a new language, Symbolism for instance, may fail their object to reinterpret the same reality they are from. Create a new space and time to explore the author’s experiences might be safe and useful in psychoanalysis, but in literature and philosophy it is a risk one always has to take. Given that reality is always far more complex than fiction, if such fiction is used to explain one’s reality, this picture will lack of those details which are the quintessence of life, those for which we have no words to express.
In Physics, one cannot have the picture of a particle, one only knows the particle “exists” because of the effects it has caused around it, in space and time, the way it modifies things around it. Someone told me once that whether one cannot find the exact words to tell anything it is because there was nothing left to say. In Language, one cannot express the things that matter the most such as Love, Hate, Pain, Sorrow, Happiness, and etcetera. Those are the names one uses to qualify an amount of things which modify us one way or the other, as complex compounds one cannot describe by using words. Never the less, the effects achieved by those daemons upon us can be more or less simplified in order to communicate them to others by molding tone, rhythm and sounds, trying to transmit to the Other one’s version of the experience of being alive.
