I'm speechless.
I literally have no words. A meditation on grief and the importance of shutting up sometimes.
I am the writing teacher for the third through fifth grades at a Catholic school. I have no homeroom class, no one group of kids to call “my own,” which means there are times at school when I find myself adrift, lending a hand to whoever happens to need it. The first day of school is one such occasion as homeroom teachers try to establish classroom routines and rules, and not a whole lot of “real” teaching gets done.
Last year, on the first day of school, the fifth grade homeroom teacher asked me to help a particularly needy student. The student, whom I will call William, would need a hand assembling his three-ring binder, especially with inserting labels into the tabs on dividers to signify where he should put papers for each subject. When I got to the classroom at our agreed upon time, William was already hard at work and holding his own with the task, which posed some difficulties for him due to some issues with his fine motor skills. Everything lay neatly on his desk and his handwriting on each label was downright passable. Nonetheless, I approached him and offered my help, and he accepted—but as soon as I did, the boy directly next to him, whom I’ll call Constance, also flagged me .
“Give me a second,” I said to William. “I’ll be right with you.”
I pivoted, answered Constance’s quick question, whatever it was, which couldn’t have taken more than twenty seconds, and turned back to William, who was now looking with a sort of defeated expression at his desk: what had been an adequately managed set of papers and tabs had become a crumpled and disorganized bedlam. It looked like he had tried to fold and insert slip of paper after slip of paper into the binder tabs, and, failing at each attempt, had left them strewn across the surface of his small desk, each one a sad, scrunched up landmark of a minor disappointment.
“William,” I said, a little amused but also taken aback by the sudden mess, “what happened?”
William sat back in his chair, his face resigned. He gestured with his hand halfheartedly at the chaos. Then he said, his tone straightforward, “I don’t know. It’s just the situation.”
An inexact phrase, perhaps, but that’s all that needed to be said. He was exactly right.
A group of friends of mine have recently been trying to think of “millennial phrases” for laughs. I am a millennial, so I am entitled to this. “Ermagerd,” is one. “Sorry not sorry,” is another. “Adulting!” millennials say by way of congratulating themselves for functioning with basic autonomy.
My favorite of these phrases deploy the term, “This.” “So, THIS happened,” millennials say in the captions of their own engagement photos. “This is EPIC,” they say to affirm one another. “So much THIS,” they say in assent—and sometimes, they voice their agreement with an abbreviated version of that: simply, “This.”
I’m troubled by this slothful use of language, even though it has also been a source of entertainment for me and food for my omnipresent appetite for irony. Why would we cut ourselves short with such stunted phrases when we have such a lush and elastic language at our disposal? When we can go to our Romantic noses with words like “cornucopia” and “antiquated,” or to our Germanic throats with “flack” and “prattle,” why are we stuck in such lazy shorthand as “I can’t even”?
I taught writing at the undergraduate level to earn my funding as a Masters student in 2017. I was only 23, so it didn’t make sense for me to teach a 20-year-olds. But that’s how it had to be; it was just the situation. I tried to quell my feeling of being an impostor by assigning pieces by geniuses of the craft. Early on in the semester, I had my section of Introduction to College Writing read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” “Sonny’s Blues” is masterful on every level: narrative, sentence, thought, psychology, sentiment, spirit. You hardly notice that the protagonist lacks a first name; you inhabit his mind so completely—and why would you ever refer to yourself in the third person mode?
I thought this would be a rich and successful text for them to examine for their first writing assignment, a close reading essay—but to the extent that students can fail in writing about such literature, they failed. My prompt probably sucked. I had wanted them to discuss the effect of certain particulars of Baldwin’s language, but who knows what I actually communicated. When the time to submit the assignment came, I received essay after essay that cited Baldwin’s “intense” language. “Baldwin’s intense diction shows …” “Baldwin uses intense imagery, which …”
I am still not sure why the word “intense” had such a grip on kids at that moment. Clearly it indicated something that lay just beyond the grasp of my comprehension as an instructor, even though I wasn’t that much older than they were. It seemed to be a placeholder for a deep well of what was probably several different psychological experiences at once, coalesced into one nebulous sentiment, and my students lacked the vocabulary to name it with any precision.
Sometimes we struggle to find the words for things, and sometimes there simply are no words. This is a difficult reality for me to face: for whatever reason, God gave me a hunger to capture things in language; and if I cannot find the words for something, it fills me at best with a kind of fussy vexation, and at worst with true grief. I think, sometimes, about how naming a child in the womb is like uttering a prophecy. The life in that child is its fulfillment, but it is more than that: each child seems to rise to and dwell within their name in a particular way: I have never met a person who didn’t truly fit their name. I imagine that for a parent, it must be terribly difficult for a child to enter a religious order that requires that they change their name. I imagine that it must make the child unintelligible along the whole world of terms by which a mother or a father used to know their son or daughter. It signals that they are, in some subtle but significant way, no longer who they used to be.
I have an identical twin about whom I don’t talk much because I don’t know how to. There is something uniquely lonely about being a twin: you are used to someone “getting” you so deeply, understanding the entirety of the foundation of your identity without need for explanation, being able to meet you in almost any joke or brainspace, that the rest of the world can sometimes feel foreign and strange in comparison. My twin and I did have something of a “secret language” when we were kids, made up largely of hand gestures and facial expressions. But even now, at family gatherings, people tell us that they feel like they need a translator in order to keep up with our jokes, which admittedly we often get carried away with, leaving all others on the outskirts of a figurative town that only the two of us live in. I’m trying to remember one such joke. It had to do with trying to check a huge knife with a luggage tag on it as baggage at the airport. It was funny, but I can’t explain it. Even if I could, you wouldn’t get it.
I don’t want to get too deeply into it, because it’s all very private, but when we were in our late teens, my twin decided to gender transition, and remains in that lifestyle today. At the time, I thought this was a good thing, and I continued to think so for a handful years after that. We stopped talking for a few years because of a mostly unrelated conflict, and in that time, I returned to the Church, but even then sincerely thought I could maintain a lot of my liberal beliefs and be a Catholic. I’ve written a little about this before. Over time, though, clearly, my heart changed on the matter.
This is not an essay about the transgender debate. I am still friends with a handful of gay and transgender people, and I don’t feel as though I am in a position to condemn them, partly because of my own checkered past, and partly because I believe that by and large their confusion and pain is genuine; that they were manipulated by terrible, sick people in their youth; that this action often arises from great heartbreak and a lack of feeling at home in the world; and that by and large people believe that they’re doing something good when they make such a choice. I condemn the culture, and I condemn adults who promote it in children, but for the most part I see the individuals who have carried out a social and physiological gender transition with sorrow and charity. I pray for the transgender community with particular habit and fervor.
But I want to talk about a consequence of gender transition that I haven’t heard anyone speak about, and that is the death of language. As a Catholic, I think it is important to tell the truth, and that we should treat one another with great care as we utter it. But there is nothing to say that could compassionately and truthfully cast language to a gender transition when it happens within your family. You don’t realize it at first; it seems like a small thing, simply changing a name and pronouns. It looks very cosmetic. But then you realize that you can’t quite recount memories of that person in an honest or clear way anymore, nor even think of the person in quite the same light: who was it that I caught fireflies with, and with whom did I stand in matching white dresses when we received First Communion? Nor can you fully communicate with others who knew that person in a younger season. They ask, “How is your sister?” and all you have are vague phrases that make you look like you have no idea. And you don’t.
At the end of the the tenth book of The Odyssey, Odysseus and his men have been living on an island owned by Circe, a witch, for a year, and they want to go home. When Odysseus makes his request, Circe says,
Son of Laërtês and the gods of old,
Odysseus, master mariner and soldier,
you shall not stay here longer against your will;
but home you may not go
unless you take a strange way round and come
to the cold homes of Death and pale Perséphonê.
This declaration fills Odysseus with dread and despair. “Kirkê, who pilots me upon this journey? / No man has ever sailed to the land of Death,” he says. She responds,
Son of Laërtês and the gods of old,
Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways,
feel no dismay because you lack a pilot;
only set up your mast and haul your canvas
to the fresh blowing North; sit down and steer,
and hold that wind, even to the bourne of Ocean,
Perséphonê’s deserted strand and grove,
dusky with poplars and the drooping willow.
Odysseus is a man of action, a great captain and a hero of war. He is accustomed to taking to the sea and, in a sense, taming it, by way of masterful navigation; but his unsuccessful attempts to return to his home have illuminated his innate helplessness. The sea was never his. It is controlled by the will of the gods. In a sense, Circe is asking that he demonstrate submission to this truth: Odysseus, paragon of strength and strategy, master of the ocean, cannot accomplish the only meaningful triumph over the water—namely, permanent departure from it—until he concedes all control of his boat, setting it adrift along a current of wind, with neither plan nor route nor pilot. And the wisdom he needs will come from a blind prophet, a man who holds the way but never sees it, an embodiment of the frailty that the son of Laertes must come to know in himself.
Peddling in language is at times a project of taming the unruly forces of this life, but it is a futile one. There are things that defy language—and besides, language can do hardly anything in the way of changing things on its own without a corresponding change in the heart of a being with will.
Something magnificent happens over summer vacation between school years: the kids grow up a little. Every year, the teachers talk about it. “I was really worried about so-and-so,” is a common refrain. “I thought he wouldn’t be ready for this next year.” Third graders don’t end the year as fourth graders in terms of their maturity. But without in-person educational intervention, with rest and play, over the course of June, July, and August, something sinks in, or clicks, and by the time the school year starts, somehow it happens: they become fourth graders.
It is like what happens in sleep. You can spend all day thinking about something, trying to find the right answer to a certain question, going over all possible scenarios in your mind, raking yourself over the figurative coals of a theoretical framework, but for all of your recursion, all of your mental labor, you get nowhere. Then, you go to sleep, and when you wake up, you have your answer. This has partly to do with the cognitive processes that occur in the dreamstate that promote healing and problem-solving. The dreams of people who suffer from PTSD, for instance, will often bear a resemblance to the source of their trauma. Psychologists who work with dreams will often note marked change in their PTSD patients’ waking symptoms only after their responses to their fears change in their dreams. I have heard it theorized that this is because dreams lend people the ability to test different responses to different stimuli without a threat to their physical safety.
A few years ago I heard something similar that had to do with some type of bird (sorry, I don’t remember which). They studied the patterns of brain waves in very young male birds as they sang, with particular attention to their mating calls. Most of the time,the mating calls of these young male birds mimicked their fathers’, or else was a poor variation of them. Biologists then decided to study their brain waves as they slept, and they noticed something remarkable: their brain waves would mirror, almost exactly, the ones they observed when they sang while awake, suggesting that they dreamed of singing. Over time, the sleep brain waves would gradually evolve, indicating that the birds were “trying out” different pitches and intonations in the songs they sang in their dreams—and the changes in the dreams would eventually begin to reflect in their waking bird calls, until one day they developed a mating call that was distinct from their fathers’, a song entirely their own.
I need to finish writing this and go to sleep, so I will tell one final story and then do so. A handful of months ago, at Mass, I felt clutched up by all this anxiety about how I should use that stretch of time in prayer. I couldn’t decide who or what to pray for, and it seemed urgent that I use the time well. I felt desperate. In that distressed state, I asked Jesus, “Please, tell me: what do you want me to do right now?”
Jesus’ voice came to me quietly. “Just rest in Me,” He said. And then my nervous thoughts evaporated, and my mind was filled with a great silence and calm as if it was a vast, dark, clear sea, and God’s face hovered over it.
The project of articulation is a valiant one but it is not a path to epiphany in its own right. Wisdom comes when we set the work down until the Spirit has done His work in us. When the Scriptures say, in Exodus 14:14, “The Lord will fight for you; you need only be still,” it is true. There are things that cannot be captured by the tongues of men, or cannot be changed simply by giving them a new name. Those things, we offer Christ, and from them we let Him hew our peace.