Authors: William H. Gass
Suppose our words spilled from our mouths as palpably as spit; suppose some were encased in soft pink clouds like cotton candy or encircled like comic-strip balloons, or came out in Gothic; suppose they filled up small rooms, and we waded through them to reach the phone or the door, and little language ladies spent the night collecting them in nets, hosing them into vats, and at earliest dawn trucks laden with the
logoi
slunk through the streets to great dictionary-shaped dumps. I suppose it only to indicate how well rid of our words we are. No sooner spoken than absorbed by the wide, though increasingly worried, sea of air around us. As for the similarly useless written word … well, we may die of our records; bad writing is more contagious than a cold; and if it isn’t pieces of plastic and those wormy twist-ties that get us, it will be vast memo slides, a plague of computer print-outs, best-seller buildups, or stock-certificate subsidence.
But if your language is intended to be the medium of an art; if you, its user, are an artist and not a reporter, a persuader, a raconteur; if you aren’t writing principally to get praise or pay, but wish to avoid the busy avenues of entertainment, to traffic in the tragic maybe, dig down to the deeply serious; then (although there are a few exceptional and contrary cases) you will understand right away how blessed you are by the language you were born with, the language you began to master in the moment you also started to learn about life, to read the lines on faces, the light in the window which meant milk, the door which deprived you of mother, the half-songs sung by that someone who loaned you the breast you suckled—the breast you claimed as more than kin.
Only if you spring fully grown from the brow of Zeus can you escape being born, and learning a language before you get big, and losing that language along with growing old. It is like living under a certain sort of sun, except that the word begins as merely the wind and weather of the spirit, because what occurs in the outside world initially as a kind of din is slowly made sense of and assimilated. Gradually, too, is a style formed, like the hardening of your bones and physiognomy, by degrees, the way your character comes into being—assertive and tough, mild and weak. That you will learn a language, then, is likely; that you will learn it well is unlikely; that you will live well is unlikely; that you will have a shape is certain; that your soul—that old ghost—will be the source of your speech and the words you write is a Socratic conjecture I support; the word is all the soul is, ever was, or wants to be.
So what is sent away when we are forced out of our homeland? Words. It is to get rid of our words that we are gotten rid of, since speech is not a piece of property that can be confiscated, bought or sold, and therefore left behind on the lot like a car you have traded, but is the center of the self itself. The excruciation of exile lies in this: that although the body is being sent into the world as Adam and Eve were sent by the Angel, the soul is being cast into a cell of the self, where it may mark the days with scratches on the wall called writing, but where it will lose all companions, and survive alone.
This claim of mine concerning the centrality of the spoken word is, of course, disputed, widely rejected, believed to be passé. In our picture-perfect time, who should accept it? Okay. So on your next date, draw a picture of your passion. Thus explain your needs. How far into real feeling will it take you? Will it not inadvertently possess a certain lavatory style? When next you are alone, and pondering some problem (should you call him? will she or won’t she? does he like the amplified guitar better than the cradled bass? in what will she prefer that I express myself, chalk or crayon?), try posing your questions in terms of the flickering image so many say they love and see as the future’s salutatory wave. Think through anything. Start small. Continue simple. But comic-strip the solution into being.
If we can read, it is expected that we also ought to be able to write, or, anyway, type. How many of us, in our camera-crafted age, can take a really good photograph, or copy a pictured face, or form an interesting image in any medium, or read a blueprint, understand a map or set of architectural plans, or even follow the right arrows when trying to catch a suburban train? If this is a visual age, why is our visual competence next to nil? We can’t even doodle with any skill.
We could say, of Cronos swallowing his children, that he had sent them to hell inside himself. For quite a few of its sufferers, exile is a spiritual condition, not merely a geographical one. This is what many of our American writers of the teens and twenties meant when they described themselves as exiles, and when they weren’t just putting on airs. Gertrude Stein said that when American expansion had reached the Pacific, there was nowhere else to go but “west in the head.” And into the head we went. Then sent our luggage east of us to Paris. Where we spent our exile wasn’t the real issue. James Baldwin wasn’t sent into exile in France. His exile began before he was born, when the darkness of all our beginnings darkened his skin.
The expression “spiritual exile” is a metaphor, of course, but a significant one, since there is a large number for whom exile is only
a pro forma punishment: they are doing well and have found a happy home in their adoptive country. “Alienation” pretty well describes the condition of heart and mind which constitutes the inner content of actual, of effective, exile. While alienation can be mutual, as it often is with married pairs, it is often as solitary as masturbation. Citizens can become alienated from their government without the nation noticing. That failure to notice is often part of the condition. Still, being indifferent to someone or something does not imply that you once upon a time felt otherwise, or that you must continue to mourn your separation.
“Alienation” as a philosophical term is no longer in vogue, so perhaps it is safe to pick it up again, if only for a moment. What is more familiar than your own face—the one there in the mirror, the face you are shaving? But what is that behind the head? It is a wall you’ve never seen, a wall the mirror has invented, and the head, too, wobbles on its neck now, as if it were under water. Remember how it felt to return after many years to the high school of your youth: how small the halls were; how tattered the blinds; how grim the lockers—a greasy green, and dented without design. Reality and memory were out of tune then, and now they are again.
The movement of the razor over the face, the scrape of the blade, the cream being pushed here and there like suds across a floor, have all leaped over oddity and reached the surreal. The operation of doorknobs is inexplicable. Doorknobs ought to be easy. We only expect bidets to be mysterious. But as alienation settles over our souls like a fog, features, operations, relations, without actually altering, offer us different points of reference, their aims shift, their essences dissolve. An inner weariness wells up; everything is an obstacle, asking us questions we do not understand. We issue the same old orders to our body, but despite that our limbs flair awkwardly; walking cautiously straight ahead, we still back into things as though blind; we forget how to sneeze.
At the same time, of course, how vividly, how accurately, how freshly, we see, for everything we had known well, we had long
since ceased to know: the flag was noble; the flag always waved; priests, presidents, and poets were worthy of respect. And now the bathroom wall surprises us; so does the tone in our wife’s voice when she says no once again—a sound which suddenly seems the same as the scrape of our razor. We really hear, perhaps for the first time, the gurgle of water down the drain—down the drain like the departure of all hope. In the blink of an eye, we’ve placed a Duchamp here, another there, until we have a world full of the familiar made strange.
We have spent a lifetime making things a part of ourselves, constructing, as they say, a second nature: learning to walk, to speak, to ride a bike, pick a lock, spoil a party, dance the fandango, wash dishes, shovel snow, swim, do our job, turn on, turn off, go to the bathroom, stoop to conquer. We had felt at home in our yard, with its swimming pool, until someone threw an open can of paint in it, until adolescents made a habit of swimming nude there in the middle of hot nights, until a squirrel drowned. We had felt at home in our home, freshly done in chintz and lacquer, until the kids brought their noisy punk friends in the den, the dog began pooping in a corner, robbers ripped us off, and the wife stopped making the bed. We had felt at home in our flesh until our flesh grew old, grew flabby, went fat and blue-veined, and then there was that stranger in the mirror with his red-rimmed eyes, and the stubble, every morning, like an early field gray with frost.
Then strangers invaded our private hunk of public space with their hands out and each of their unblinking eyes staring and staring. Then strangers came too close to us in the subway, and sat down beside us with empty seats on every hand. So now we come warily up to the ports of our eyes, and go about, even when alone, hidden deep within like a pip in a pumpkin, and protected from the actuality of everything, especially every touch, as we always did at rush hour, so as not to feel felt when packed in the train like a tin.
Alienation is the exile of the emotions—of hope, of trust—sent away somehow so they won’t betray us.
The exile that I have personally experienced is one far less gruesome than the fate that befell Cronos’s children; it is not at all dramatic like the epic of Oedipus; not a bit lyric, either, like a ballad bemoaning the old days from the lute of a Slavic poet. It does not even concern the exile of a person whose speech was found to be offensive, and who was sent away where his message could be heard no more. I am talking about the loss of the use of a language (a use that, in my opinion, is its fundamental employment—the poetic in the broadest sense), and how that limb of our language has been cut off and callously discarded.
This has been, of course, my subject all along. And someone may ask, so complete has been its disappearance, what is this special use of language, and what makes it so special? Alas, to answer would require another essay and an honesty absent from most hearts. It is, first of all, a use of language which refuses to be a use. Mere use is abuse. That should be the motto of every decent life. So it treats every word as a wonder, and a world in itself. And it walks along and upon them, even over dizzy heights, as confidently as a worker on beams of steel. And it does not care to get on, but it dwells; it makes itself, as Rilke wrote, into a thing, mute as the statue of an orator. It reaches back into the general darkness we—crying—came from, retouches the terrors and comforts of childhood, but returns with a magician’s skills to make the walls of the world dance.
Paul Valéry divided buildings thus: into those that were dumb, and therefore would be, on my account, soulless, dead; those that spoke, and would be, on my account, solid citizens and a worthy norm, provided their speech was clear and honest and unaffected; and those that sang, for these found in themselves their own true end, and rose like Shelley’s lark, through the heaviest atmosphere.
We have grown accustomed to silence from this sort of singing. We make other noises. Yet it is an old rule of history that exiles return, that they return wrathfully, whether a banished people, a forbidden idea, or a barricaded way, to reclaim what should have been their heritage. They return wrathfully, not only because they
remember and mourn the life they were taken from, but because the past can never be recovered, not even by a Proust, not if you wish to take up residence in it again. To listen to our stories, other selves have been invented to replace the dolls, who, if any remain, are alive somewhere in other arms. But of course poetry, if it returns, will never make us pay. No. It will not put us to death or in prison or send us, as it was sent, so sadly away. It will simply put us to shame.
Imagine that, at a point in an otherwise empty space, an event the precise size of such a point takes place. We do not require the Big Bang. A flick of the Bic will do, the simplest spark of life, perhaps God’s guilty shout like the king’s in
Hamlet:
Give me some light!
According to the most popular conception of causality, largely derived from Aristotle, this brief alleviation of the general darkness will be followed by an effect occupying every immediately adjoining area. The preferred image is that of a single pebble striking the smooth surface of a still pond. Our initial disturbance, having done its deed, is indeed done, and passes out of the present into what will later be dignified as “history.”
If Act I has the duration of an instant (so small as scarcely to exist), Act II is a membrane, an onionlike skin that is infinitely thin and the shape of a hollow sphere. Since every effect is required (by this theory) to change itself immediately into another cause, the little bubble of consequence which encompassed our originating point will find an additional film forming about it, as if the surface of the globe were constantly growing a further surface just above itself—like layers of atmosphere, like countries of cloud.
However, it is important for us to remember (what will be important later mainly because we shall have forgotten it now) that the vacancy created by the obligatory disappearance of the First
Cause into the sphere of its following Effect will be filled by one of the consequences of that Effect, because every event which succeeds the first will be like a ball with an equal emptiness on both its concave and convex slopes; so that creation will continue in two directions: explosively outward in the direction of infinity, and implosively inward in the direction of the dawn of creation, its first light. The energy of any event will therefore be divided, inasmuch as each will bear twins, one concave and expansive, one convex and contractive—inspired and expired breaths.
When a particular contraction reaches such a degree of concentration that inwardly there is no place left to go, it will radiate outward once more, although in a greatly weakened condition. To complicate our image perhaps to a point of incomprehensibility, we have to keep in mind the fact that every returning system will have two sides just as the venturing systems do, so that twinning will be incessant in both types. In short order, expanding rings will encounter contracting ones, causing incalculable consternations, collisions we may expect to become causes themselves, and so on, and so in, and so on, and so in, ad infinitum.