Eternity too is full of eyes: Sunday September 30th, 2023
Can't even describe it: part two of this little series
Dear Gentle Readers,
As you’ll have gathered by now, part of my project here is to understand and examine all the (countless, or incalculable) ways in which experience can be conveyed or embodied or carried out in literature. As words are my trade, precision in the transfer from thing to description is critical for my work, and that precision is the essential quality that makes it possible to convey experience through language. And yet, one of the ‘things’ we often want to express is that which is, in fact, inexpressible. Where its inexpressibility is the key aspect of it, the very quiddity of the thing in question.
Amazingly, this is possible, or at least it seems possible. We can convey the feeling that something is too big, too weird, too majestic, too frightening, too delightful, too private, too terrible, too amorphous—whatever—to be expressed.
Unwritable, but you can watch it
There is in fact, (of course) a suitable YouTube video: How to Write the Unwritable.
Although the video world is so full of interesting things to see and learn, watching videos uses up precious minutes of life that could be spent reading a book, so I don’t do it very much (I make an exception for daily yoga and workout videos, the occasional fall into a hole of cute animals doing cute things—I’m only human—and things like this, or really anything with David Attenborough). Here, though, a helpful commenter has given us links for immediate access to the part of the video on each of the steps involved, which provides us with a handy primer of ways to express the inexpressible in fiction:
3:01 Admission: State plainly the thing is ineffable.
4:40 Circumscription: Describe the effects of the ineffable rather than the thing itself. 6:50 Magnification: Compare the thing to something already extreme.
8:32 Alienation: Describe how it violates the usual principles of reality.
10:13 Combination: Use a combination of analogies to create a liminal effect.
12:19 Obfuscation: Be vague and ambiguous.
13:57 Abstraction: Use nonsensical descriptions.
15:29 Disorientation: Reference alternative mind states.
17:05 Fictionalization: Lie and exaggerate.
19:20 Omission: Give no description.
Not mentioned in this list, but well-addressed in the video and in the comments from watchers, is the use of humour, which of course can be based on some or all of the techniques enumerated above.
Inexpressibly hilarious
Here is The Funniest Joke in the World, which Tale Foundry, the creators of the video above, use as an example of the expression of the inexpressible, mostly via omission and circumscription, with some of the other techniques, like magnification, nicely employed as well. In this case, we’re talking about something both inexpressibly and dangerously funny—it’s so dangerous, we never get to actually hear it, and its originator, Ernest Scribbler, dies laughing. “It was obvious that this joke was lethal,” we are told, “no one could read it and live.”
Ineffably personal
In Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, Marco Stanley Fogg, who has essentially let himself starve almost to death over two years during which he did nothing to try to solve his increasingly desperate financial situation (in Auster’s autobiographical Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, we learn how based on reality this story is), tries to explain himself to the doctor:
As I continued to explain the life I had lived for the past two years, I could see that he was actually becoming uncomfortable. This frustrated me, and the more his incomprehension showed, the more desperately I tried to make things clear to him. I felt that my humanity was somehow at stake. It didn’t matter that he was an army doctor; he was also a human being, and nothing was more important than getting through to him. “Our lives are determined by manifold contingencies,” I said, trying to be as succinct as possible, “and every day we struggle against these shocks and accidents in order to keep our balance. Two years ago, for reasons both personal and philosophical, I decided to give up the struggle. It wasn’t because I wanted to kill myself—you mustn’t think that—but because I thought that by abandoning myself to the chaos of the world, the world might ultimately reveal some secret harmony to me, some form or pattern that would help me to penetrate myself. The point was to accept things as they were, to drift along with the flow of the universe. I’m not saying that I managed to do this very well. I failed miserably, in fact. But failure doesn’t vitiate the sincerity of the attempt. If I came close to dying, I nevertheless believe that I’m a better person for it”.
Marco has successfully put his almost-ineffable experience into words (only the “I’m a better person” language seems to me fake, as the rest does not—not an unusual experience for me reading Auster, whose straight, simple-to-the-point-of-naïveté laying out of what a character feels or what we are supposed to feel can be refreshing and powerful but occasionally becomes mawkish or clichéd). But while we can read and understand Marco’s account of his behaviour, what he is describing remains ineffable in the sense that he cannot use words to cross the border between his mind and the doctor’s, cannot take that complex set of decisions and emotions and make them make any sense or have any meaning for his interlocutor:
It was a horrible botch. My language became increasingly awkward and abstract, and eventually I could see that the doctor had stopped listening. He was staring at some invisible point above my head, his eyes clouded over in a mixture of confusion and pity.
Because we are, logically-speaking, able to understand Marco’s train of thought, and our position inside his mind as readers helps to suspend the judgment we might otherwise feel about it, we are left unsure whether this was an inexpressible experience or not. Is the doctor unwilling to understand, or is the experience that is simply too much, too intense, too insane to be understood, regardless of the words Marco gives it?
There are so many other forms of inexpressibility between human beings. Take the socially unwelcome or unacceptable, the death or poverty or failure or depression or suicide or anxiety or other bit of intimately human experience our interlocutor pretends to know nothing about, that they want to know nothing about, or to which they feel inadequate. The other may be afraid to hurt us, to say the wrong thing, may mistake an awkward desire to reveal for an awkward attempt not to reveal. Or they may just not care, not want involvement, anticipate problems better avoided, or may be afraid or limited themselves in a hundred little, petty, stunted ways. Or they may be wise, and, having learned from painful experience the costs of getting involved in other people’s words, have erected a smooth barrier of invisible plastic to keep out unwanted, messy humanity.
There may be things we want to say, but though we can put them into words, skillful or mangled, the things we try to say are denied or rejected, the receiver choosing not to understand, to deflect, to turn away.
There are relationships where we love painfully and feel invisible barriers between us and the ones we love. There are things we desperately wish we’d said, but, let’s be real, if the chance were to come again, the situation might well play itself just the same as before, and before that, and before that, and so the tender words or the angry, honest words or the words that would break the barrier of coldness or denial or sexual tension or hurt or shame between two people remain unsaid in any alternative reality you choose to invent. There may be no fiction that can allow these things to be expressed. The words may exist, yet the idea is inexpressible as ever. They are things that may haunt us forever, those things unsaid.
Unimaginable, unspeakable, yet real
And then—we move from the funniest joke in the world to the truly intolerable, here—there is that which is truly unspeakable. And here I see we aren’t finished with this series, because there is much that is not about horror but that is inexpressible, but our last two examples are about that which is so horrifying that there should be no words to speak it, or no arrangement of words that can make sense.
Fiction, though able to convey realities that don’t exist, quails—or at least, the writer of fiction or the poet quails—at the prospect of writing accurately and deeply about things that feel unspeakable, in such a way that that unspeakableness is conveyed in all its horror. It might be easy to trade in coarse and imaginative violence in writing, but it’s far harder to convey reality in a way that reflects that very quality of a thing being so terrible that it ought to be unimaginable, unwritable, unspeakable, un-real. And yet as such realities constitute the most traumatic and so most historical, most earth-shattering, most determinant of human experiences, experiences that shape the lives of people not yet born through the experience of people long dead, this is precisely a thing that writers—of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry—are for. Fiction, whether based on reality or on imaginability, gives us subjective insight, insight into what it’s like to experience a thing. In this case, the worst of things.
In The White Hotel, novelist D.M. Thomas gives us a detailed psychological case history of Lisa Erdman, a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. We are immersed for most of the novel in Erdman’s more-than-true story (by more than true I mean fantastical and psychoanalytic, true to the reality of both the character’s experience and her dreams and subconscious). In a variety of creative ways, Thomas lets us inside this single person’s deepest self—sexual, emotional, spiritual, historical. This single person, for the length of the novel, becomes the reader’s entire world.
But before we reach the end of the book itself, the historical timeline takes us to the real life September 1941 shooting massacre at the Babi Yar ravine, near Kiev (Kyiv), in which Erdman and her son Kolya are killed (according to the report sent by the perpetrators to Berlin, 33,771 Jews were killed in two days. Over the next two years the site was used for many other killings. A total of 100,000 Jews were killed at Babi Yar as well as Roma, Russian POWs, and Ukrainian civilians).
Not just Erdman’s life is extinguished, then, at Babi Yar, but her individuality, which has taken an entire book to even try to sum up in words, which has exhausted us as readers in the attempt. This is what it comes to, as her corpse joins that of so many others:
The thirty thousand became a quarter of a million […] The bottom layers became compressed into a solid mass. When the Germans wished to bury their massacres the bulldozers did not find it easy to separate the bodies: which were now grey-blue in colour. The bottom layers had to be dynamited, and sometimes axes had to be used. These lower strata were, with few exceptions, naked; but further up they were in their underwear, and higher still they were fully dressed: like the different formations of rocks. The Jews were at the bottom, then came Ukrainians, gypsies, Russians, etc. […]
When the war was over, the effort to annihilate the dead went on, in other hands. After a while Dina Pronicheva stopped admitting she had escaped from Babi Yar. Engineers constructed a dam across the mouth of the ravine, and pumped water and mud in from neighbouring quarries, creating a green, stagnant and putrid lake. The dam burst; a huge area of Kiev was buried in mud. Frozen in their last postures, as at Pompeii, people were still being dug out two years later.
No one, however, saw fit to placate the ravine with a memorial. It was filled in with concrete, and above it were built a main road, a television centre, and a high-rise block of flats. The corpses had been buried, burned, drowned, and reburied under concrete and steel.
“Nor can the living,” the narrator tells us, “ever speak for the dead.” And yet, like other Holocaust writing, this book is an attempt to do so (as are other fictionalized records of historical genocides, almost always verifiably, rigidly precise about known historical details even as they must improvise to render the subjective experience of a character, whether historically real or invented). Although Erdman is a fictionalized character, Pronicheva, mentioned in the novel, was not. Unlike more than thirty-thousand others who were either shot or crushed and buried alive during those two terrible days, she managed to scramble out of the death pit at night and survived. I’ve linked to her actual testimony from her name in the quotation from the novel, above.
The inexpressible, infinite nature of the horror of destruction is conveyed by juxtaposition: by Thomas’ choice to follow the exhaustive exploration of that psyche and that personal history with sober documentation of physical destruction and the collapse of individuality (or, if victims are in fact not forgotten, the attempt at such collapse) that occurs in mass murder, that occurred in the multiple mass murders of the Holocaust. And to again remind us both of the unspeakable tragedy of loss and of how inexpressible, un-sum-upable each precious human subjectivity is by following the terrible account of Babi Yar with a fantasy that seems to take place in Palestine, a fantasy in which Erdman survives and continues her dreamy exploration of the psyche.
The book ends with her hurrying along, distinctly alive. It ends with her subjectivity. Barring fiction’s ability to let us into other people’s minds, this is what remains individual to each of us, our experience of being alive and ourselves:
She smelt the scent of a pine tree. She couldn’t place it… It troubled her in some mysterious way, yet also made her happy.
At one point in the earlier description of Babi Yar, an omniscient narrator writes (and this is the thesis statement that isn’t really needed at all):
The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored. Most of the dead were poor and illiterate. But eery single one of them had dreamed dreams, seen visions and had amazing experiences, even the babes in arms (perhaps especially the babes in arms). Though most of them had never lived outside the Podol slum, their lives and histories were as rich and complex as Lisa Erdman-Berenstein’s. If a Sigmund Freud had been listening and taking notes from the time of Adam, he would still not have full explored even a single group, even a single person.
Historical events like these—the collapse and loss of so uncountably many subjectivities, of so many rich and complex sounds and dreams and visions and histories and experiences—are so horrifying that, as we have discussed previously, it becomes difficult to put words to them, or to imagine words doing justice to their enormity.
It gave me no words but went through
One writer who wrestled with the question of how words can be adequate to this task—with how they both must and cannot—was the poet Paul Celan, whose parents were transported and killed in the Holocaust. He wrote perhaps the most powerful poem ever written on the subject. But because he wrote in German, without being born German, his very language is fraught and alive with pain and conflict. German was Celan’s first language although he was a Jew in Romania (from what is now Cernăuți, now called Chernivtsi and part of Ukraine; it was previously part of the Soviet Union, and before his birth is was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and called Czernowitz). On language “after Auschwitz”, he said:
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.
As Celan’s translator, Pierre Joris, explains, the poet, who wrote in a language that represented both horror and love, and the most profound exile and alienation, as it was both the language of his parents’ murderers and his mother’s mother tongue:
The Celanian dynamic […] involves a complex double-movement [of] philotes (love) for his mother (‘s tongue) and of neikos (strife) against her murderers who are the originators and carriers of that same tongue.
Over time, Celan began to create new words from German, to create new compound words, and to strip away all flowery language, dismantling and recreating the language, as Joris tells us in his introduction to his English-language translation of Celan’s Breathturn, to check the lyrical nature of the German language, to create of it “a language which wants to locate even its ‘musicality’ in such a way that it has nothing in common with the ‘euphony’ which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horrors.”
Here is his the entirety of his poem Tenebrae:
We are near, Lord,
near and at hand.
Handled already, Lord,
clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.
Wind-awry we went there,
went there to bend
over hollow and ditch.
To be watered we went there, Lord.
It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.
It gleamed.
It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.
Our eyes and our mouths are open and empty, Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.
Pray, Lord.
We are near.
This certainly conveys an otherwise inexpressible horror. Later, in Breathturn, which gets almost secretly at ideas of witnessing and of the inescapability of language, Celan’s images are more terse and evocative, the syntax is what Joris describes as “spiny”, and silence becomes more and more important in his work. Among other ideas, the inexpressible itself is conveyed by the use of a language that is taken apart, made something distinct from the things it refers to (and so despite linguistic precision, we are in fact not exactly sure what those things are, we are unbalanced). Here’s one example:
FROM BEHOLDING THE BLACKBIRDS, evenings,
through the unbarred, that
surrounds me,
I promised myself weapons.
From beholding the weapons—hands,
from beholding the hands—the long ago
by the sharp, flat
pebble written line
—Wave, you
carried it hither, honed it,
gave yourself, un-
losable, up,
shores and, you take,
take in,
sea-oats, blow
yours along—,
the line, the line,
through which we swim, entwined,
twice each millennium,
all that singing at the fingers,
that even the through us living,
magnificent-unexplainable
flood does not believe us.
Or this:
GO BLIND today already:
eternity too is full of eyes—
wherein
drowns, what helped the images
over the path they came,
wherein
expires, what took you too out of
language with a gesture
that you let happen like
the dance of two words of just
autumn and silk and nothingness.
This must be almost impossible poetry to translate, and yet, for all the flaws I am unable to recognize, Joris seems to get at its uniquely strange quality, even as it takes on the unwritable. Late Celan, like this, involves what he calls “syntactical wrenching”, “linguistic under-mining and displacement,” working with language that has been “debased, emptied of meaning” then remade and made to be useful, to tentatively express the inexpressible.
Paul Celan drowned himself in the river Seine in 1970.
We might take a break to talk about other things, things that can be said more easily, next week. Still, we must definitely return to the expression of the inexpressible, the uttering of the ineffable in literature. There is much, much more to be said. Some of it joyful, some gorgeous, some hilarious. Of the terrible, there is much literature that reckons with it honourably and bravely, and so there’s more to say on that as well.
Wishing you a wonderful week. If you’re not yet a patron of this project of literary enchantment, I invite you to sign up now. If you do, I’ll see you on Friday!
And I’ll see all of you next week.
If there are words that you need to express, and that you’d do better to say now than be haunted by in years to come, I wish you courage and luck. If you already know (without lying to yourself) that conversation is not the right place for them, I recommend fiction.
From one of my favourite poems by a favourite poet (Toronto institution Dennis Lee), a poem I share over and over,
Tell the ones you love, you
love them;
tell them now.
For the day is coming, and also the night will come,
when you will neither say it, nor hear it, nor care.
Tell the ones you love.
I have lost many who mattered, and I will say it again:
tell the ones you love, you love them.
Tell them today.
And with that, I wish everyone fine reading—maybe outside, on a bench or a hill, or indoors by a sunny window—through a week that looks like, here at least, it’s planning on a last burst of glorious summer.
-Carlyn