Love and Deconstruction

Don't you ever look at me and think, who are you? I think that sometimes, when I look at you.

It wasn't so much a fight as just a very painful conversation, one of those times when you both squint at each other's eyes and take turns saying, "I don't know what you're talking about." The moodiness of failure was settling in when I realized, like shaking the hair out of my eyes (and feeling stupid for having ever forgotten it for a minute), that this hopeless confusion was not the result of the matter but was the matter.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

"That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all."

                                          - from TS Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 

Words are my life, and people like me are their life, too, so I am unafraid to speak plainly about them. They are pitiful, sad, nearly useless things. I love them and revile them because I know what they are. By catching hold of us at such an early age, they trick us into trusting them. Insidious things. We get comfortable with them, so that we never question even that which was never true - that they communicate, that we communicate through them, that if we only master them, we can connect.

A word is not a thing, but only a tenuous relationship between other non-things. The letters on the page, the sound of the word in your ear, these are the signifiers. But what is signified? How do you know a word's meaning except by other words? And so words are signs that point on toward other signs that point on and on toward something we think of as "meaning" but which can never know.

It's a hopeless endeavor when we set out to understand through words. Things like God, the meaning of one's life, the overwhelming questions, seem sometimes to be just ahead of us, on the tips of our tongues, but the more we try to call them out, the further they elude. Words settle in their wake like dust, and they are dust. Not even the Bible will lead you to arrive at God. The words can settle all around you, you can run your fingers through them, but they can never take you past themselves, to what is real.

You are real. Your realness is what makes you unknowable. You are an incomprehensible signified. Your signifiers will bring no one to you.

I cannot trust in words to explain me and teach me. I cannot call on words to bridge us together, two incomprehensible signifieds. When you hold out your hands to receive something real, all I can give you, all anyone can give you, is a few shimmering words.

Words are no more than bird songs. I do not strain to know the meaning of a bird song any more than a bird strains to define its birdness by singing. Singing is for honoring one's soul, not for arguing one's thesis. I hope I can remember that my words are songs. All our words are songs. In the absence of the real, you can still have a few shimmering songs.

I sit on the edge, kicking my feet in the water, calling out my words, hoping to catch some of yours. And if I do, I'll turn them over in my hands and memorize the feel of them, and sing them back to myself again and again. I will sense something, and perhaps it will be close to what you sensed. It will be impossible to understand, but it's okay, because the beauty isn't in understanding. The beauty is in striving.

My love, I cannot tell you what I mean, but perhaps it will mean something to you if I say my soul is a spinning coin. Perhaps you will sense something if I say you are a prism throwing colors on my face.

I am blessed
Just to be, more or less,
Standing in the afterglow of rapture
With the words the rapture left.

                    - from Emmy the Great's Paper Forest (Afterglow of Rapture)

Nonprofit Girl Shares the Elevator

Adventures of Nonprofit Girl, Episode 3

(Did you miss Episodes 1 and 2? They're here.)

The sun is just beginning its descent and the last of her colleagues have just left the office as Nonprofit Girl eats the last doughnut straightens up the kitchen and packs up her things. She heads down the hall and a young man from one of the other offices on her floor holds the elevator for her.

Nonprofit Girl knows you are opening yourself up to danger if you smile at people you don't know. A smile, after all, is all it takes to expose any harmless-looking passerby as that infamous imposter, Creepy Stranger Dude. But it was very nice of this stranger to wait and hold the door for her, and she is a superhero after all, so she decides to risk it.

Nonprofit Girl smiles at the stranger, in the face no less, and offers a clear-voiced "thank you."

But Nonprofit Girl is about to encounter something she never could have predicted.

The elevator door closes. The man (Nonprofit Girl is seriously not making this up) the man paces the elevator like a caged lion. It's only five floors, but he paces that four feet of space like death is closing in, and in doing so, chokes on his coffee. He is still sputtering when the door opens to the lobby. Nonprofit Girl considers asking him if he's okay but realizes the answer to that question would take far too long to answer.

She dashes out, thinking, Damn.