What is a word? All I have. I walk down to the park this morning with my old dog. Subject predicate object subordinate clauses, symbolizing but not fully signifying. His ache, his grin, his increasing inability to stand. My fierce joy and heartache and premature grief and impatience, and love that still astonishes me it is so devastating. This is The Year, we said last night, the year his happiness becomes a higher priority than my employment, and if I am late to meetings for matching his labored pace up the hill I know I have chosen the better path to walk. There will be meetings next year, and the next.
What is a word?
They drop notes at me, frustrated and heartfelt. Inadequate, they call them, but what in this world is not? Offers, voiced sighs, stories. What a world, to know a person’s heart but not her face, his voice. The steep and arduous pursuit of love in all its forms. Bonds without descriptors, and me enmeshed in them, and glad to tears.
I am too tied up in words sometimes, too eager to moderate my raw experience. Some things are best described sidelong. A glance is not a word, nor is a tear, nor the bright smile she washed over me last night, nor the smoothness of her face against my chest.
Now, you’re just trying to rack up comments with the heartfelt Zeke posts. You know better than that.
Like it’ll work now that you’ve said that. Thanks a bunch, McBoing.
I have ruined more than one love by narrating it instead of living it.
But memory is made up of language. Without words, we cannot remember. Cuando piesno en español, soy una mujer diferente. Why? Las palabras.
Your next-to-last paragraph touches on a theme explored at some length by the British blogger Dick Jones a couple days ago: http://patteran.typepad.com/patteran_pages/2006/04/hello_goodbye_d.html
Now that i am closer to the end of my memories than the beginnings, i am realizing they are made up more powerfully of smells and other sensations than words and metaphors. Hopefully those are the last to go, the words never will replace that lingering fragrance or radiant visions of reflected light dancing into my memories eyes. Words let us argue over what hue/tint/shade of green that was, but the truth remains in our being. Soak in the moments will full awareness of your senses, let the voices/textual narrations subside beneath the smells and textures.
The most fun I have with words is using them to caress experience.
Chris, this post comes as close to anything I’ve read recently to saying it all.
Hug Zeke for me (it I may presume to ask); I saw a picture yesterday of a dog that looked just like my old Tober.
(o)
Yeah. This is our last year with Christmas; the vet said it wasn’t worth digging out her stomach-tumors; they were growing slow enough that something else would probably get her first.
It’s not our last year with everyone, but it’s our last hundred years with everyone. Something I don’t think we bear in mind nearly enough. Screw being on time for meetings.