Friday Nights: Language

I look for beauty in the strangest of places. As if, life, my life in particular, was somehow wedded to beauty. As though the world was designed to be aesthetically pleasing, full not of being, but of moments, concrete things that a person can hang a day on. I don’t know where I came by this idea. I think that the images I’m trying to recreate are from old commercials or movies, in which the texture of the scene is enriched by music playing in the background.

And suddenly I am listening to a song by Lyle Lovett after catching snippets of it in the background of a show.  

And three things are happening at once. I’m thinking of Steven Pinker, how he said that music is, “auditory cheesecake.” And I can’t remember exactly why I should believe Steven Pinker, though I often think that music is auditory cheesecake. But, I like cheesecake. I suppose his point is that I should eat cheesecake less frequently, or that I should only listen to music at a party, or when I am feeling blue, or if I am having good coffee. But then again, I do not remember who he is.

I am also feeling moved by the music and thinking that it would be odd if I started crying here, sitting alone near midnight listening to a song, and how that isn’t the sort of way that a person should spend a Friday night. A person should spend a Friday in bed, in laughter, drinking, watching a movie, doing a puzzle, dancing until 2 A.M., a person should not be almost crying while listening to a song they have just heard. And yet, I am a person almost crying to a song that I’ve only just heard. And it occurs to me that maybe I'm not all that sad about the song, but sad that its been so long that I listened to something so quiet. And that maybe, I didn't almost cry, but thought that I almost cried because it happened an hour ago. Maybe what I did was felt something. I couldn't say for sure. 

I am also remembering that Lyle Lovett was once married to Julia Roberts, and how everyone was confounded by their marriage years ago, and how much worse it would be now. But really, really I’m wondering what I’m supposed to do with all the ephemera piling up in my brain like so much useless dust, or cheesecake or music lyrics. And I wonder why my brain has stored so many odds and ends. I wonder why it couldn’t have grasped Geometry, perhaps it was too busy remembering the part in Anna Begins when rain starts to fall or she begins to fade away. And instead I’m remembering that night, years and years ago, when we stood twenty feet from the stage listening to songs from my first ever cassette tape, and how it’s okay, that that evening is still lodged there. How we were all there listening together, how maybe music doesn’t always have to be auditory cheesecake, how sometimes it can make us stand in the dark and feel something.

And now I am listening to music and thinking of cheesecake, which is, if I understand Steven Pinker correctly, exactly the way a person is supposed to spend their time. Though I’ve been guilty often of misunderstanding people when it suits me, for three months in college I pretended my girlfriend spoke Chinese because I didn’t like what she was saying to me. I covered her room in Chinese characters, decorated the mirrors and the walls with words I found in the library that said things like “trust” and “love.” I built a series of origami swans that showed a time lapse type scene of being born, growing up, and then failing in love and put them on her dresser with a note that said, “This.” I trained a parrot to speak, and put it up in her room. Whenever she looked out the window he would say that he loved her. After a week, when I’d enter, he’d just mumble “bastard.” And I could see then, looking at that failed parrot just what Flaubert meant when he said,” “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

But the part that moved me to pity was that he’d already said it, and so I couldn’t say it after him, or couldn’t say it as well. I could say: language is an inadequate medium in which to show our true selves, but that is clunky. I could say:

Language is a dead horse that we beat senselessly when we intend to wake it up. (And though it has the virtue of including the animal, the animal is not dancing, but dead, which seems like  a step down. And don't even get me started about the stars). 

Language is like a sand dollar that you find on the shore as a young lad, and you take it back and show it to your mother, and she tells you that it is perfect, and you hold it in your small fingers, feeling its rough edges, and then you see the shell that she has, stored behind glass, this perfect shell, the very shell you’d intended to find, and you realize that the shell in your hand is a pale imitation of what you’d intended it be. ( Not as pithy at the kettle thing).  

Language is me sitting across from you and intending or meaning things, but not saying them, just looking off instead at bits of the sky and saying how we’re having nice weather this spring. (Closer, but that’s not nearly eloquent enough).

Wait, I once wrote an entire essay about conversation. Certainly I must have said something that will make Flaubert roll over in his grave. (Checking).

“Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.” (Nope, that’s Virginia Woolf, and she doesn’t even include anything about language or bears).

You know, I believe if there's any kind of God, it wouldn't be in any of us. Not you, or me...but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.” (Nope, that’s from the script of Before Sunrise).  

Language is a maze with no entrance or exit. Language is the lovechild of a Borges and Kafka story. And why shouldn’t it be? Everything is confusing. Although, the more I think about it, the more I wish I was Gustave Flaubert and had said that thing about the kettles and the bears. Maybe I should just say, Language is kind of like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for trained bears to dance to, while all the time we’re intending to move the stars to something resembling pity.

“Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.” Dead Poet’s society.( It has the virtue of including the word language, which I like and that makes me think that it, like the quote by Flaubert is about language, though it appears the dancing bears have been replaced by women and the stars by laziness).

Instead, perhaps language is like this:

And in that fairy tale land of childhood we understood that we were not traveling through a hole in a fence into waist high patches of grass to stand near the train tracks that cut like a black scar behind those suburban fences. We knew instead that we were traveling from the safe land of mother’s skirts, of milk and cookies and bed times, and into a foreign and dangerous land. And parts of ourselves that we didn’t know existed wanted to court that danger. Parts that we’d rediscover later in life, courting strange lovers, girls with gaps in their teeth who smoked unfiltered cigarettes near the beach, where we’d watch them against a blue horizon, blowing smoke into that same blue, on long afternoons and evenings spent by the sea. We’d stare at these women for hours, losing ourselves in them, when all we’d intended to do was pass time reading about epistemology.