I find it much easier to write in the form of a personal journal than I do in a formal essay or fiction piece. In a journal, I am less concerned about being right, or saying things in the correct way, than I am with the simple act of describing my thoughts and experiences using whatever words feel most appropriate to me. My difficulties with “polished” writing almost always stem from my perfectionist tendencies, and at the heart of this perfectionism is the fear of defect, of the painful awareness of the disparity between what I wish to convey and what I actually conveyed. Put more simply, I am terribly afraid of being wrong.
I am going to write this journal entry about a topic that I admittedly do not know much about. I am also certain that this topic is not at all original, although my personal arrival to its consideration was. Perhaps there is an existing body of work wherein a linguist or semiotician or some other intelligent person describes what I will discuss with a much greater degree of clarity and precision. If any reader is familiar with such work, please do not hesitate to inform me of it, as I would very much like to know of it. But for now, regardless of my ignorance, I believe I will find this exercise valuable. I am tired of how many half-formed thoughts swirl around in my head unresolved, and so I will proceed in my attempt by first talking about roadkill.
For the last several months, I have been experiencing what I believe to be a protracted nervous breakdown in response to the emotional demands of my job and to my dismay at current events in my country and the world. My proficiency in coping with these difficulties is inconsistent, and I am prone to episodes of depressive spiraling and anxious rumination. In the days I have felt closest to a complete breakdown, a disconcerting pattern has begun to take shape: I have always come across roadkill. An opossum, a rat, a house cat, and a crow are among the victims whose guts I have seen spattered across asphalt and whose broken bodies have been left to rot in the gutter with the leaf litter. Every time I have seen one of these little horrors, I have been struck by an oppressive feeling of nausea and have had to practically stagger the remaining way down the street to wherever it was I needed to go.
Even to a mind healthier than my own, such a sight is just as disturbing, and it requires no intellectual explanation of why it is so. What interests me about my case is my emerging sense of a pattern, which feels like a cruel joke from the universe, and why, against all the emblems of capricious suffering I am exposed to every day, the image of roadkill cuts so viscerally through me. Of course, it is because of what the roadkill symbolizes, but I react to that symbol long before I understand what it symbolizes and even before I am aware it is a symbol at all.
When I was in college, I read Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series. One passage in the second novel has stuck with me since then, and I find it relevant here. It reads:
“By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow—so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.” (The Claw of the Conciliator)
I like the use of the word “charm” here, because I believe there is a precarity in the inherent reification of language, in mistaking our “manageable entities” for the substance of what they describe, which is itself a kind of spell. All language is symbolic, of course, but there are differences between our actual experience of these symbols. Here, I think of the reflex arc, our nervous system’s mechanism to induce a reflexive response to pain before the signal is even transmitted to the brain. If the signal from a sensory neuron is sufficiently intense, it short circuits upon reaching the spine and immediately fires back to the motor neuron, which triggers the physical response to recoil away. Our actual experience of the process would suggest that our recoiling was in response to our perception of pain, but the brain is bypassed entirely here, and so the reaction has already occurred before we are even consciously aware of that pain. I believe that we respond to many symbols via a similar mechanism, and our recoiling, wincing, and weeping is not in response to our perception—that is, a conscious awareness of their symbolic nature—but actually precedes it. How mysterious.
There is a quote from Virginia Woolf that discusses this phenomenon far more eloquently than I could ever put it. It is an excerpt from a letter to her friend, a fellow writer, about the craft, but I find her idea rather existential:
“Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.”
My singular objection is that I believe this wave is created in the spine. It bypasses the mind, and therein lies the mystery.
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