There are some sensations that escape language entirely, which is both a welcome and frustrating realization for a professional writer to come to.
Case in point: I’m sitting here with the window open behind me, listening to the sound of the wind as it comes through the trees, hearing it come in waves towards the house from the furthest trees to the ones right immediately behind, and then the wind pushes through the open window and I feel it surround me. Everything goes cool for an instant, and feels at once entirely still and in motion, and then falls away again.
But that’s just a description of the cause and effect, of the facts of the matter; it’s not a description of how it feels physically, or the feelings it evokes internally; I can’t come to anything approaching a way to helping myself share that in any kind of meaningful way without hand gestures, hyperbole and metaphor, and saying things like, you know what I mean, right? on a worryingly regular basis. The experience above is something that can’t be summed up in words, when it’s happening. You had to be there, as the saying goes.
I’m coming to appreciate that a lot more lately. Not just the experience that has to be experienced, although that ideally goes without saying; I mean the shortcoming of language, though, the sense of coming up against a brick wall in my own abilities to write it down and make it understandable to other people in any meaningful way. I read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living when I was on my trip to the Bay Area, and couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d written an entire book trying to say things that couldn’t be put into words and failing in the most successful, most beautiful way possible.
It’s good that we can’t translate everything into easily digestible language. It’s good that more talented people than I keep trying, anyway.