The Solace of Words

A found poem.

A deep yearning stirs.

A yearning that

will never be fulfilled;

an emotion that

can be expressed

only through poetry

or other evocations of

its melancholic longing;

a longing for something

that never was, something

not attainable;

to connect to the divine,

to the universe,

in a personal and

meaningful way.

We long to find meaning.

We long for

the things we

do and say

to make a difference.

Indifference is all there is.

Move closer to being fully human;

embrace just how things are;

stop searching for meaning,

or for the things

that will satisfy

our melancholic longings.

Instead accept

that all we can do

is wait,

with an open and ready heart,

for such truths

as there are

to turn up.

 * * *

The wilderness

inside your head.

Be reminded that you're not alone,

how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be,

the knowledge that we're all lost,

burdened by the same unanswerable questions,

this world is still mostly undefined.

To feel anything at all is a joy;

the magic of expressing how you feel.

Tap into

the undercurrent of humanity

that connects us invisibly

with so many others

who feel exactly as we do.

A powerful reminder

that we're not alone.

 * * *

You've heard about the Rapture?

It's everybody;

good, bad, or indifferent;

the lot.

"Rapture" is an out-of-date expression;

a noun that has no verb attached;

its manifestation already accomplished.

Found among the words that follow.

I came across a new word in an essay the other day, and I absolutely love it. Saudade. It's Portuguese, and doesn't seem to have an exact English correlation. The essay offers a beautiful meditation on it, though.

Solace and Saudade

An elusive point sits on the horizon. A deep yearning stirs within to move closer to this point, perhaps in search of the unknown, perhaps in search of questions without answers. It is a yearning that will never be fulfilled. It is a point never reached. This yearning is the all-too-human inclination for our lives to somehow be different than they are, and for the universe not to be indifferent to our cares and concerns. . . . 

Lacking any easy English translation, saudade seems to be an emotion that can be expressed only through poetry or other evocations of its melancholic longing. Whereas nostalgia is a longing for something that once existed, a person or place or experience that lives in our memory, saudade encompasses a longing for something that never was, something not attainable.

Within the yearning, a sense of incompleteness exists, a feeling of loss for something we never actually had. We want, for example, to connect to the divine, to the universe, in a personal and meaningful way. We long to find meaning in our existence and our experiences – and the meaning we tend to attach to the confusion and loss we feel when this fails to happen is of some sort of providential punishment or karmic backlash. No matter how we attempt to make sense of what we experience, the indifference lingers, an unsettling realisation that nothing, ultimately, matters. We long for the things we do and say to make a difference, for the universe to respond to our call in a way that is just and kind. But it simply can’t.

How can we still find solace living in such a world, where indifference is all there is, to reach a place where our yearning has not disappeared but yet has, in some way, been transformed? . . . 

If saudade is a melancholic yearning for something the universe will never provide, perhaps the very absence to which it draws our attention can be a creative opportunity, an empty space . . . to fill . . . 

Perhaps, then, the idea is that finding acceptance in indifference is a way to move closer to being fully human. . . . 

The longing hasn’t vanished but is now truly seen and accepted without giving it meaning or importance. He does not claim understanding, but instead embraces just how things are.

To find solace here without the yearning for meaning is to find stillness and to experience it as what it is to be fully human. . . . 

We can still yearn for something to fill the empty space in what feels like an incompleteness of life, but that yearning takes on a new purpose: it exposes a new humanness that before was obscured. . . . 

Rather than straining ourselves in a supreme effort to find answers, to achieve goals, to reach destinations, we should instead – and this is equally difficult – learn to wait. Waiting means making oneself receptive, and being ready to recognise a truth when it shows up. We must, in other words, stop searching for meaning or for the things that will satisfy our melancholic longings, and instead accept that all we can do is wait, with an open and ready heart, for such truths as there are to turn up. . . . 

Literally the day before I read this, I was trying to come up with a way to describe how I was feeling that day, mentally trying out something like:

A sense of contentment in acceptance of things as they are, mixed with a sense of discontent due to unrealized potential; a need to make or express or do something meaningful to connect with others.

I like their version better.

An old favorite from my university days.

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

 ~ Stephen Crane

Indifference is all there is.

Perhaps you've heard of the website The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It has some notoriety for some of its more popular words. Its author started inventing words to describe feelings he had that could not be described with existing words. It became a project, caught on, and has turned into a book.

I became familiar with the website about the time the book project was announced, so instead of delving into the digital version as I was tempted I decided to wait for paper, my preferred format. After it came out, I waited until I had some expendable money to buy myself a copy. When it arrived, it was so perfect looking that I decided to wait until just the right mood to crack it open and start reading.

I've been carrying it in my book bag since, enjoying the delicious anticipation.

My encounter with saudade inspired me to take it out and get started. I haven't gotten into the words and their definitions, as I'm still savoring the front and back matter that accompany them. Here are some excerpts from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.

From "About This Book"

It's a calming thing, to learn there's a word for something you've felt all your life but didn't know was shared by anyone else. It's even oddly empowering--to be reminded that you're not alone, you're not crazy, you're just an ordinary human being trying to make your way through a bizarre set of circumstances.

--

When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be.

--

These words were not necessarily intended to be used in conversation, but to exist for their own sake. To give some semblance of order to the wilderness inside your head, so you can settle it yourself on your own term, without feeling too lost--safe in the knowledge that we're all lost.

-----

From "Neologistics" (afterwards)

Words are so effective at simplifying reality that it's easy to lose track of how much detail is being left out.

--

By conveying an artificial consensus, dictionaries make it all too easy to believe that our words define us, instead of the other way around.

--

Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.

--

I wholeheartedly recommend the practice of inventing new words to pin down whatever it is you're feeling. It loosens your mental frameworks and gives you a sense of ownership over the stories you tell yourself.

--

To feel anything at all is a joy.

-----

From "On Gratitude"

Over time I began to get a sense of how much we all must secretly have in common. How many of us must be burdened by the same unanswerable questions, muttering the same thoughts to the steering wheel or the shower wall. And whenever I felt alone, or confused, or like a stranger to myself, I knew I was tapping into an undercurrent of humanity that connected me invisibly with so many others who feel exactly as I do, each in their own lives. That's the magic of expressing how you feel, as precisely as you can. If nothing else, it can serve as a powerful reminder to all of us that we're not alone.

I haven't really started to read the book and already I love it.

Speaking of books, I recently attempted the short story collection Illuminations by Alan Moore. Here's my review:

I'm not giving this a rating since I only read the first half.

I've read some of Alan Moore's comics over the years and liked some, loved others, so I thought I'd try his prose. In a nutshell, I find he has great ideas and tells really good stories, but uses far too many words.

He almost always uses the rarest, biggest word possible when a simpler, more common one will do. His descriptions are too long, and not needed as often as not. And he tries to cram far too much into each story he is telling. He's an impressive writer doing his best to convey impressive thoughts as specifically and precisely as possible, but he needs to let some of it go and focus on the essence more than the details. I was finally too fatigued to carry on.

Of the five stories I finished, I especially enjoyed "Hypothetical Lizard" and "Location, Location, Location," the former heartbreakingly tragic and the latter hilarious (with excellent theology thrown in).

Here's a bit of that theology. In "Location, Location, Location," an English solicitor is to meet with the Christian Son of God after his second coming to sell him a property he wants. All other humans are gone, and the imagery from the biblical book of Revelation is happening about them as they meet. He's dressed in casual attire, has a relaxed demeanor, and tells her to call him Jez.

'You've heard about the Rapture? It's a bit like that, except it isn't just a thing for all the fans - the Christians - or for people who've not coveted their neighbour's ass or anything like that. It's everybody. Good, bad or indifferent, atheists and Mormons, Satanists and Buddhists, Moslems and Jehovah's Witnesses, the lot. Actually, "Rapture" is an out-of-date expression. In today's terms, think of it as "everybody's information has been instantly uploaded to the cloud". Except for yours, of course. The seraphim in legal said we had to retain one decent solicitor to represent the Panacea Charitable Trust, in order to keep all of this legitimate.'

First, I love that he's a unitarian universalist. Second, his approach to language. I've always struggled with the fact that our religions are stuck on static language and imagery that made a lot more sense 2000 years ago than it does today. The ideas need to be translated to new contexts, given new expression for changing circumstances, perspectives, and worldviews. That idea carries through the entire story.

Here's a bit more, just for the flavor.

'This is my suggested reading list, then? This is what they thought I'd enjoy flipping through on rainy afternoons? There's nothing here but books about me and my dad, as if I'm Frank Sinatra Junior or somebody. I mean, who does that? Who wants to read all about their fucking awful upbringing, or how their dad was always going into one and smashing the place up? There's no crime fiction, there's no science fiction, nothing here by anyone who's black or Asian. And for saying there were never more than one or two blokes in the Panacea Society, there's nothing here by women. If you walked into a bookshop and this was their catalogue, you'd walk straight out again. I'll probably get rid of them as a job lot and then have a flat-screen installed. That's more me, if I'm truthful.'

Angie ran her hand across the writing table's varnished wood, its glinting leather and the plump, soft paper of its blotter; reassured herself that this was still a solid world, for all that it kept bleeding into dream. From this reaffirmation of reality, she glanced up at the window and was nonplussed to discover that, in August, it was snowing. Fat white flakes fell lazily through blazing sunshine, although as she watched, her mind corrected this initial error of perception. Obviously, it wasn't snowflakes. It was feathers, some of them on fire. Jez joined her by the antique bureau.

"That'll be the debris from the angel-holocaust that's going on above us. You can see why I suggested that we come indoors before we got the Full English Gomorrah. It's like this for the next hour or two now. Nothing I can do about it, I'm afraid.

Outside the window in the distance, sizzling through the swansdown blizzard, there were intermittent shooting stars, blazing parabolas that plunged like crippled Spitfires on to Bedford. Angie speculated that these were slain angels, burning up as they passed through Earth's atmosphere. They watched this phosphorous precipitation for a while, and then she and her client returned along the landing for a look at the front bedroom, where there was a bit more light.

'Oh, this is nice.'

Jez tells the solicitor early on that all of those things need to happen because it's in the contract, even though the terminology is from an earlier era and doesn't really translate to the current world.

One more bit, this from "The Improbably Complex High-Energy State." Here's a great example of Moore using too many words to say the consciousness decided it was tired of simply observing the universe so manifested itself a tail to join the fray.

Accompanying this latter coinage was the brain's dismaying realisation that it was itself a noun that had no verb attached: in all the seething metamorphic panorama spread before its new-found scrutiny, it was the only thing not visibly involved in an activity; the only object not engaged in manifesting, toppling or whizzing.

Observing that, with its manifestation already accomplished, most other verb activites apparently involved some form of movement, it attempted to imagine an appendage useful to that end. Once more exploiting Heisenbergian indeterminacy, as with its flaccid sensory apparatus, it was able to produce from the surrounding soup of proto-particles a vaporous posterior plume that rapidly congealed to a whip-like flagellum with articulated vertebrae, so twenty-five times longer than the brain itself and coloured a pale gentian.

Though I share it because I like the way he conceptualizes "being" a noun without a verb. I think it's a helpful way to frame many ideas. Like "love" for instance; it doesn't mean nearly as much when it's just a noun, is only really itself once it becomes a verb.

It seems like wordplay, but words help us think, and thinking helps us be who we are.

Words help us be who we are.

Truth-by-Repetition: No Matter How Outrageous, Repeated Lies Become the Truth

It doesn't matter how ridiculous a lie is. As long as it is repeated often enough, some people will believe it.

 - Research has shown that repeating a claim increases that claim’s perceived truth value.

 - However, for a long time, it was assumed that this so-called truth-by-repetition (TBR) effect only applied to claims whose truth value was unambiguous.

 - A new study confirms what politicians and advertisers knew all along: that TBR works on virtually any kind of claim, even highly implausible ones.  

Words have power.

A poem I found.

Ed Hack

OUR TRIBE

The day goes on regardless of the plight

of man. And that is right. We are the dust

that spoke, that saw the will of gods in flights

of birds, but never learned, not once, to trust

the one across the stream who held his spear

as we held ours but spoke another tongue.

We got what we deserved because our fear

matched theirs, and then we prayed and taught our young

to fear. We looked into the mirror of

their eyes and, satisfied, we died. The hate

would now go on; our kids were tough.

The mystery was gone. We knew their fate.

So let the day be gold or blue or green--

what’s true is what we’ve done and what we’ve seen.

 

—from Rattle #80, Summer 2023

Tap into the undercurrent of humanity that connects us invisibly with so many others who feel exactly as we do,

to connect to the divine, to the universe, in a personal and meaningful way.