Tom Spanbauer is on the verge of saying it. Then he does say it. โYou are formidable,โ he says. He means this with tenderness right now, but in a few months Iโll hear him use the same word to describe his former teacher, editor, mentor and monster, The Notorious Mister Lish. But right now Tom is saying this to make sure Iโm okay. He asks me, looks straight into me with his warm brown eyes when he asks. โAre you okay? How is this landing on you?โ
Weโre talking about a short story Iโm writing and itโs not going very well, which is the way that these things sometimes go. We are both saying things and trying not to overstep in the saying of them, both trying to be understood. Iโm at his table with him, in his house. Technically, in the basement of his house, with its own separate entrance, but itโs still his house and I am inside it. Invited, even, to both sit and remain. Tom uses the word โrevoltโ next, says that he thinks I am actively in it, that I am in revolt against the rules and conventions of writing. He says this, he says, because he and I create stories so differently.
But we donโt. He uses words. I use words.
The difference is he trusts them more than I do, which makes him reach in his writing more often and a lot further than I can reach right now in my writing. Words. Iโm still talking about words.
Whatโs formidable is entrusting ideas and memories to words and crossing your fingers so hard you feel like they are going to snap clean off, crossing them and squinting real tight because you know once you take the memory or the idea โ when you take it out of its naturally chemical state and give it the flesh of language, give it bones and blood and a nervous system โ once you do this, you are Victor Frankenstein. And youโre terrified of what Victor was always most terrified by: your own expectations, your own disappointment. Youโre terrified youโll be terribly disappointed in your wordsโ inability to fully translate and transmit and animate. The reader, that adoptive parent of what youโve birthed, sheโs going to do all that surrogate stuff readers do when they are so affected by what youโve made and imposed upon them, that they heap upon you all the credit for doing something you didnโt really do and feel like you donโt deserve.
Iโm talking about robbery now. About committing a crime. Notย being robbed. Not the fear that wells up inside you and stands your hair follicles into little mountains all over you. None of the fear. Itโs guilt. The guilt of being the robber. Of being the one who points the gun at someone and doesnโt have to pull the trigger and still gets something for it anyway. Of still being able to feel the long deep groove of the trigger embedded in your finger long afterwards, feeling it in your sleep, the weight of it. But more than the physicality and the big dimple in your skin, feeling the parallel reality where it all goes wrong. What Iโm talking about when I say guilt is the flutter in your chest that doesnโt match the smooth calm in your brain, that discomfort and sleeplessness and slow spin of knowing you got away with something you probably shouldnโt have been able to get away with at all. Because this isnโt what being formidable is supposed to feel like.
I go home later, to my own house, where I donโt have a basement, where I have to walk in through the front door, and I try to explain this to my wife. She asks me to clarify what I mean. Formidable. I tell her Iโm not sure how, but Iโll try. I realize before I even start talking that Iโve never had to do this so deliberately before, to assume someone wouldnโt know what that word meant in the same way I understood it. Or wouldnโt feel the tingle of familiarity in the back of their heads when the word is uttered, the one that pushes the neck around and bobs the head and makes the forehead move in what we would all call a nod. To affirm our understanding.
But this is so easily feigned, you know, this understanding thing. What Iโm talking about right now is the robbed robbing the robber. Because nodding in and of itself doesnโt confirm anything. It is only evidence that someoneโs nervous system is functioning, is sending and receiving chemical messages; itโs no proof at all that there is sympathy or jealousy or worry or compassion or any of the other thousands of emotions we feel when we understand something, when the message stops being something chemical and begins being something physical.
My wife nods at whatever it is that Iโm saying. Her doing this doesnโt reassure me of anything because I donโt trust the words Iโm using. Using one word, two words, twenty, well over a hundred before itโs over, to explain another word. The prisonhouse of language. Her doing this only assures me that she can hear me, and that she is trying to understand.
Gustave Flaubert wrote a novel calledย Madame Bovary. What I should say is he published a novel calledย Madame Bovary, because he never finished writing it. Flaubert went to prison for doing this. And while in prison for publishing his novel, he began reworking every sentence of it. Word by word. In pursuit of the perfect expression of his ideas.
Le mot juste.
A formidable task, to say the least.
I tell you these stories โ about Tom, about my wife, about Flaubert โ because our need to be understood is both part of what makes us human and also what can make us insufferableย asย humans to other humans. I also tell you these stories because thatโs what humans do. And if Iโm telling these things adequately, youโre probably nodding your head right now. In fact, Iโm pretty sure if youโve read this far, youโre probably already doing it. But itโs entirely possible that youโre not, too. And not just possible, but incredibly likely. Especially if youโre as skeptical of words as I am.
Look, this isnโt about proclaiming or celebrating the Words Are All We Have As Writers thing. Itโs not about bemoaning it, either. This is simply about being honest. About realizing that thereโs only so far words will take us before they become prisons. There is a kind of understanding that comes from the simple act of hearing. Itโs called listening. Itโs what every reader does. Itโs what you are doing right now. And itโs what every writer does, too, whether she knows it or not, accepts it or not. Listening to the story you are trying to tell is the first act of telling it. You donโt have to hear every word of it, by the way. Because what we are ultimately after in the telling of our stories isnโt a specific form of understanding that gets perfectly replicated in every reader.
Listen carefully now. What Iโve just described is programming, and programming is most definitely not understanding. Programming is about replication, exact replication, which is about the farthest thing I can think of from understanding. Understanding is about making the mistake โ about fucking up โ and knowing youโve fucked up and having something itch in you because of it. Programming doesnโt itch. Or, at least, itโs not supposed to.
But Iโm coming to wonder if what we are ultimately after as writers may not be understanding at all. Maybe weโve given up on being understood, or maybe we give up on ourselves before something like understanding could even happen. Iโm wondering now if I am less interested in being understood and more interested in something else. Something bigger and more powerful than being understood. Something that a skeptic like me has a hard time accepting. Something like trust, as in I Trust You. When we read and when we listen, we suspend our disbelief. Writers canโt make readers do this, by the way; that suspension is inherent to the process of both telling and being told a story. โLet me tell you a story,โ the writer says. โOkay,โ the reader says. โI willย letย you.โ That most gracious allowance, for some of us, can be literally too much to bear. Iโm thinking about Sylvia Plath right now when I write that. About Ernest Hemingway. About David Foster Wallace. I donโt have to say it exactly, do I? You understand what I mean. No. Iโmย definitelyย more interested in something else than just being understood. And I hope you are, too. Because I trust you. I really do.
So go ahead now. Disappoint me. Break my heart. Enrapture me. Be formidable. Tell me a story. Because Iโve already decided that I will let you.
