i feel i can give you everything without giving myself away

excerpt from the argonauts by maggie nelson

before we met, i had spent a lifetime devoted to wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed. this idea gets less air time than his more reverential whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, i think, the deeper idea. its paradox is, quite literally, why i write, or how i feel able to keep writing.

for it doesn't feed or exalt any angst one may feel about the incapacity to express, in words, that which eludes them. it doesn't punish what can be said for what, by definition, it cannot be. nor does it ham it up by miming a constricted throat: lo, what i would say, were words good enough. words are good enough.

it is idle to fault a net for having holes, my encyclopedia notes.

in this way you can have your empty church with a dirt floor swept clean of dirt and your spectacular stained glass gleaming by the cathedral rafters, both. because nothing you say can fuck up the space for god.

i've explained this elsewhere. but i'm trying to say something different now.

before long i learned that you had spent a lifetime equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough. not only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow. we argued and argued on this account, full of fever, not malice. once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. all that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. you called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. you said that you knew this not from shunning language but from the immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page. i argued along the lines of thomas jefferson and the churches - for plethora, for kaleidoscopic shifting, for excess. i insisted that words did more than nominate. i read aloud to you the opening of philosophical investigations. slab, i shouted, slab!

for a time, i thought i had won. you conceded there might be an ok human, an ok human animal, even if that human animal used language, even if its use of language were somehow defining of its humanness - even if humanness itself meant trashing and torching the whole motley, precious planet, along with its, our, future.

but i changed too. i looked anew at unnameable things, or at least things whose essence is flicker, flow. i readmitted the sadness of our eventual extinction, and the injustice of our extinction of others. i stopped smugly repeating everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly [ludwig wittgenstein] and wondered anew, can everything be thought.

and you - whatever you argued, you never mimed a constricted throat. in fact you ran at least a lap ahead of me, words streaming in your wake. how could i ever catch up (by which i mean, how could you want me?)

a day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, i sent you the passage from roland barthes by roland barthes in which barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase "i love you" is like "the argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name." just as the argo's parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase "i love you," its meaning must be renewed by each use, as "the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new."

i thought the passage was romantic. you read it as a possible retraction. in retrospect, i guess it was both.

you've punctured my solitude, i told you. it had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of hollywood, evening drives up and down mulholland to kill the long nights, and, of course, maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one. but the time for its puncturing had come. i feel i can give you everything without giving myself away. i whispered in your basement bed. if one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.