the shape of what cannot be said

If we say that identity formation is wholly based on the understanding of how language works, then it is also a matter of forming one's own relationship with language, of how words are defined by a meaning-making consistent with one's own worldview. Change a definition, reframe the world within a new system of language, and the world appears different than it was before. A person changes with it. Immensely.

I believed this for a long time. I once wrote that we only exist in language, and I meant it the way one means a vow. But being itself, in all our entirety, rests on something more abstract and primitive, something in between conscious and unconscious.

The hand that reaches for a cup has never said the word cup. It knows the weight before it knows the name. A child flinches at a raised voice years before she can say what fear is. There are people who lived into adulthood without any language at all, and they still had a temperament, a stubbornness, a way of turning toward the people they loved. Something was there to be given words. If language made all of it, there would have been no one to receive it.

So I could take back wholly and say mostly. Language is the strongest lever we have on ourselves, and a sentence said to oneself at the right hour can turn a life. That much I still believe. But mostly is a coward's revision. It keeps the same picture and only shrinks it: language as a floor of the house, the body as a basement underneath, and somewhere a staircase between them that we are supposed to find.

What sits outside of language is also inside it, at the exact place where words stop meeting each other, where a sentence reaches for its own end and finds nothing to hold. That marginal threshold, a hole in the floor of the house. Every word carries the absence of what it is not, and in a few places the absence is all there is. We do not run into the unsayable from the outside, as if it were a wall at the edge of the world. We are built around it. The self is the shape that forms around what it cannot say.

Some call that place a wound, the Real that the symbolic can never close. Some call it a field, a nothingness out of which the self is continually born. I can't decide which. On some days the hole feels like something taken from me and on others like the only open window in the room. Perhaps it is both, depending on what we do in front of it.

Because there are two things we can do. We can speak around it. We can give the hole a new edge, a new story, a better word, and the edge holds and the person really does change. That is what I meant all along by reframing, and it is not nothing. Or we can leave it open. Not narrate, not explain, not fill. Simone Weil thought grace could only enter where a void was left unfilled, and that our whole nature leans toward filling it. Reframing and silence look like opposites. I am beginning to think they are two ways of standing at the same edge.

And then there are the places where the edge will not take. A loss you can describe a hundred ways that remains exactly as heavy. A body that keeps flinching long after the story of why has been told and retold. Language works on our relation to the hole. It does not work on the hole. Redescription slides off it the way water slides off a stone, and the stone is not interested in our sentences.

This is what wholly was covering. A self that is wholly language has no such places. Nothing in it cannot be renamed, so nothing in it can undo the one who names. It is a beautiful thought and a closed one. A totality is a lid.

I still want to say that it is through language that we change. I only want to say it with the hole in it now. What makes each of us particularly unique may not be the words we have, which we share with everyone, but the way we hold ourselves around the few things we will never have words for. That holding is the closest thing I have to a signature.

There is an answer to all this that I haven't refuted. It says the hole is only a habit that is expensive to revise, a pattern too deep in the body to update, and that I am dressing a mechanism in theology. Maybe. But the mechanism cannot tell me how to stand in front of it, and that is the only question I have ever actually needed answered.

This piece opens a longer thread on language and the unsayable.