LIKE WATER THROUGH A RUSTED PIPE
For a few summers in a row, when I was twelve and thirteen and fourteen, we used to go spend a week at a family friend’s cabin in the woods with no running water save for a rusted red old-fashioned hand pump in the side yard. In the morning, before the dew burned off and the birds quit calling, I’d slip quietly out the screen door and across the clearing to fetch water for coffee. To get the pump going you had to prime it: bring along a bucket with a little leftover water, pour it in, then heave and heave at the heavy metal lever until the grind and squeak of the mechanism gave way to smooth suction and a gurgle of clear cold water.
It makes sense to think of language as water, something ubiquitous and essential, something that flows and dissolves and conducts electricity, something inherently colorless but reflective of the world around it. Something that can harm or heal, depending. Something limitless but finite. I liked “Language” early because, well, I liked language, too, and because I was often frustrated by my own attempts to delimit the precise edges of a private and particular silence I had experienced. These words are too solid, they don’t move fast enough. Everything about it felt familiar. That babble of round-singing at the end, voices chasing over and around and through the threads of different conversations, could not represent more perfectly the too-muchness of thought, the sudden rush of ideas that roars in from nowhere –– and is gone.
“Rusted Pipe,” though –– “Rusted Pipe” scared me. It conjured visions of the self’s interior as a cavernous, near-infinite darkness, spiderwebbed with faulty plumbing, dripping and echoing and unknowable. Body as broken infrastructure. Brain as flawed machinery. The solemn organ interrupted by the urgency of the chorus –– there’s a mania to it, a desperation, something frantic and horrible. But I don’t think any of that would have frightened me on its own if I hadn’t seen myself in it too. Suzanne Vega’s voice spins from perfect verb to perfect verb, luxuriating in the articulation of the failure to articulate. A feedback loop that could go on forever.
I used to write a lot about writing –– about not writing, too, I guess. Dwelling on ideas and on failures, bemoaning my own shortcomings. At the time it felt useless, proof that I’d never be able to move outside myself to get the perspective I needed to tell the stories bubbling up inside of me. I tried for clear water, and all I got was gurgle and mutter / hiss and stutter. I was afraid I’d broken something. Now when I look back on those pages they seem as rich and important as anything else I’ve written –– maybe not to an outside reader, but to me. Even when I didn’t feel it happening, they drew me, word by word, closer to what I hoped to find.
Is it better to say something poorly, or to say nothing at all? Is a perfect moment better cherished in silence, or does it make more sense to circumlocute it as best you can, hoping the logic will tighten as you go along? Why does it still feel embarrassing to try and express something complicated even knowing that there’s no way to communicate it perfectly in the first place? How long do you have to let the water run until it warms up? There aren’t any right answers, and there aren’t any endings, either. To get started you’ve got to pour in what lingers, put some muscle behind it. Somewhere deep within / hear the creak that lets the tale begin. If the pump needs priming, that’s okay. That’s how it works.
