Ineffable

This essay is from a print issue zine I created. Send me a message if you’re interested in buying a copy.

I’d like to think I’m still a hopeful person in life, but it’s easy to be pessimistic too. It’s easy to see all the ways in which we’re going wrong and all the ways we can’t stop the tide of the mess rolling in. I can see it in the way we communicate, and in the way we don’t. In the way that eye contact feels like the ultimate form of intimacy, the kind of intimacy we fear and shy away from. In the way that when we lock eyes, we turn away quickly even when everything inside of us is telling us not to, to hold. We leave the restaurant and regret not saying anything, even though we won’t the next time either. That’s kind of how living feels these days—when we’re face to face with it—with living, openly—we close our eyes tightly and slow our heart beats back down. Safe.   

Sometimes I think creatives are getting less creative, and people are losing their person-ness. Maybe it’s because we like to decide what’s collectively “in” and “out” within culture and life, picking what’s real and what’s normal like Miranda Priestly picking colors—it has to be this and not not not that. Everyone wants to be in, but out is where the person-ness is. And art was never supposed to be liked or understood by everyone. If it’s for everyone, it’s for no one.

One thing I personally hate is how we decided “realness” was in—first, there was this obsession with the lack of authenticity in culture, which then transformed into an obsession with authenticity, and has since transformed into a loss of ineffability, I think. Meaning, we feel we’re supposed to be so authentic, so true, and we’ve equated that with a sort of boring straightforwardness, and thus has become our art, when art really isn’t straightforward at all, nor is life. It is entirely ineffable—unable to be described, best described in weird words and overly sentimentalized feelings.

Think about the slow, painful feeling of nostalgia—the kind that makes your heart leap into your throat, so much so that you feel like you can’t swallow, that you might choke. Or the magical feeling that happens sometimes when you witness something beautiful or watch a beautiful film scene—something slow-motion with a Sigur Ros song murmuring behind it, something so not-real that it feels more real than worldly experience, because it feels not like what is real life, but what is real to our internal world. We’ve swapped these ephemeral things for shock — for immediate reactions — for an “authenticity” that is really just authentic to our performance of ourselves. If anything is truly authentic, to me, it would seem to be the things that are so mystical and mysterious and sad and fantastical that they take us out of the tangibility of world on earth and into the subconscious, beautiful existence of what’s unseen, of what we feel rather than we experience, physically.

Like the ending scene of Short Term 12 or the submarine scene in The Life Aquatic. Like the fantastical words of Haruki Murakami and other strange Japanese literature. These worlds meant so much to me in my childhood and coming-of-age. I lived inside the strangeness of them, the warm feelings they produced, the way they made me feel entirely distanced from my life experience but in the same way more connected than ever to it. Thinking back to those feelings, I can still remember them, but I rarely experience the same pure reactions now. Was it just the heightened teen emotions? Is it growing up? Or is art changing? Created for the eye, for the brain, for the instinct of fingers hitting buttons, instead of for the gut.

Of course, I still think there is amazing art in the world now. Genuine, beautiful art, incredible and raw artists. Maybe it’s our reaction to it that has made it feel so cheap—turning every artist into celebrity, requiring of them a sort of attractiveness, participation in pop culture, sales skills. Requiring of ourselves the branding of our tastes, our vibes, our cores. What is taste? You like what you like and love what you love and if you felt nothing watching a film you don’t have to pretend you liked the cinematography.

If anything is a sure sign of something sad and strange happening in the world, it is this flattening of art and the loss of raw, untouched, unhyped discovery. Everything we see we’ve already seen before, we see so much every day it feels as if we’re seeing nothing. My brain is a mélange of other people’s thoughts and words, I feel sometimes as if it is full of multiple minds, not all of them belonging to me. I used to process things I saw through my body, feeling it through each and every cell, goosebump, and organ, like liquid. But now I intake through the multiple brains, running processes and procedures like a factory, and moving on before the feeling is anything more than a rough drafted prototype thrown in the bin.

I don’t know what is happening, but what I know is that there is a grey polution in the air where fresh summer showers and Texas sunsets used to be. The feeling I used to get on humid nights chasing fireflies is lost in a droning numbness. When I get flashes of it, rarely, I wake up and remember what I—what we—have been missing. Where there used to be a collective energy in the air, a collective creativeness, a collective eagerness, there is now, for lack of a better descriptor, nothing. It’s like we’ve lost signal to a radio that used to hum and sing and we forgot that it used to make sound, that it’s not just for decoration sitting on the shelf.

I feel that what was sold to us as the utmost vulnerability, the most powerful and intimate connector (sharing our lives and thoughts online) is actually completely void of vulnerability—completely empty of it. And it emptied us out too, like a vacuum. It put us on display, on individual light stages, making us feel like we could see each other better. But it turns out all we can see is the spotlight, bright in our eyes, and we’re more alone than ever—living out our nightmares of being on stage in front of an audience and forgetting the part we’re supposed to play, the part that everyone else seems to know so well.

Writing used to feel so vulnerable, before the vacuum. Writing feels brave when I do it like this, early in the mornings, sitting in the window, searching and excavating inside parts of me and laying them on the table, serving them to people I want to connect with, to share with. A potluck, family style meal of feelings and fears and flavors that linger in mouths, a communion that connects us long after we leave the table. But even writing has become another commodity, cheapened into a media, polished with a sellable straightforwardness where fragmented, fraught, humiliating, beautiful chaos should be. We’re turning gasses into liquids, liquids into solids, solids into clunky matte objects that are cold to the touch.

I think there are a lot of people who really see the world, see it all happen in real time. And seeing the world is the most terrifying thing, because the world is scary and all-powerful and seeing it doesn’t mean you can change it. I think those of us who see, maybe we’re artists—because I think living intentionally is an art, life is the product—have trouble creating out of this space, because it feels icky and tired and like if this is our life, is this is what supports us, if this is what we choose, we’ll have to sell ourselves and all our goodness for safety eventually, and that thought is almost worse than keeping the art inside. If everyone is an artist than no one is. If artists are celebrities, then they end up losing the art. If artists are commodities, artists won’t want to be artists. So what is an artist today? Maybe we need a new word.

I think the real artists are the ones watching and patiently waiting. Observing, understanding, peeking behind the curtains while the puppet show starts to get boring. Sooner or later, the audience won’t want to see hands shoved up cloth, strings tied to ceiling rods. Sooner or later, they will want to see skin.

I think the ineffable is waiting patiently and silently, like a monk in meditation, like the Holy Spirit who doesn’t have to be summoned but is always just there when you seek it. Sooner or later, people will begin to bore of perfection, desperate for someone to scream or cry or scratch something, so that they too can release, and melt into a heavenly post-cry clarity and freedom. Magic, beauty, grossness, weirdness, strangeness, vulnerability, nostalgia, déjà vu, peace, being in love—these feelings, dimmed, pasteurized, and flattened with time staring at screens, will start to feel full again, will start to awaken sleeping energies within us. We will have to unlearn the fear of them we’ve developed, but once the attempt to be “real,” to be understood, to be branded, to be whole is finally abandoned, just then, I think finally we will be truly real. Real and true. People with person-ness.

People aren’t meant to be understood. They are meant to be loved. They are meant to experience. They are meant to try to understand, but ultimately have peace with the fact that the attempt to understand is more interesting than ever reaching the final point, the ultimate comprehension. Unknown-ness, unfamiliarity—that is where magic lies, where trust is the final word, where humans meet to discover something new and experience the ineffable.

It’s easy to be pessimistic in a world that is obsessed with knowledge, knowledge that will never be final and true but also that cannot be accepted as a lost cause, an agreement to accept misunderstanding. But I think, with time spent softening our edges and getting comfortable with mess, a little chaos, and the sound of our own voices in our heads, it will be easy to be optimistic about the world. Because the world is just people, and when people have their person-ness, their lights turned on, when people remember that they are people and not machines, when people stop trying to be real and begin to be humans—spiritual and energetic and ineffable beings—the world is not scary or sad or void, it is full of discovery.

I’m trying to fish out the minds in my brain that do not belong to me, and let them go. I’m trying to look into myself, into the way my stomach feels when I hear a song, into the way the tightness behind my eye eases when I think about how much time I have, into the way I instinctively take deep breaths when I’m writing. And I’m trying to find the un-real, the feelings that cannot be described and no matter how many words I use will never be understood by you in the same way that I can understand them. I am trying to spend more time there, in that comforting confusion, feeling something that no one or nothing can ever take away from me. I am trying to remind myself that that is what’s real: the messy, strange, gurgly, odd, drug-like feeling of being a human with person-ness. What’s real is what no one knows about me. What’s real is what we make of the ineffable. What’s real is everything, and nothing. What’s real is the way I felt writing all these words, the way I don’t really care if they make sense, because the way it felt, or feels to excavate them—is so, so good. Ineffable.

Experiencing and creating the un-real—what can’t be seen or described—which may be more real than whatever real is—if there is a God, which to me, there is—that is where I think He is found.