on eloquence

or the im/possibility of language

A friend plays us a voicemail she recorded at 2am. She is still a little drunk on the recording and, empowered by such drunkenness to speak unself-consciously, language unspools from her like a thread. For a full unbroken minute, she is ranting about her boyfriend pretending to be bisexual for attention. We replay it three times.

A full unbroken minute, not a moment of dead air. Each sentence dominoes and knocks square into the next: one line alleges cultural appropriation; another questions what this alleged bisexuality would mean for their relationship. Even as her voice buckles under the weight of laughter—the laughter of a woman who knows she is entirely unserious but has committed to a fantasy of indignance—her fluidity remains uninterrupted. She must have recognised, even as she recorded this, the calibre of its performance quality, or at least that it would be replayed twelve hours later for us to make fun of. But the spectre of audience does not corrupt her delivery; she is breathlessly fluent. An entirely reflexive outpouring.

I scour the transcription for even a trace of hesitation. That something could sound so natural it felt scripted; that a throwaway line like ‘I still believe in queer spaces, I’m still woke in that way’ could feel so profoundly funny, so immediately quotable. This style of monologue takes on a certain timelessness, as if it could be lifted whole from this context and placed in any other without losing its potency. What we should have forgotten as a spontaneous outburst was mutating. It was becoming almost canonical.

I could not shake the feeling that it should be performed in a theatre. It was Shakespearean; the same sense of rhythm, the same completeness of Portia’s soliloquy on the quality of mercy. At the very least, it belonged on a T-shirt.

In that minute of venting, she had stumbled upon—alongside casual biphobia—a mystical kind of eloquence.

It seemed to me that the shape of her thought had become near-symmetrical to the shape of her language. If all the things we might say are dissolved somewhere in a primordial ooze of pre-consciousness, then she had thrust her hand in and separated it particle by particle, crystallising each unknown into whole speech. And the curator who should sit at the threshold between mind and mouth, carefully editing an idea before it manifests into conversation, neutering its fullness for the sake of coherence, had all but disappeared. What remained then was pure articulation.

In a posthumous publication of her diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, Susan Sontag grapples with the problem of eloquence. ‘It is not natural to speak well,’ she writes. ‘Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it is more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.’

The effortless authority of Sontag’s public prose, its ‘cool girl’ detachment and world-weary aphorisms, bear little resemblance to the nervous, self-flagellating voice found in As Consciousness. Sontag the writer warns against hermeneutics, balks at endless interpretation and the search for hidden depth. Sontag the woman is snared in a futile examination of self, striving and failing to map out the contours of a deeply painful psyche. Over the years of 1964-1980 immortalised in these journals, Sontag’s anxieties are proliferated by heartbreak, depression, cancer. All that remains is a woman who seems hopelessly fragmented; ‘my various selves… how do they all come together?’

As she circles and questions and second-guesses, what she incriminates is the real throughline of her being: a sharp and constitutive loneliness. Her claims about eloquence expose worries about her own soul. Has intellectualism rendered her alone, or has solitude rendered her intellectual? Throughout As Consciousness, she is possessed with an urgency to ‘write more,’ ‘write better,’ and it is exactly the characteristic urgency of someone whose survival depends on articulating herself.

Language is the only rope by which she might pull herself out of the void of her own head. Perhaps, with her hands outstretched in that pitiful fashion of any true writer, language is the only means by which someone might grasp back.

---

When I was about seventeen, I turned an unsolicited dick pic from a guy we all hated into a Snapchat sticker. It circulated into a school-wide fixture of the daily morning selfies that marked 2016 adolescence, and I made sure that everybody knew I had propagated the idea. It was not my proudest moment. Or rather, as with all my attempts at emulating a Ja’mie: Private School Girl experience for myself, I am not proud to admit that it was an exceptionally proud moment.

Private schooling—as must be the case for all high schools, but distinguished by egregious wealth and its compounding aversion to empathy—is an economy which trades on cruelty. A nerd on a scholarship draws unwanted attention, and if that were not enough, I had the four strikes of brown and gay and fat and poor against me (really, I should’ve been a pariah at three). It followed that any real sense of triumph came not from material success, but a manipulation of that attention. No grade could ever compare to skipping the tuckshop line.

I needed more than anything to be liked, because to be liked was to fracture the looking-glass separating The Cool Kids from my own oddity, and in passing through, to be brought into the fold as someone worthy of being there. It might even grant me the same power, so that I too could decide who belongs and who is exiled from that coveted fold. If prey can at least pass as predator, then he touches the elusive high of popularity and enjoys its necessary protections. And in lieu of beauty, or talent, or even similitude, all that could smuggle me across the border was just this: my mouth.

A dick pic is a dick pic. A dick pic is a weapon. A dick pic is the Machiavellian strategy of a eunuch who knows how to secure political control. A dick pic, though not verbal in itself, speaks to a calculated articulation, an ease with ruthlessness that calibrates exactly what appeals to its audience’s sensibilities. Underpinning one Snapchat sticker is the restless machination of a faggot who wants to prove he is not like the other faggots. If his charm and witticism and language are oriented just so, then they will become the prosthetic by which he earns a seat at the centre lunch table.

While solitude may create the conditions for eloquence, it is also true that the muscle of articulation would atrophy in a vacuum.

Whether Sontag has explained eloquence well, or whether a voicemail is memorable, or a dick pic funny, all rely on their being heard and seen and interpreted. A man who sits in solitary confinement would find his tongue stiffening from disuse, the distance between his inner world and its externalisation becoming all the more unbridgeable without someone to spit himself to. Likewise, if I am a good orator, it is because there has been an audience to determine goodness. The same ‘groups’ who Sontag dismisses, those who do little more than sing and dance and pray, become the very ears that tell us the sound of the tree that falls in the woods—they are essential jurists to an eloquence even existing.

What, then, of loneliness?

The term ‘deracination’ is singular: ‘to be uprooted, removed or separated from one’s native environment or culture.’ The loneliness of a deracinated speaker is therefore not innate; he has been made alone through some silent and insidious process of separation. Sontag’s solitude is not exactly absolute isolation, like the image of a deserted island we might envision for the term ‘solitude.’ It is something more piercing. A consciousness boarded up within its own walls, yearning for the thrum of the crowd below, resigned to a fear that it might never truly join them.

This deracination may be palpable, embodied, as it seemed to me in my youth. Keenly aware that I did not look or sound or even behave quite right, I would do anything to claw my way out; naturally, my subconscious took to an uncannily similar project as Thomas Macaulay in 1835. That is, if the education policy Macaulay devised for British India then was to create a class of people ‘only Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,’ then I was enacting that same violence on my own subjectivity.

Speaking well—in the manner ordained to me by institutions, respectable and clear enough to make myself legible to whatever dominated me—was surely the logical path out of my deracination. It was my only means to a level playing field with my peers. Maybe then, I might even dare to find camaraderie or understanding or love beside them.

When I reflect on it now, I wonder whether the state of deracination is forever insurmountable.

Not because there is anything uniquely lonely about my existence, or even Sontag’s, or that we have some remarkable intellect that obviously distinguishes us from the illiterate masses. But if I had experienced a physical deracination, all it had done was coagulate a more intangible loneliness we must all suffer. I had only been given a clearer lens through which to see the distance between us.

‘We are all in exile from each other,’ Etel Adnan once said. Every feeling of belonging is accompanied by an undercurrent of dread, the sneaking suspicion that we might not actually belong. And the Sontags of the world, ripped from a delusion of belonging at some formative moment of their lives, devote the rest to speaking and writing and making the self legible so that for even a moment, they may return from exile.

When one becomes so vigilant about their own deracination, it can only give way to a rather constructed kind of eloquence. This is perhaps what Sontag refers to as ‘invented’ speech. Every meticulously-crafted sentence exposes the seams of its construction. I speak much the same way that I write, sprawling, discursive, often qualifying and hedging each statement with an immediate aside, and it is evident that in my relentless need to be understood I will complicate and modify everything until it becomes almost nonsensical and all that is left is my pathetically obvious need to be seen exactly as I want to and a failure to achieve that at all—So on. The more I insist on precision, the more each add-on dulls the very meaningfulness I crave.

This is articulate. My meaning, however blurred by method, does eventually communicate itself. But it could not be considered eloquent. To be articulate is to translate thought into comprehensible speech; to be eloquent is to accomplish this with such grace, such rhythm, that the speech itself becomes an aesthetic triumph. Language is no longer a vehicle for meaning, but its own experience of pleasure. What I possess then is merely the former dressed up as the latter. A cheap, dirty kind of eloquence.

---

I am in the back of an Uber with Heidi on the way to a barbecue mostly composed of acquaintances, and she asks me if I ever experience social anxiety. Not really, I respond.

The more complicated truth is that I have never been able to parse whether I simply don’t experience anxiety, or, like a fish in water, anxiety has become so structurally intrinsic to my experience that I cannot see outside of it. I do not care for diagnoses anyway—adolescence is about being overwhelmed by the crippling enormity of being alive. Adulthood is about contingency plans.

I will never be anxious because I have created a world for myself in which its restraints can never arise. Every weekend, in front of the mirror, in the back of an Uber, I devise my social schemes; I have a perfect set of conversational starters, ranging from the current zeitgeist to characteristically philosophical interrogations. I must come across deeply interested and deeply interesting. I methodically run through every potential guest I will interact with, and have a recall cheat code for said conversation. How was your opening? How were your exams? What are you learning from your rebound relationship?

Heidi tells me this is also a symptom of autism. I don’t care to investigate that.

What is far more interesting is what happens three hours later, testing out my methodology in a conversation with a relative stranger, trying to relate to their work troubles with an anecdote about my totally-all-but-confirmed narcissistic boss. This must be a hit, I think. I’ve rehearsed the beats of this one to opening night-perfection in my own mind, and every reaction must go in accordance with what I have imagined for myself. When I hit the reliable stride of showing off her definitely psychotic Instagram habits, I am instead gripped with a sudden nausea—the laugh of my audience member is awkward, forced. He does not really care. What I am saying is, God forbid, desperately uninteresting.

If all that props my body up is this thin wireframe of calculated articulacy, then even a moment of conversational awkwardness is my undoing. For people like myself and Sontag, the curator never disappears. It puppeteers even our briefest lines. What I call eloquence is just elaborate preparation, and when it fails, all I have left is its machinery, whirring helplessly in the air.

So I obsess over that which I cannot access; there, it must emerge, my Great White Whale.

Somewhere out there, something is being expressed extemporaneously, nearly perfect phrasing, beautiful and pure eloquence, all by instinct.

---

When I watch the Ballet International Gala’s recital of Dracula on my birthday, I am most moved by the fact that there is not a second of language throughout the performance. It seems ridiculous to say, but I was taken aback by the sheer voicelessness of it. Nobody speaks, nobody sings. Narrative is driven entirely through movement and flourishes of orchestra. Every emotion must be completely embodied.

When a world is constructed entirely from language, where everybody is speaking and writing and reading and the Word is relentless, its very absence seems revelatory. Here at the Civic Theatre, I have stepped into a void of the very thing I build myself on. In fact, any use of it would be a pathetic crutch. The performer who plays Dracula does not assert his dominance through verbal commands. He simply leaps in the air three times and lands them on beat with Mozart’s Requiem. In just that demonstration, he has asserted his virility, and the world of Dracula bends to his centre. His body becomes the very instrument of his expression; desire bursts from him in a direct, unencumbered line. A silent and pure eloquence.

Ballet is perhaps a strange teacher for the enterprise of speaking, but dance and speech are as similar as anything we do in this life.

Every single act, from speaking to dancing to moving to touching, is a painstaking act of transcription. As blood from a stone, we squeeze our most inarticulable desires into something intelligible, small and dignified enough to make contact with the outside world.

And if the essence of ballet is its construction—mastery of technique, a language of movement that dates back centuries and must be adhered to unflinchingly—then what that construction reaches for is something visceral. In that moment on stage, everything must be manifested in the body immediately. I must see and understand images of passion or hurt or beauty in real time, and if it has been successful, I must be affected. I must think I have felt something beyond what even language can express.

But if there are mediums of expression like this, expressions that can exist as a direct line from one soul to another, then what becomes of language? As we think into speech, does the very nature of speech obstruct the lucidity of meaning? Could words ever be enough to capture what we want to say?

When I listen to Rosalía’s La Yugular, the eleventh track on her latest album LUX, I experience something close to that voicelessness; not silence exactly, but language pushed past a point of consciousness.

Here, Rosalía takes on a Sisyphean task for any writer. She is trying to comprehend God within the flimsy bounds of lyricism. La Yugular is inspired by the first female Sufi saint, Rabia Al Adawiyya, who founded the doctrine of divine love: that is, to love Allah for only the sake of loving Him, and not for fear of Him or desire for His rewards. The song’s title itself comes from the Quran 50:16, where Allah describes Himself as closer to us than our own jugular vein.

To capture something so utterly incomprehensible, the sense of God’s ubiquitousness, the enormity of His love, the sense of divine nearness that can never be articulated but only felt, Rosalía renders her final verse like so:

I fit in the world

And the world fits in me

I occupy the world

And the world occupies me

I fit in a haiku

And a haiku occupies a country

A country fits in a splinter

A splinter occupies the entire galaxy

The entire galaxy fits in a drop of saliva

A drop of saliva occupies Fifth Avenue

Fifth Avenue fits in a piercing

A piercing occupies a pyramid

And a pyramid fits in a glass of milk

And a glass of milk occupies an army

And an army fits inside a golf ball

And a golf ball occupies the Titanic

The Titanic fits in a lipstick

A lipstick occupies the sky

The sky is the thorn

A thorn occupies a continent

And a continent does not fit in Him

But He fits in my chest

And my chest occupies His love

And in His love I want to lose myself

Even in translating this to English, I lose that effusive meaning provided only by linguistic context. Perhaps if this verse had been sung in English, the pleasure of its syntax would be diminished; certainly, a Spanish speaker may be underwhelmed by a line as eclectic as ‘the Titanic fits in a lipstick.’ But listening to a language I do not speak, hearing it push and pull against the song’s rhythm, the sonic bounce of a word like ejercito against una pelota de golf, the very sound of each phoneme seems to resonate inside me. I don’t understand it consciously, only instinctively—God’s presence, never seen, only felt.

In an effort to render the omnipresence of God in all things, these lines can only approximate something close to it. An army is a sky is a thorn is God is you is me. Rosalía conjures image after image of something that might actually strike at truth, like so many Rorschach tests that might just capture a glimpse of His face. In practice, all she can ever do is circle endlessly around an impossibility. Even a continent could not fit in Him.

It is in that failure, in that surrender to impossibility, that she gets to an almost pure eloquence. Her language admits to its own insufficiency and perseveres in spite of it. She articulates beyond reason. Because for every thing she tries to say, every word she constructs and invents in pursuit of understanding, she might at least draw an outline of the most unsayable things. Somewhere in that striving, somewhere in that negative space, there just might be God.

Rosalía sings the chorus of La Yugular in Arabic. It translates to ‘For you, I would destroy the sky / For you, I would tear down hell / No promises, no threats.’ Even if she were to understand its meaning logically, by virtue of singing in a language she does not know, she has become a vessel to sounds completely alien to her. There is no translation between thought and utterance, because the thought does not belong to her anyway. It is pure phonetics, surrender to incomprehension, listening so carefully to the shape of Rabia’s devotion that she might emulate it herself. Through the very given speech that Sontag deems non-eloquent, Rosalía attempts to invent another dimension of understanding.

It sounds beautiful and I don’t understand a word and I feel something.

---

Eloquence can never be defined, only felt.

Eloquence is the river and it is the dam; gravity and suspension. It is a cathedral, rigorously architected, elaborately detailed. It is a cathedral, woven into the fabric of its own city, so natural and present it seems it must have always been there.

It is not that loneliness beats language out of us like we owe it money, nor that the mere presence of other people pulls language out of us through osmosis. Really, it is an irreconcilable tension between the two. The conditions of Sontag’s deracination are not so dissimilar to the conditions behind my friend’s voicemail—they are generating a certain quality of listening.

The speaker in exile becomes exquisitely attuned to the frequencies around them. They listen to how others speak, how the language moves between us, the flow of giving and receiving, what rhythms appeal and what flounders. And that wretched curator who mangles our thought into speech does the same in reverse; it receives the world into us, constantly calibrating the interior world against the exterior one.

What I had thought of as perfect articulation, my Great White Whale of spontaneous and perfect phrasing, had always seemed to be a total disappearance of the curator. Instead, like a ballerina who so perfectly embodies her years of training to execute a grand jete, or a popstar with a team of producers fumbling to get the right note at the right moment—maybe what I am seeking is a dissolution of self. Immersing myself whole into that very curation.

Somewhere at the bounds between invention and immediacy. Somewhere between the vital need to eject myself out of my head and the world rushing inside to meet me. Somewhere between speaking and listening. Somewhere between somewhere and nowhere, circling around the impossibility of ever getting it right but trying anyway. Maybe that’s where it is.

---

Maeve and I get to a pre-drinks for a concert we don’t even want to go to, and the host’s interior decor is the kind of eyesore that inflicts a deep spiritual damage. It is in the vein of all modern design, which is to say that all the furniture seems to have come from an off-brand IKEA showroom, and each cream tone is set off against some inspired beiges. Its lifelessness is animated only by pops of hideous succulent plants, and who even knows if they actually are succulents, because this entire room is essentially proto-AI. It is a pastiche of a living room for an approximation of an actual living person.

As I try to construct more sentences just like those ones, flailing around to word my visceral disgust at what I am seeing, Maeve tries to take over the aux. In one move, she takes all the wind out of my lungs with just one succinct, incisive, effortless line: ‘everything in here just looks like a fucking speaker.’

I couldn’t have said it better myself.