the bug

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain

the first time i listened to jason isbell was on a long and straight and uniform but not lonely drive. kip and i were going to montana to hike in the bear tooth pass. there is a hill that is the reason for a town named valley city but otherwise the geography for the first five hours of the drive, between fargo and theodore roosevelt national park, is a pancake placed by the hands of god. it is a good drive for hearing the words of songs.

what struck me the first time i listened to isbell was the precision of his words’ effect. he was talking about cancer and love and being lonely away from home in precisely the language that can transport the listener to the feeling of what he wants them to see. isbell’s words are lightning. i suppose that if he made the same drive as me he’d have a better way of laying out how it felt, and in this way he probably sees the world and remembers it a little more acutely than those of us who can’t quite get the right words.

—

i have felt my handle on naming my world to be mostly bug. mostly wrong words. mostly failed affect. mostly questions posed as statements and the me truly compelled by a response that doesn’t connect. on edge to know what the world could be following with. i’ve tended to believe i mostly get the words wrong and the degree to which it happens is directly proportional to the degree to which i think i’m sticking (or more accurately, not sticking) the landing in knowing what to think of life.

words build what we think of the landscape of our interior worlds. we name the world and then we interact with the world as we have named it. we lay our models on the next time we feel like the word is appropriate, and then tack on the new baggage of the word to the next time we feel like applying it. words also make what we think of who we are. if you don’t have the words, you don’t have a grasp on who you are. which is disorienting, to say the least.

i have begun to suspect that i, compared to the norm, execute a very small percentage of my thoughts. i have begun to suspect that a big reason this is the case is that i cannot sort them. the words needed to build the thoughts into coherence exist out of contact in a field of fog. they cannot see each other. i suppose this is quite the definition of “stuck in my head”: the presumption that existence can be something uniquely and imperially immaterial and in my head and interacting with no other thing or place. i also suppose the flailing incoherence of what i’m writing here is precisely proving my point.

i think what i’m trying to say is it feels like this sifting through the words and the thoughts that follow the words feels like what’s really experienced is in the end a very small piece of what’s on offer in the world. i think the sliver we end up with can make us feel cheated. i think we’re just barely bright enough to realize this but not bright enough to fully comprehend it. i think what i’m getting at is a much less graceful (more bug) version of what seneca was getting at here:

“The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.”

the things we can’t name or handle or grasp get lost and become just time upon reflection. they get too jangled up to be considered life. this, i suspect, is one of the reasons life feels short: because most of it is time, and much of it feels like a misled chance at other, potentially more remarkable bits. there’s a small piece of us that knows how much of it all we’re missing.

—

i am talking about feeling like one has simultaneously realized that the right words are impeccably important and that they are maddeningly hard to find: i am talking about the discontent that follows. i am talking about how 24 hours is never enough and how neither is 365.24 days.

the words i can think of from that trip years later have a lot to do with a sunrise in a canyon and a night in a tent and a drive and a great friend and isbell and a wild night at the yodeler motel that best not be spoke of. and i know now that i have words for those things and i feel good about that but i worry about which parts of my experiences i have not had words as hooks to hang on and now are lost.

i think people like isbell understand this phenomena. i think he carefully calls each thing by its true name because he knows how fickle his time here is. i think his filter is sharp for seeing the world as it is because he handles well what he calls it. if he was a vampire and death was a joke, i think he’d suck at writing songs. i think he wrestles with the words and the notes precisely because he is mortal, and knows it.