I’ve been thinking about how our language reveals us. How we are never fully legible to ourselves, until we go back, re-read, underline.
I pulled up old blogs. Some of these blogging platforms are now defunct. Xanga doesn't even exist anymore. I downloaded the log archives and read them all in the indecipherable language of markdown.
Over the course of a few weeks, I sent childhood friends snippets from old posts. Remember this? Remember saying that?
"damn cringe," E texted. "you clearing your digital space ah," Y asked.
“ya so cringe,” I replied. I didn’t explain the sudden compulsion to take a critical eye towards my language, the urge to see how it has shifted and warped according to the exigencies of time and mood. The sense of alienation and lively curiosity when face to face with written relics of selves lost to time. The urge to lay out all past work and annotate with a red ballpoint pen.
I reminisced, I laughed: “Wow, I really wrote that way, huh. So embarrassing. How could anyone read this?”
But also, as if for the first time, I read it at a remove, looking at the language like a perverse little voyeur, slack-jawed— fascinated and astonished: "What kind of style was I aiming for? Why did I choose this structure? What does my language tell me? "
Reading not as the writer, but the reader. Or the curious middleground between literary scholar and amateur psychoanalyst. You see, sometimes the two overlap. And since the language is mine, I can do whatever I want.
The discomfort here is because I’m now the subject, the text. And the particular tension being the literary critic of your own unadorned, gawky writing is that it is— to quote a trusted source— “damn cringe.”
Case in point:
“et tu, brute? this is heartspeaking: i believe in many things. i dream of them too. tell me, if we are such stuff as dreams are made of, why the stark discrepancy?/ shakespeare! winston wokeup with your name on his lips. i see you in my dreams, and i loveyou. the thousand twanging instruments, the clouds that open up, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not; dreamstate spectacular, smiling! (i’m starting to think that freud was right all along). / the harsh sunlight, the aching silence, i want to speak but i won’t because then i’ll lose, endless waiting for that something, terrified it’s actually nothing, convinced that it’s nothing. burn and rend, turn away and pretend.”
All this obfuscation and intertextual deflection! Drips and drabbles from books I was reading in class! George Orwell's 1984, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Freud—! The romantic abjection! The posturing! Smattering of cultural capital!
When all I wanted was to say was: I'm in love with this guy. His name is Beng. But he’s attached so I can't talk about it.
The writing style of my teenaged self was a performance of mystery— a wish to be seen, but not understood. The desire to be read but be illegible. A performance of the manic female trying on different voices.
Despite the self-indulgence of the tone, there is something touching about it all— my language was round with adolescent desire, the pressing need to shape emotions out. Here, invocating literary references was less a cheap imitation, less the lack of originality, and more a search for a style that rings true. A quest by someone newly enamored with language, grasping for vocabulary that could hold the immensity of young love.
The thing is, I don't think I really understood that, writing that resonant but utterly confounding piece. I’ve re-read this old post several times throughout the years, and it’s as if I’m face to face with a brick wall. Somehow, because I wrote them, the words don't touch me. I don't even think I realized I wrote this because I was lovelorn. Only now are things clearer, in retrospect.
I wonder why I have such a hang up about understanding this so late. Maybe part of this anxiety is about a certain selective reading— that I do ‘literary studies’ but it’s taken me so long to really read and think critically about my own writing— the style and form.
Novelist Ocean Vuong confirms, “The text is a fossil. The text is a photograph.” Underlying this sudden retrospective look at as much writing as I can pull up, to see what the archive can tell me, is a fear— what has slipped under my radar? Only recently did I take an ear to my own academic writing and found it so sad and lonely, cowering behind flimsy shields of jargon and insecurity. Why has it taken so long? What else have I missed?
I re-read Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm, and squint at the notes scribbled in the pages. In the scene where a moth immolated itself upon a candle flame and its husk became a new wick, I had underlined Dillard's line, “like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light.” In the margins, I wrote in blue ink, my knowing is in the light of dying.
It startles me, that knowing can be so belated. How we can wield language so confidently without knowing the full ramifications of what we are actually saying. How even in editing, re-reading, we may not grasp the effect of our words. How even a small glimmer of illumination may take years— a lifetime of looking back, reflecting.
I revisited a whole genre I had undertaken sometime in 2018. This time, it wasn’t a blog post performing for the eyes of others. Vastly, vastly different.
Instead, I spent months in my journal writing letters to an imaginary reader. His/her appellation was an algebriac placeholder— Cher x. Dear x. I abstracted myself too, signing off as ‘K’.
Dear x,
You’d be so angry with me if you knew the little work I’ve done this month. I know you liked me driven and accomplished and passionate, and I’m afraid I’m none of those things right now. [...]
And now I will be going to explore the library instead of working. I can feel your disappointment, I’m disappointed in myself too.
Yours (will you have me?), and mine (will I have me?), K
I remember being inspired by Chris Kraus’ autofictive I Love Dick, which has an ardent, cultish following by "smart women who liked to talk about their feelings"— an ironic appellation I still smugly wore after finishing the book. The narrator, also called Chris Kraus, writes to Dick, calls him, thinks about him all the time. And he rebuffs her, plainly uninterested. I didn't identify so much with her unrequited obsession, but was mesmerized by the output produced by the epistolary form that makes up the body of the book. I remember thinking to myself, if I changed my journal entries and addressed it to someone, maybe I'll journal more. And journal deeper.
It worked. I told my fictitious interlocuter about my day, insecurities, fixations. Books that touched me and podcasts that were changing my life.
But mostly I described dank days of depressive fugue.
At the time, I thought I was being so clever, experimenting in private, playing with form, exploring the para-social benefits of the Dear Diary format. Months later, when I ceased this endeavor, I re-read these entries with amusement and bafflement: “Ah, Cher x. Funny times.”
But now, re-reading it, it’s as plain as day:
I created a whole genre to feel less alone. It only just occurred to me that the whole Cher x epistolary genre actually screams, “I want someone to hear me, to understand.” But being too afraid and depressed to reach out to anyone real.
My loneliness wasn't legible to me. I see these words I type down. And I don’t understand them for years. Something is blocking me from feeling the resonances behind the syntax echoing along the creaking of the pipes in winter.
At the moment of writing, I thought I had felt all the nuances, the full spectrum of motivations and insinuations. I’m used to teasing out meaning from the words of others but am both intrigued and horrified that the understanding in my own language was so thin— the embarrassment of discovering a period stain on one's skirt after a whole day of socializing.
Now, in hindsight, it’s heartbreakingly clear:
Mei bent down to tie her shoelaces. “Maybe the fear of showing others your writing is because you fear being heard.”
I have a journal in which I write letters to Quinn. In it, I tell her she delights me, apologize for my shortcomings, and chronicle the days we spend together. I paste polaroids of her as a toothy toddler, and document the stories I whisper to her when the lights are off. I helplessly confess that she is magic, and how much I love her.
But unlike Cher x or old blog posts, these letters aren't static or pristine, aren't fixed documents of a time past, or the "fossils" that Vuong mentioned.
The body of my letters in blue ink are scribbled over with black. To already finished letters, I add, append, and edit— footnotes, things that occur to me when re-reading, references from books. Arrows and linkages abound. Indexes, postscripts, and references spiral from the main text; run-off typhoons of retrieval and compensation.
Reading these letters is a reader’s sprawling nightmare.
On the front flap, I wrote:
"These letters are full of revisions, footnotes, additions, edits, re-writes, disclaimers, mistakes, addendums, regrets, second thoughts, third thoughts, going backwards, traveling forward, and inhabiting multiple timelines— which, for me, is a truer representation of the emotional, phenomenological, conceptual, and affective experience of parenthood than any one neat, coherent, linear narrative."
I believed these words then. I still do. But also, now I am also thinking: Good bloody grief.
Am I writing an academic paper to Quinn?? Is she gonna peer-review this Moleskine journal?? "Emotional, phenomenological, conceptual, and affective experience of parenthood??" The actual heck?
It’s not really Quinn I’m writing to, as she is now— nearly four years-old, but some future version of her, a full, literate adult, her body and language and face still foreign to me. I imagine giving her this journal on her wedding day. Or it passing into her hands when I’m dead. In a sense I’m still keeping up the practice of writing to an imaginary reader, not knowing the version of her who will receive these letters.
A paragraph might read like this, with addendums in bold:
I am imagining you reading this years later, looking at my handwriting [proof of me]. Maybe I'm still around, if I have the good fortune. Maybe I'll have gone. But my words here will remain, a humble act of devotion [D.W. Winnicott's "The Ordinary Devoted Mother"] , full of feelings for you.
I re-read my missives and search for lapses, cavities, and openings. I try to preempt my adult daughter’s judgment, wriggling out of it by adding, forever adding, never satisfied. It seems that I can’t shake the nagging feeling that previous acts of reading and editing were false starts, that every attempt to relay something profound to Quinn is sorely lacking. Resigned to the sorry fact that children will always misunderstand their parents, I try to control how future Quinn will interpret me, not realizing that the crowded pages and margins expose more than they hide.
Will I copy and paste this whole section and include it as a supplement to that note on the front flap? Further cluttering up an already congested journal?
...most likely.
I suppose I should just surrender to the fact that I am a hopeless neurotic, uneasy malcontent, full of regrets I try to rectify with a different-colored pen. That seems like "a truer representation of parenthood", Quinn— whenever you read this.
Writing is a means of expression that tries to convey clarity and yet can be inexorably opaque. Words can tell us so much, but also be so silent.
And yet, that's the beauty and frustration of our entanglement with language. No matter how much we try to control it, we can never fully command its secretions— in the sense of language being wantonly secreted, like a bodily fluid; as well language holding secrets that only time and a patient gaze will reveal.
And this gaze— I thought that to read I had to harden my eyes, make it precision-sharp. How could I have forgotten that to see something means to yield?
The elegaic Charles D'Ambrosio observes that the secrets we uncover from our writing is a "good reminder that you don't have to indulge in a goopy confessional mode to write a personal essay— you're more mysterious than you know, more naked than you imagine, and whether you intend it or not you're going to be exposed."
I'm still not fully sure why I'm going through my written archive, taking an ear to the language and an eye to the shape. Maybe I’m trying to confirm something about literature to myself.
Whatever it is, the epiphanies I received from this dip into the personal archive were small but quietly revelatory, though they may touch no one but myself. Maybe, as the precedent I've set seems to indicate, I'll know more with time.