“Chicken” and Poe try: The Unspeakable and the Unsayable

      1

      I like to play “chicken” with my students, most of whom in our post-positivist age have never really experienced the power of language, though every freshman can repeat the truisms retailed by English teachers from the early grades onward and wholesaled by “communications” specialists in the academy, the media, and the marketplace: through language, you discover truth, convey ideas, gain professional and economic advancement, convince individuals, sway the masses, sell products, preserve freedom, defeat falsehood, gain status. . . . Yes, we agree, language is like atomic energy, a mighty force that can be used for good or ill, to heal or kill, an instrument more delicate than the surgeon’s knife and more ominous than any other weapon in the history of humankind’s arsenals.

      Yet, on a less grandiose scale, in a more immediate sense, in the homely atmosphere of a beige, chalk-dusted classroom, with the whirring continuo of a perpetually ill-adjusted air-conditioning system, I like to play “chicken” with my students.

      Here are the rules of the game. I’ll start with an innocuous expletive, “Darn!” I’ll pause and then utter something a bit more potentially offensive: “Damn!” Now the agon reveals itself. Either my oaths will continue to grow worse until I chicken out, can no longer bring myself to the next, more scabrous term, or a student will raise his or her hand, indicating that he or she is unable to tolerate the next move in the game. The student is chicken, though usually it’s several members of the class who are unable to let me proceed.

      The tensions that the game generates come not from mere etiquette, not from formulaic Puritan propriety, rather from, I know certainly, dark caverns of psychic constraints that I as a teacher of language use can experience, but not adequately explain. If the game works—and it always does—the mood of the room seems concentrated in the electric focus of the ambient, unvarying ray of sound from the air-conditioning duct, inhuman, inexplicable (since Carrier’s engineers should have been more proficient), and timeless. The pause before we giggle and relax is a suspended moment.

      Needless to say, unspeakability comes not only from sexual and other taboos, but from any of the limits set by a given community—including limits of credibility (not many would pay serious attention to the argument that the earth is flat), of genre (as we all know, if something looks like or is called a poem, we lose much of our audience), of beliefs and values (any statements made by officials of the current administration, whoever they might be, are propaganda).

      If you think I’m overdramatizing, try “chicken” the next time you have the chance for a parlor game. You’ll experience the mystery of the unspeakable.

      2

      Both D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller took to painting, though neither was a Rembrandt, choosing palette, paints, brush, and canvas as a first and primary means of expression.

      Years ago in Taos, my wife and I saw a collection of Lawrence’s art, gathered by the enigmatic Saki Karavas in his office in the old hotel that he ran. His cluttered desk was in the middle of the room, and two pairs of his shined shoes sat on the floor by the wall. The admission charge, paid to the desk clerk, was two bucks each. We had just come from the mountain ranch, where we visited Lawrence’s tomb, and had signed the register just beneath the line on which a Nebraskan had penned flowingly, “Lawrence lives!”

      “Red Willows” lives in our memory: naked bathers in a stream with a red willow fringe. In the foreground, a young man, crouching like a frog and viewed from the rear. His torso is an optical illusion, a gestaltist ambiguity, an impossibility such as those which obsessed M. C. Escher. At one moment, the figure is a swimmer, about to launch off into the stream. At another, his torso is a penis, the buttocks a perfectly formed glans. He is both swimmer and phallus.

      Any interpreter worth his or her salutation can give a perfectly reasonable explanation of this image: D. H. the repressed homosexual doing bugger imagery in a moment of nasty artistry. In language, with such outrages as Lady Chatterly, he had reached the limits of speakability, and hence he changed his medium.

      And yet, such a reasonable explanation is far too easy, belies what we sense—when we are playing chicken, when we are being honest with ourselves—about the nature of our knowledge, for we know much more than we can say. Not only is language bound by the manacles of propriety (whatever that might be in our daring game of “chicken”), by the limitations on our gutsiness to utter that which is in principle speakeable; it is also shackled by the limits of the sayable.

      D. H. Lawrence, like all of us, knew a good deal more than he could ever say.

      Of course Lawrence could have “spoken” his homoeroticism, did speak it both in the suppressed beginning of Women in Love and in the conclusion of that novel. In the last scene, Ursula asks Birkin, “Did you need Gerald?”

      “Yes,” he said.

      “Aren’t I enough for you?” she asked.

      “No,” he said. “You are enough for me, as far as a

      woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted

      a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.”

      “Why aren’t I enough?” she said. “You are enough for me. I don’t want anybody else but you. Why isn’t it the same with you?”

      “Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said.

      “I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.”

      “Well—” he said.

      “You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!”

      “It seems as if I can’t,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”

      “You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,” she said.

      “I don’t believe that,” he answered.

      You say to me, “But ‘Red Willows’ is nothing more than a pictorial statement of what Lawrence said explicitly in other places, as in the conclusion to Women in Love, an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.”

      “I don’t believe that,” I answer. “In part, yes, the painting strains at the limits of ‘speakability,’ but goes beyond those bounds into the realm of the unsayable, the sort of knowledge that is as certain as the flick of a dry fly toward an eddy in Rock Creek and the sort of knowledge that is not certain at all, that