Attempting the Impossible
by Rebecca Balcarcel

"Behind all words, the Unsayable stands." -- Rilke

I am a communicator by trade -- poet, teacher, and sometime translator. Because my business is words, you might imagine I have staunch confidence in language and its ability to transmit thoughts and emotion. I don't. In fact, I find true communication miraculous. I think it astounding that words ever traverse the distance between humans. I know the weakness of the bridge. I draft and craft, carve and cut, weigh and wedge my words, hoping each time for that miracle.

My first experience with the inadequacy of language came at an open-air market in Guatemala at age five. My father led me along a dirt street lined with vendors. Women in their hand-woven huipiles chatted and bargained with customers. Men used colored sand to make pictures along the walkway. I could smell corn roasting and tamales baking, but Dad walked to a pile of coconuts. He planned to share with me a delicious treat from his own childhood. With an expectant smile, he handed me the fruit. A straw stuck out of a hole in the top. He gestured that I should drink. My brain registered the taste as dusty, sour, and reminiscent of moldy wood. Before I swallowed, a chalky sharpness bit my tongue. I tried to route most of the liquid into my cheek and then down my throat, missing the tongue. With the first gulp down, I looked at my father. "How does it taste?" Even now, reading my description above, I know how far my words land from the target. Tastes and smells persistently resist description. Beyond this, I knew that my father expected me to like the coconut milk, and that the truth might hurt his feelings. I lied that day. It was the first lie I deliberately told, and I remember feeling surprise that he believed me. To keep the illusion, I drank every drop. The odd thing is that, in a way, I didn't lie. True, I did not like the taste of coconut. But I appreciated my dad's buying it. Even at that age, I knew he was sharing a piece of his past and a piece of his culture when he handed me the hairy fruit. Money was tight, and I saw him pay the man a few quetzales. This coconut was almost a splurge. Which words could tell the truth of this situation? Maybe saying that I liked the coconut was more true than saying I didn't.

Language has failed me on other occasions. A few years ago, I was asked to give a toast in honor of my parent's 35th wedding anniversary. The party was a rarity; my parents had never celebrated their anniversary as a family event before. With no precedent and no experience, I sweated my assignment. No doubt my parents thought giving a toast would be easy for me, the poet. "This is what she does,'' I could hear my mother thinking. "She puts words together all the time." Yes, I do put words together all the time. I put words together, then unhitch them. I craft a phrase, then trash it. I'm always hunting my poem, trying to catch it in word-traps, and sometimes, I partially succeed. But all this experience adds up to a knowledge of how hard is this enterprise, how chancy, how unlikely the most effective combination of words. Even the best words are a compromise. The love I have for my parents, for example, and the love they have for each other -- these feelings cannot find pure expression in alphabetical constructs. Our deepest experiences happen beyond language. My words stand as signposts to that realm. I did manage to give a decent toast, I think. I posted signs to 35 years of singing Spanish love songs, of dancing in the kitchen, of overcoming cultural, linguistic, and religious differences to build a satisfying life. But even my words could not compete with the silence that followed the toast and the look my parents exchanged. The poem was there, in that look. And I stood by, with my fat case of words, helpless.