The limits of my language mean the limits of my world, says Wittgenstein. And if we continue to censor our most vital dialogues, our world can only grow smaller. And here, the poem does not necessitate admittance to anyone’s dinner table. It speaks to whomever chooses to listen, whomever needs it. But mostly, it avoids the easy answers, the limited and stunted, convenient closures. And maybe all a poem can really do is remind us that we are not alone—in our feelings. And maybe that’s nothing. And maybe that’s more than enough. Still, there’s no way of knowing if an engagement with poetry would have saved my uncle’s life.
Perhaps. And perhaps not. But I wish I could’ve found a way to share it with him more often, to have the courage to communicate on that urgent and open bandwidth. That we could have trusted each other with our frailties knowing that, as humans, we are, at our best, partially broken. I was never able to explain to him what I really do—with poems and words. My family calls me a scholar because scholars are revered in Vietnam. Having lost so much, they wanted, desperately, for something to be proud of. How can I tell them that I spend hours, months, writing poems very few people will read—and with barely any money to show for it? I hesitate to elucidate on my writing, fearing I will taint any esteemed image they have of me in the process. Other families sacrifice everything for lawyers! my uncle would say at family gatherings, a Heineken in his hand and his face flushed with delight. But we, we did it for a scholar. We might be poor but we’ll live forever in books!
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There is another world
but it is inside this one.—Eluard
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I speak of poetry only because it is the medium that I am most intimate with. But what I mean to say is that all art, if willing, can create the space for our most necessary communications. The character in the novel, the brush strokes in the painting, its tactile urgency, the statue of the Madonna made from birdseed, partly devoured and narrowed into a yellowed sliver in the rain. I want to believe there are things we can say without language. And I think this is the space the fire escape occupies, a space unbounded by genre or the physical limitations of the artist’s tools. A space of pure potential, of possibility, where our desires, our strange and myriad ecstasies can, however brief, remain amorphous and resist the decay actualized by the rational world.
And yet, in a time where the mainstream seems to continually question the power and validity of art, and especially of poetry, its need, its purpose, in a generation obsessed with appearances, of status updates and smiling selfies bathed (corrected?) in the golden light of filters, in which it has become more and more difficult for us to say aloud, to one another: I am hurt. I am scared. What happens now?, the poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. A place where I can be as honest as I need to—because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions—and even my loved ones. My uncle is gone. I will never know exactly why.
But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night—we can live. And we will.
