Before I Knew the Word
On a fish tank, a wire in the wind, and a feeling that arrived before its name
Sometime around my fourth birthday, on a late spring afternoon, I was standing in my room. I had gone back there to get my jacket before going out with my parents to shop. My birthday was in a few days and there would be a party. I was excited and rushing — I remember looking for the jacket — when a feeling came over me, and I paused. Looking. There was a large fish tank on a table in front of the window, and the window looked out onto a courtyard. I was watching the fish. Then my eyes went past them, through the glass and the second glass, to a wire hanging from the roof of the adjacent building, moving gently in the wind. Above the courtyard there were clouds. Light was coming in. Somewhere below, out of sight, I could hear people whose faces I would never attach to their sounds.
And a feeling arrived that I had no name for, because I was four, and because — I have come to believe — it has no name.
It was an expansion and a contraction at the same time. Butterflies in the stomach, but not fear — something closer to thrilling, except it wasn’t attached to anything, the way thrills are supposed to be attached to things. I felt an opening out of some kind, a connection to a vastness — and at the same time my body seemed tiny inside that vastness, and the vastness was not familiar — and yet I was somehow of it, a part of it, the way you feel on the roof of a tall building: the drop and the belonging at once. Both. That was the whole character of it — a bothness. Or, as I would hear it decades later — a word set at the head of a Delmore Schwartz poem, in a recording of him reading it aloud, that landed on me like an allusion to this exact afternoon — a withness. Small and endless. Held and exposed. I stood there floating, calm, thrilled, in a moment that was doing two opposite things without any strain at all.
I looked again at the fish. They were moving in their contained world, and I was in mine, and the immensity was somehow present in both — a physical presence, not an idea. I remember imagining what the wake of one fish would feel like to another: that small displaced water, that trembling arrival of someone else’s movement in your own body. Then out the window again — the wire stirring, the clouds crossing — and each time my attention swung, the feeling swung with it: expansion, contraction. The infinitely small and the infinitely large were not in different places. They were in the same afternoon, and depending on where I stood in myself, the world appeared differently — but I was of this world and it was of me, and the appearing itself was the thing.
Then I began to think about it, and everything changed.
I could feel two of me, quite distinctly. One part had begun trying to decode the moment — to figure out what was going on, to solve it. The other part was simply remaining in it. And I made a discovery that afternoon that I have spent my life confirming: whenever the decoding part took over, a queasiness rose, something that shaded toward fear. And whenever I let the moment simply be — when I stopped working on it and stayed in it — the queasiness vanished, completely, as if it had never existed.
At one point a question surfaced: Is this God? And the question itself made me queasy — because God, as I had understood it, was apart from me, and the moment I reached for that word, the bothness split. The feeling that had held me now had an inside and an outside, a me and a something-else, a problem where there had been a presence. The word didn’t describe the experience. It divided it.
That was the lesson, though it took decades to phrase: there is a vivid mode of being that thinking-through shatters. A space that exists — really, palpably — and that resists the mind’s attempt to know it by describing it. And yet the two modes are not strangers. One is experienced through the other; they touch everywhere. It is only that one of them resists being known about, and the other can do nothing else.
Here is the strange mercy of being four: I had no escape. I did not have the word mystery. I did not have unknowable, or infinite, or awe. There was no vocabulary standing by to receive the experience and file it, no discourse to convert the moment into a topic. I could not manage it, so I had to be with it. Readers of these notes will recognize the shape — I once wrote of walking into a room I had no map for, and the missing map turning out to be the way in. This was the first room. The poverty of my language was the condition of the encounter. It was raw and overwhelming, and I discovered I could feel it and remain in one piece — that it didn’t crush me. If anything it seemed to be doing something like the opposite: sustaining me. Forming me.
But there was one more movement in that afternoon, and it was darker. As I swung between the small and the vast, the smallness revealed itself as a process — an endless fractionating, a dividing that could divide forever, each piece splitting into pieces. And where the vastness felt like something that settled — settled into simply being there — the atomizing felt like a whirlpool with no floor. It seemed absurd and inevitable at once. And I felt, with a child’s unargued certainty, that the whirlpool was not self-sustaining: it drew its energy from the vastness, pulled the oxygen out of the immensity to keep itself spinning. The exhilaration of belonging to the endless was suddenly shadowed by the will to make everything smaller and smaller, forever. I looked back at the fish. Their entire world fit on a table — a piece of the boundless, cut to size, boxed in glass, maintained. And yet the immensity was in there too; I had felt it; the wake of one fish still arrived in the body of another. I could not decide whether the tank was a keeping or a taking, and the not-deciding had a taste I would meet again all my life. That was the moment the butterflies first tipped toward fear — not at the vastness, but at the appetite of the small.
Into this arrived language — not as an abstraction but as a person. My mother.
She taught first grade; she taught children to read. I have written in these notes about a sculpture on a shelf and an argument with her over the names of colors, and about what naming had meant in her own life — the key that had unlocked a country for her. She was, in the most loving and deliberate way, expanding my vocabulary, preparing me — without my understanding — for school. And so, in the months around that afternoon at the window, I was becoming aware of what words do. They bring things forth. Out of the unknowable vastness, a word extracts an entity — crisp, bounded, shareable — and there it is, where there had been the shimmer. I could feel the power of it. I could also feel the cost, and I could not yet say the cost aloud — which may be why, for almost a year after that afternoon, I stopped saying much of anything.
Because to my four-year-old sensing, language was suddenly a miniaturizing technology. Every name was a small act of the whirlpool. And what terrified me — truly, in a way I can still touch — was the endlessness of the management that naming seemed to set in motion: categorization, organization, parameters, maintenance, a bottomless appetite for converting presence into inventory. The world around me seemed lit with that appetite. It would go on forever, I felt, and it would be fed forever from the same source — the radiance of afternoons like mine — until the beholding was fully processed into the beheld-and-filed. An eternity of becoming, purchased with being. It made me, more than anything else, sad — and not for myself alone, but for myself as part of what was being consumed. I felt protective of my belonging to that vastness. And the strange thing, which I could feel even then, was that the vastness was illimitable — the describing could never actually exhaust it, which made the whirlpool, in the end, pointless. I grieved the drain anyway. Not because the immensity would run out, but because so much radiance was being spent on making things smaller.
My response was twofold, and I have described both elsewhere in these pages without ever before naming their origin. 1) Silence — I largely stopped talking, and I should be honest that the silence had two motives. I had been a talkative child; my ability with language at an early age would startle strangers, and my parents loved to recount those stories. I had learned that speaking won me attention, and I liked it. But I had also begun to notice how people looked at me when I spoke — something in their gaze felt like a distance. I didn’t have words for it, and the irony of that only strikes me now: it was my first taste of performance, and of the strange remove performance opens between you and the people watching you. And 2) the piano at dawn: rising before anyone else and going to the instrument not to practice anything or pick out a recognizable tune, but to explore relationships of frequency and silence at the threshold of audibility — and at the threshold of tonality — not making music so much as keeping a channel open, being with sound before sound became recognizable.
The changes worried my mother — as mothers do, and should. My father was less concerned; he seemed to file my behavior as a phase. At day care, however, I was a problem. I was a child who, when the lesson began, would simply walk away and do his own thing. Or perhaps be his own thing. I noticed my teacher’s divided attention — entirely normal in a room full of children — but what I felt through that opening was the pull of the collective: the lesson as a device for making us the same. I didn’t have those words. What I had was a feeling of impending homogenization — one more violation of the vastness — and it fed my distrust of “learning,” and of “teachers.” My response was to peacefully distance myself, with the thought that if I left them alone they would return the favor. I preferred building large structures out of wooden blocks, alone. Enacting my piano ritual in space, with wood. And like the tones I lingered over, I needed time to be with whatever I’d assembled, to experience whatever the form had unlocked. If other children wanted to build near me, that was fine; but if they tried to rearrange my work — or if my teachers tried to “help” me build a “castle” (for some reason they always said that) — I would lose my temper and remain tempestuous and guarded. I was asked to leave more than one day care, and the options were thinning.
There were consultations, of the family kind. My mother’s mother was a doctor, her father was a chemist, and her uncle was a psychiatrist, and I remember being with them in that season — and I remember, more vividly than anything they said, the quality of their attention. They were kind. They were genuinely interested in what I was trying to say. The verdict, as best I can reconstruct it, was my father’s position: do nothing, it will pass. And here is the detail I hold dearest: none of them ever forgot it. My mother’s parents, my mother’s uncle, my father’s aunt — the officially creative one on my father’s side — remained fascinated for the rest of their lives by that strange season and, by extension, by me. Whatever it had been, they treated it as something particular and worth respecting, and that respect never waned. I felt it every time I saw them, decades on. It was a kind of shelter.
My mother, though, decided to act, and took me to a child psychologist. I went once. My mother told me we were going to see someone who wanted to talk to me, and that seemed fine. But when he came to meet us in his waiting room, I was alarmed by his white coat — and entering his office, I saw objects that looked invasive and surgical, and I became terrified and desperately tried to flee. I have distinct memories of struggling with my mother, and of being closed in the room alone — and then, through tears, of the door opening and the man in the white coat returning. I climbed under a table. I remember him calmly trying to talk with me, and how his questions felt aimed — I now assume with the best intentions in the world — at the very thing I was protecting; it seemed to me that he had been hired to take the awe away and give back something orderly in its place. I never returned. I don’t offer this as an indictment of anyone — my mother was doing what care looked like from where she stood, and I was four and telling no one anything. I offer it because of what it instilled: an early, cellular wariness of collective, formal conditioning — of any procedure whose function is to process the unnameable into bits that can be organized. I had the awe. I knew how to be with it. And the machinery of the world seemed to want it converted.
What worked, in the end, was stranger and more fitting than anyone could have designed. The last school that would take me — a last resort by then — was part of a Friends school. My mother’s family had a history there, though I knew nothing of it as a child: when they arrived in this country, the Friends’ Meeting House had become a place of refuge and contemplation for them, and my grandfather, the chemist — with whom I was very close, and who will have an essay of his own in these notes before long — was the one who never let the connection go. He loved the practice of shared silence, punctuated by contemplative thought. In truth, and in a kind of parallel, the family’s past was kept from me — the whole family kept its past silent — and its presence in my childhood was a certain shape of silence that felt, somehow, familiar, though I couldn’t have explained why. But the school received me. And so the child who had stopped talking was delivered, at last, into the one schooling tradition where silence is not a symptom but the shared practice — where a room full of people saying nothing together is not a failure of anything but the point of everything. I stayed. My parents joked about my finally making friends at the Friends school, and wondered — joking again — why they hadn’t thought of it earlier. Underneath the joke was the fact that mattered: the first institution that made no attempt to convert my silence was the one that had been built around it.
The rest of what helped was slower and less official. My parents, in the end, gave me room. The tension I could read in the faces and voices around me eased, gradually, into something like acceptance — and I learned to mirror that acceptance back, and the mirroring, strangely, is what let me integrate the intensity into a livable life. Not a resolution. A truce with room in it.
At end of that complex year, my social skills having seemingly improved, my mother enrolled me in a day camp. I hated it with the full purity of my age. One morning, shortly before I was to leave for the bus, I went into my room and squeezed myself into the gap between the chest of drawers and the wall — a very tight fit — and waited.
I heard my mother asking where I was. My father came looking. He put his head into the room, and he saw me — I am certain to this day that he saw me — and I smiled at him, and he called out: “He’s not here. He must have gone to the bus by himself.”
He had seen me. He knew I didn’t want to go. He was doing me a favor. I had the day off.
I waited until they were both long gone, expecting at any moment to be retrieved, and was not. I was, in fact, free. I watched some television. I played. I ate. And eventually — of course — I went out for a walk around the block, which expanded into a walk in the park behind our building, where I met a black poodle with three legs, who seemed to be alone, wandering, like me. We wandered to the perimeter of the park, and I wondered if it had lost its leg to a car. I thought about going back into the park to keep the dog away from traffic and safe, but the dog was keeping itself safe on its own, and I decided to continue — crossing the street and taking the long way home. On a corner a block from our building stood my godfather, Mike, with his family. Mike was my father’s best friend, and he and his family were always happy to see me — their apartment was being fumigated for a wasp nest.
“Where were you?”
“I was just walking around the block.”
“You’ve been gone for three hours.”
In my time, it had been fifteen minutes. I trusted Mike, and I distinctly remember wondering whether clocks ran differently for different people — and whether the three-legged poodle had anything to do with it. Mike was stern and kind in a single tone: your parents are worried; you need to let people know where you are; go home.
I went home knowing my mother would be upset, while still clinging to my faith that my father was in on it. She was upset. But what I actually met, standing in the doorway, was not simple anger — it was anger braided with fear from caring about me, oscillating, neither one winning. And the sight of that braid took me straight back to the window, the wire, the fish: the tension of opposites, live, unresolved — only now it was not in the sky and the tank. It was in a person. In her. The butterflies came, punctual. And something else came with them: for the first time in my life I saw my parents as two distinct people — one who had seen me behind the dresser and covered for me, one standing in front of me frightened and furious — and not as the single two-headed animal called Parents. The bothness was in them too. It was in everyone. It had been all along.
It has taken most of a lifetime to say plainly what that afternoon deposited, so let me say it plainly once and then let it go. I know what the word anxiety has become — a diagnosis, a condition, a thing to be clinically managed downward — and I know that for many people it is a real affliction, and I have no quarrel with anyone's care. I can only report what the word names in my own history. Anxiety, as I first met it and as I still understand it, is the feeling of the co-presence of finitude and endlessness. The very small and the boundless sharing a single moment — and you, somehow, are both of them at once. It is not a malfunction. It is the tenor of being itself, the vibration of the two poles held together; and the management of that tension — the naming, sorting, solving, shrinking — is the condition of becoming, necessary and bottomless. Neither pole can be eliminated. What can be practiced is where you stand. There are disciplines — art is mine, love is another, and certain kinds of sustained attention — that do not cure the tension but make it possible to remain with it, to be claimed by the immensity for a while without being dissolved, and to return to the world of names without being consumed by it.
The poem that handed me the word withness also gave me, I saw much later, the portrait of the other pole. Its epigraph named the being; its body is the bear — the heavy bear who goes wherever the speaker goes, hungry, lumbering, strutting, terrified of ending, moving through what Schwartz calls “the scrimmage of appetite everywhere.” He knew the two arrive together. You do not get the withness without the bear.
I will be honest about the years between. As I grew and learned, the analytical eros did to the memory exactly what I had feared it would do to the moment: it problematized it. The afternoon was re-filed as a “weird feeling,” and the weird feeling, handled often enough, grew a rind of fear around it — fear of its otherness, fear of losing control, the psychologized shadow of what had originally arrived as belonging. For a lengthy stretch the two lived side by side in me: the eros toward what I came to call the uncanny — the knowable and the unknown sharing a given moment — and the wariness that wanted to manage it. To whatever credit I can claim, neither ever colonized the other, and the art never became a wellness routine, never turned illustrative or therapeutic or explanatory. It stayed what it had been at the dawn piano: an opening, kept open.
And everything in this notebook descends from that. The wall that rang under a knuckle in a clothing store, the tea house that turned a stranger into a co-presence, the stream that came up through the sound of a machine — none of it would have happened, none of it could have happened, to someone who had not learned, at four, at a window, to remain loose in the field: unclaimed by the names, available to the bothness. Even the objects that have ebbed and returned across my life — a philosopher’s collected papers, a poet’s wheel — belong to this weather, this comfort with the tide of awareness itself, which is, I suspect, all I have ever meant by improvisation.
Writing this, it came again. The wire, the fish, the clouds; the expansion and the contraction, simultaneous, unstrained; and the butterflies, punctual after all these years. I have stopped trying to think them through. They arrive when I let the moment be what it was, and they thin the instant I reach for its name. Before I knew the word, I knew that. It has taken me the rest of my life to know it again — and to learn that the knowing is not a possession but an allowance. It ebbs. It returns. And a life, as far as I can tell, is the allowing.
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