X marks the spot

If anyone cared enough to canvass about for a nonfiction equivalent to the Great American Novel, my nominee would be William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth: A Deep Map. The book spends 622 pages and 76 chapters examining a single rural county, Chase County, Kansas. From those limited and seemingly unpromising materials, Least Heat-Moon uncovers—he does not make—something monumental, uncovering the depth and richness of life in even such a small and forgotten place.

Late in the book, however, Least Heat-Moon confesses he’s struggled to locate a particular portion of the book. The 76 chapters of PrairyErth came about due to Least Heat-Moon’s arcane method of dividing the county into twelve major parts or “quadrangles,” following a U.S. Geological Survey map. Each “quadrangle” then receives six chapters, with two chapters each of introduction and conclusion. One chapter, however, “kept jibing about, slipping from quadrangle to quadrangle, and, at times, even leaving the county altogether.” Least Heat-Moon ends up calling the chapter “The Black Hole: a thing with a mystic gravitational field so intense its light can’t escape to reach me.” Finally, the topic of the chapter ends up being its own topiclessness. Least Heat-Moon continues: “I keep having various ideas about what this black hole might mean: maybe it’s an emblem of all the Chase material I haven’t found or that hasn’t found me. Or maybe it’s a darkness waiting for a future light.”

To that end, Least Heat-Moon titles the chapter “Until Black Hole XTK Yields Its Light”—XTK, or more commonly “TK,” being a journalistic means of marking material for future inclusion. “This chapter,” Least Heat-Moon confesses, “is a big XTK. But, so that I don’t cheat you of the outcome, or at least of its raw material, I include as best I can now a Tristramian answer on the next page. Have a go at it yourself. Perhaps, I having failed, you are to be its author:”

The next page is printed solid in black ink.

The reader, Least Heat-Moon implies, ought to chisel away what doesn’t belong, leaving the real topic of the chapter to stand revealed in new words.

PrairyErth models the use of lively words in many ways, from its rich inclusion of voices beyond the writer’s (each chapter begins with a “commonplace book” of quotes drawn from literature, local history, interviews, and more) to its careful attention to every detail of Chase County. But its black page and “chapter XTK,” practically wordless as they are, offer us Least Heat-Moon’s most important example of lively words. This is because lively words can never claim to be exhaustive. Some X factor must always remain—something dark, to reader and writer alike.

I’m not here decrying expressions of certainty or attempts at encyclopedic scope. I think we’ve all probably had enough of English professors insisting how contested and uncertain everything is. Everything is, indeed, contested, and many things are uncertain, but we don’t really need another academic pointing that out. Moreover, Least Heat-Moon advances plenty of claims with certainty and attains a pretty darn near encyclopedic take on Chase County. My point is not that a right use of language must submerge us in uncertainty, but that all knowledge has limits, and that honest words acknowledge and embrace those limits.

At the limits of language, we encounter that quality that Least Heat-Moon marks with an X. Good words embrace the X, regardless of their overall aim. Words that lack attention to the X strangle us, because they compel us to act as if the world is no larger than the text. Advice can often feel this way—you feel in reading it as if what’s left out, and unacknowledged, is much larger than what’s been put in. When a writer refuses to acknowledge the X, we strangle on it. We know ourselves to be encountering a text that’s narrowing rather than expanding our field of vision.

To embrace the X need not mean that our words live in a haze of uncertainty. Consider these words from a text that nobody could accuse of being uncertain or undogmatic:

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father

These are credal statements, affirmations of faith. And yet they embrace the X in a way that language seldom does—we are acutely aware, if we read this text seriously, that it takes us very much to the edge of language. What does it mean for Christ to be the “Only Begotten” or “consubstantial”? What on earth (or in heaven) does it signify to confess that he is “Light from Light”? These terms have been debated and defined to the very limits of human patience for millennia, and yet they alert us to nothing so much as their fundamental incapacity to express the reality of the object they are meant to describe.

The example of the Creed also signals an important aspect of the X, as modeled in Least Heat-Moon’s writing as well. Words that embrace the X invite the production of further words. Nowhere else in language do words so proliferate as around those perennial X factors in language, the limits of our comprehension. However, even those further words aren’t an attempt to exhaust the mystery at the heart of language. Rather, if they are composed with wisdom, these proliferating words themselves will offer the reader an invitation to bring their own words to the mystery of XTK. ​