Unsayable Life
A routine struggle amongst freelancers and the self-employed is translating what they do into a soundbite. Family and friends often (unfairly) want to know what one does for work; what one actually does. Cruel!
One of my jobs is at Forward Music Group, a record label and artist management company that has formed a strong community over the last decade and a half around the really good music that they release. Last month we put out an ambient-ish EP by Nico Paulo called Interval_o. With this project, Nico wanted to make a piece of work that could "keep people company with words and sound and not have to tell a full story".
Nico's sentiment pinged along a busy little pathway in my brain that is currently very actively devoted to thinking about process.
In the bio that Matt Horseman wrote for Interval_o, he invoked a notion attributed to author Lorrie Moore: "unsayable life". Matt drew this idea of unsayable life into parallel with Nico's "ambient meditations and stream-of-life fragments". Unsayable is the in-between, the liminal, the many steps between a project's initial concept and its execution. And yet, a behind-the-scenes look at your favourite musician's studio or a flip through their notebook is tantalizing, because- say it with me- process is magic.
It's magic because the gritty "hows” and the "whys" are so very human compared to the polished product of the "what".
I loved that idea of unsayable life, so I read this Guardian piece about Laurie Moore to get some more context, and was rudely reminded that 2008 was 16 years ago.
After I caught my breath, I dove in and realized that my initial interpretation of Matt's application of the phrase wasn't totally accurate. Moore's unsayable life is in the sheer enormity of experience, as opposed to the actual temporal slices that are edited out for an abridged "final" version.
"How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things", Moore says. "One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really."
The onslaught of experiential life is so viscerally different from what is reflected, written, or otherwise described. So where does that leave us with our precious process? Can something so precarious and Sisyphean really be worth all the hype? Ever moreso, I'd say.
One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life!
-Lorrie Moore
I don't think the magic of process is dulled by its ineptitude. We rely on such feeble means of communicating anyway; words hinder as much as facilitate our expression by boxing us into the cultural perspective of a language. If anything, Moore's unsayable life draws me closer to those early stages of the process when form and boundary are not yet set.
I wish to always be in process and reject any urgency or requirement to arrive. To embrace a constant becoming is to accept everyone else's journey as well, which begets an empathetic world (🤞🤞).
I probably will continue to have a job and a life that evades neat description because that makes me feel free and open, and I would love to hear about what makes you feel free and open as well ◡̈