Dead Verbs

After Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind’s Death Sentence, published in The Columbia Review’s 105th Volume

            I’m fighting through a vague nausea in some Marriott Banquet Hall, with a lanyard around my neck. There’s a typo in my name but I really don’t mind the mix-up because at least it brings some excitement to the semantics conference How Dead Verbs Have Imprisoned the English Language. I ate a continental breakfast before this, so I figure I may as well endure this too. Apparently, we should imagine English without the verb to-be because it gets used to death, because it prevails in substandard writing. Stan Kazikowski passionately lists 112 reasons we need to end their prolific overuse. I try not to blow my brains out.

            During the q&a portion, there’s about thirty seconds of silence before he answers because he won’t just say the thing is… or well, I am… or the question is… There’s no place for a dead verb, for is, even in the colloquial. He clearly wants to use it, but instead he suspends us all in some purgatory.

            A person in the row ahead of me turns to his friend and says, dude he’s totally edging us, this is all a performance on semen retention, just one big metaphor. His name is Charlie, but I’ll get to that later.

            For someone worried about being imprisoned by dead verbs, Stan has walked himself into another cell, but I guess, paradoxically, freedom requires constraints. Stan’s refusal to use a dead verb even though he wants to is probably the only time I am on the edge of my seat at a semantics conference. He says something about Dead Verbs confusing possession, identification, attribution, and causation; says that he’s doing a sort of post-modernist semantics movement, because we can’t ever really say what something is.

            Maybe Stan will put to rest the age old question, to be or not to be, by getting rid of the words entirely. It’s all the rage in writing right now, to speak this way, as if words are already dead, as if nothing is.

            Here is the valley I grew up in, here is my sister’s rumbling laughter right from her belly, here is where my brother taught me about guilt without ever having to say the word. Here is the time I had a shit shot on the buck and my brother said nothing, just put his head down and chased it until it finally collapsed. He saw all the meat I’d ruined, and I was nothing more than ten with a gun which had never felt so solid before. Here is where I met Charlie and let everything dissolve, where I let all the verbs die.

            I am (I am) staring down a barrel when I write, just not pulling the trigger, when I write about love, and about Charlie, but that’s for later. And if we are both staring down the barrel, how do I know who has their finger on the trigger, how do I know who is?

            It’s about resisting desire, resisting certainty.

            I’ll tell this all to Charlie, but that’s later.

            Here is the valley I grew up in, soft red dirt, my family. Here that I never want to give up, because I am so afraid of loss when everything seems to be about loss, about anticipating the final definition, the final death of the dead verb.

            My sister says I need to let go of the past, but how do I do this when I look at her face and I see everything there is? She says if you really want to lose nothing, you have to let it haunt you: it won’t save you from any pain, it will actually be more painful this way, you can’t lose loss, you can only have loss, I think you’re driving yourself crazy sometimes.

            Loss has to be devastating again, okay, I say. My sister says, well, I’m not sure you’re really getting what I’m trying to tell you.

            I am not dogmatic about anything, I don’t care about politics, I just care about verbs dying and dead verbs. And maybe this is why I shouldn’t use them, maybe I shouldn’t say what anything is, if I really am doubting everything. But I’m the only one here, and so far I’ve proven unable to answer.

            I call my sister again to ask about the death-sentence because she’s a law student with a lawyer wife and I have been searching, in all of this, for a simple verdict, something final: guilty or not guilty. My sister says the death-sentence has nothing to do with dead verbs, really, for which I entirely disagree. She says that you have a tendency to get caught up in little matters, that I’m really overlooking the bigger picture here.

            I say, the law is all about being definitive, that’s your realm, I’m trying to say it’s all relational, there’s nothing tidy about it. Nothing is. Networks of meaning are all dissolving anyways, it’s all symbols that merely reflect one another, free-floating semiotic systems, because God has died and we’re off the gold standard, living without go(l)d to ground anything, just reflecting one another, purely relational, so maybe I should be convinced to not ever say what something is. She just says yeah, okay, I’m glad I’m the lawyer of the family.

            Here is the desert, the valley, here where rust turns to sand, where all my memories bleed into one another, resist any particular order; where all the ends scatter and blur, hoarding verbs. I follow the footsteps my brother left behind before he went off with the cattle, before he became estranged, until the wind of time has obscured them and I don’t know where else to go. Deserts have no borders, no sure horizon, they’re always whistling and encroaching beyond, without framing, without sure borders, always dissolving.

            My mom is still (is still) there, so I suppose I am too.

            I book a flight to see her with my credit card. She asks about my writing, and I tell her about my problems with dead verbs and Stan Kazikowski, that I’m so scared of everything because it’s all uncertain, that I’m afraid when I write I am always looking down a barrel. That I’m not sure if Stan is right, that I don’t know how to write if I can’t say to-be. That it feels like dying if verbs can die too. She laughs, kindly. Apparently I have always needed something to kick against. Maybe you’re always chain smoking because verbs are like cigs, you never want them to end. She tells me this with her own newly acquired habit of vaping from the kind of vape that looks like a grenade when you hold it.

            We drive out on dirt roads, far past all the empty parking lots, into the mountainous desert that hasn’t yet been developed into concrete on top of flat dirt, past McMansions and plastic lawns, to shoot some cans; I stare down the barrel. I am (I am) ten again with a rifle in front of a dead buck.

            Metrosexual hick, I joke to my mom, there’s not enough metrosexuals or hicks these days. When we’re done shooting and we sit around a fire, I pour us vermouth-and-seltzers because that’s what the Beat Poets drank, so she asks if it’s offensive to call me a metrosexual for my choice of drink, which makes me laugh. She takes a rip from her grenade-vape. Later, the car lulls me to sleep, where I am forever, forever, and never–only red soft dirt and empty shells from the smoke at the end of the barrel.

            That month I pay off my credit card statement with no problem.

            There is Charlie, the one I met at the semantics conference, the one about dead verbs. I find his name funny, and he’s a philosophy student with a big dog, which is something I’ve always thought of as a marker of normality. The dog part, at least. I ask if he wants to get drinks after those grueling couple hours and not think about dead verbs and to-be, because it’s really exhausting. It’s important in that far-off way but I want something in my hands, him or a drink or both. The bar is an unsynchronized flash of games and news and ads, and Charlie says if you watch enough ads back to back it sort of looks like looney-tunes, and there’s no volume on the news so all the bickering just looks like talking heads and teleprompters. Big teeth everywhere, blown up baby heads on grown ups. The bartender asks what we want.

            I am apprehensive, but with Charlie it was actually very easy to fall in love.

            It seems like one of those things you don’t have to say, because it’s so obvious. It just is, I guess, like a dead verb. We are walking his dog, Buster, through Central Park, through the North Woods, and I tell him I still sleep in his bed even though I’m allergic to dogs, and isn’t that enough?

            He says–and together we end up digressing until we’re more confused than before–well, I guess you don’t owe me anything. I tell him he’s stupid if he actually thinks that’s how any of this works, that that’s not what I meant. There’s just things that pain me to say, because aren’t all the words dissolving and dying, doesn’t that scare you?  It seems, he says and he’s talking in that far away place like he’s just observing, it seems like you want nothing and you’re okay with that.

            No, I want, I say, and there’s you, then, wanting, I and you.

            It’s predictable. We kiss in the end–the babbling streams of the North Woods fizzle out of our reach, and we go back to his. I take some Zyrtec. Charlie kicks the dog out of his room during our ruckus but after, Buster prances back in and stares. This never bothers Charlie, but I feel some sense of immodesty when I’m nude around a dog, staring back into him and wishing he didn’t have the ability to make my nose stuffy–though I suppose Buster is naked too.

            Here is the rhythm of the subway track that lulls Charlie’s head to rest on my shoulder, the tip of his nose in my peripheral. The ends of his fingers. Here is so soft, not fragile but tender, and I wonder if doubt is the foundation for love. If dying verbs have anything to do with this, if there’s a reason I’m so afraid. I don’t care about philosophy, unless it’s from Charlie. I just care about dead verbs, and ghosts. Here is an empty desert scattering the footprints my brother left behind–my brother used a single-barreled gun, he never needed a second shot–and I still don’t know where to go from here.

            If I believed verbs could die, it might be simpler; all of this clutter, love, would just be a matter of rearranging and replacing what is, stumbling through the unsaid and brushing off my bruised knees, the fray of my pants that always made my mom tut–though I’d wake to find they’d been patched up, hung on the kitchen chair, in the pale morning light, still ringing with her lulls and humming–still in the stitching as I stretch through the thrum of the city on my way to Charlie’s, nothing but brute need; there’s no rhythm or dance to the plot, just signs and images, their flickering associations, and a prayer of loneliness, and I still wonder if maybe now I can make the final decision, if I can finally say what is, if I can stop being so afraid of words dying.

            He asks about my writing, I say it’s endless, that I just need, well, I’m missing the story, and I’m missing. But enough about ghosts and that I’m afraid of dead verbs.

            Buster sees me nude again. Charlie tells me about his philosophy paper. Apparently you can tithe with cryptocurrency, and maybe, Charlie says, we need to pretend that God really has died and we’re still awaiting his arrival, an Eternal Saturday, so that we can experience purposeless excess, something lost which never promises return, without confidence, always doubting. Some preacher in Colorado got charged with 40 million in fraud for creating his own crypto exchange company. Said he took God at His word and spent it on a home remodel, but the preacher will accept whatever verdict he gets.

            I understand Charlie half-way, and maybe this is how he half-way understands me, at the margins between, when I leave before the verb dies. Charlie is tracing etymology, with his mouth on the wisps of my hairline, translating the words debt and credit and guilt, tracing back the meaning of the words to the origin.

            He trails off mid-sentence, mid-thought, and I say, look who can’t finish now; good, Charlie says, good, then I’ll keep haunting you. And I want to say the thing I promised I wouldn’t. I want to say what it is, but I’m still not certain. There’s a calculation to it–something thoughtfully left unspoken–because here and now, Charlie next to me, is not the right time. I’m withholding because it’s so sorely needed, I’m hoarding it, saving it to be spent later, against all the debt between us.

            Here is the barrel, just a promise, and I still don’t know who has their finger on the trigger. Here is the bathroom where we talk through the mirror, shoulder to shoulder, conjuring spirits; I spit out my toothpaste and meet Charlie in the reflection–Stan Kazikowski should note I did not say Charlie is in the mirror.

            Here he is in his small gestures hidden from sight, in silence, and I think about what he’d said in the North Woods, that no one owes anyone anything, and if maybe he’d meant there’s no obligation, no debt or guilt, no quid-pro-quo, nothing expected in return, but we still do it all anyways because here he is; thank you, I say, and I’m sorry and also thank you, and Charlie says–oh, it was nothing.

            One morning when I can’t tell which direction the sun will go, I ask him, what did you mean, about nothing? Charlie just laughs, like soft red dirt, like a desert seance, and says nothing, see? Nothing, you’re afraid of nothing. Nothing is profound. Nothing is profound! Let it be nothing so it can be everything.

            Here is the valley. Tripping, falling. Where barrels are balloons. You are years. Here is God. It is all then, it is all still then. The word is dying, yes. Yes. I’m so afraid. Dissolving. Yes, I know, Charlie. I think I get it now. It is nothing, really, so I can hold it.

–Andrew Blake

Andrew Forrest Joseph Blake is dissolving. He studies Creative Writing at Columbia University. He also likes cars.