Story
In 2021 my life significantly changed when I was diagnosed with vestibular neuritis and a very severe case of vestibular migraine disorder. As others with this diagnosis can attest, the months before finding a treatment plan can be shocking and unsparing. You can no longer rely on your body as you are used to, and with multiple episodes in a day you quickly lose the ability to hold a job, drive, walk outside, or perform other basic tasks like reading and writing. At the lowest point, patients begin with exercises to help them lift their eyes up as opposed to keeping them focused downwards, which is less stimulating. The enormous work of rehabilitation began for me at this granular level, and all the time I was thinking about how I could continue to practice as a poet in this state of extreme limitation. I would scrawl lines on paper that I could not even read myself.
I knew that some kind of project could help guide this aspect of my recovery. I was struggling with a sense of loss and displacement that came with losing reading, and this loss encompassed the sudden estrangement I felt from the community of writers I liked to read— my so-called friends— living and dead. There is a wonderful kind of devotional love that all readers know— founded in a deep & slow turning familiarity with the language of the writers they read, and to be suddenly removed from that place of feeling, from that home in language, left me disoriented & bereft. On the phone I mentioned this to a friend and she agreed, saying “let’s never be without the words of others”, which I wrote down, & this phrase clarified what I had been feeling. Or it clarified a feeling I needed to find again.
The project was simple: to write out every word in every book of poetry published by three chosen poets, then alphabetize the lists into lexicons. I wanted to use language as a ladder, or a garment I could stitch word by word. Word over word. Good days & bad, one page at a time, then two. I would then be clothed in language, or climb the ladder & arrive spoken for. I was asking myself an unanswerable question: Can you heal yourself with language? What would that mean? The form of a lexicon shaped the project out of a necessity to structure this time, and as a container for this question, but only coming after its asking, and together, the question and form are in a state of confliction.
In typical lexicons, each word is accompanied by a definition— in fact, this is what makes lexicons useful. In the lexicons I’ve made, however, there are no definitions at all. In this way, they are useless. They have no use, they contain no “knowledge”, they are missing the exact element that would make the labors undertook to create them “worthwhile”, in the traditional sense. This is part of the confliction. Are they still lexicons? To me, they are just a question I asked myself at a desperate time, a feeling I had, a need for language in loneliness, an invisible grief attempting to find its form.
It was a very long process from beginning to end, and after transcribing each book by hand I translated the handwritten words to digital text. To check for correctness, I had someone looking at the text while I read each word aloud. In this way, I became saturated in the language, like a thumbprint pressed & sealed.
At this point a year had gone by, I had found a new doctor, new medications, and my health was slowly improving. Chronic conditions can produce a kind of bitter cynicism because the burden of caring for them is isolating and exhausting. Although the benefits of the medications outweighed their side effects, everything had to be managed, and everything was a compromise. Still, this project stayed centered & meaningfully organized aspects of my rehabilitation. As I finished transcribing words, I practiced using screens, another difficulty, and began to alphabetize the lists and create book layouts. More time passed. I designed and screen-printed book covers, cut block-prints for title pages, and finally, two years later and still on the journey towards a new life with this diagnosis, I wanted to end by handmaking and binding each lexicon into a small edition of hardcover books & creating this website in order to share the journey of my experience.
Although this part of the work is over now, I may eventually continue to add more authors both on the website & in print. Why? At some point in the process, I found that I had told myself, in some secret corner of my mind, that by the time I was I done, I would be “better”—If only I could do this, then I would be cured. Even as you read this, you can see the fantasy and desperation in this hope, and along the way I would attach those feelings to many different things, like medications, doctors, or therapies, before learning patience and some measure of equanimity. Now that the project is “over”, I’m not cured. But I am much better than I was two years ago. Having let go of that idea I can appreciate this. Letting go of finding an answer to the question: Can you heal yourself with language? I can appreciate its asking, or what its asking makes visible, but does not answer. A lot of suffering, word by word, brought this project to bear before you, but some great joys as well. It was a joy to spend slow & unmeasured time with each poet and practice listening deeply. It was a joy to feel like, out of a void, the three poets began a kind of community. It was a joy to fall back into the language that I had so suddenly lost, and begin making it home again.
This project was also created at the same time as another, which I think of as a kind of sibling-- telling two parts of one story, in a different kind of language. You can find that project here.
