Incomplete Notes on Untapped Potential

An incidental critique of male writers, I guess

photo credit: Clare Elvia

My potential was always too big for my body — my earthly, frail, mortal body; itchy, sweaty, achy, sleepy — and other things you might name a dwarf in a fairytale.

I can’t forget hungry — my body, always hungry for more.

I think we spend our whole lives just trying to reach that one, solitary moment when language, or circumstance, does not fail us.

That one moment when we say exactly the right thing, at exactly the right time.

Every single interaction we have with each other can be boiled down to this — just this act of trying to get it right; this attempt at an infallible human interaction.

That one moment when our intentions align like a constellation; like the perfect high-five. That one moment which does not pass by wasted, or unfilled. That one moment when we meet somewhere in the middle, when we reach some kind of equilibrium. When we give ourselves over completely. When we finally get a glimpse of eternity.

This is the great human endeavour — we reach, every day, for some version of forever.

Will we ever really, in our lifetimes, accomplish that end?

Maybe once or twice, if we’re lucky.

But my god, how close we come. How earnestly we try. How whole-heartedly we devote ourselves to each other in the meantime.

I think most of life is made up of this — the meantime. These beautiful, accidental, in-between moments that we reach in our pursuit of a perfect one.

Most of what we have is not the thing itself, but merely the pursuit of it.

Our lives stretch out before us like tightropes pinned taut between conflicting landscapes; every day, in our own way, we walk the line between impossible contradictions. Being human is a balancing act, and we’re all pretty clumsy.

We harbour unanswered, unanswerable questions in our bodies, like a pebble in the shoe; like a pea beneath the mattress as we try to fall asleep.

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My potential was always too big for my body — of course it was. How could it not be?

We reach, every day, for some version of forever, but our bodies are so un-forever. Our bodies — so inadequate, so handicapped, so impossibly unfit for the task of our potential. The breadth of it; the magnitude, the depth, the endless scope of it.

I am aware of the ego of such a statement — the trope of the male artist grappling with the size of his incredible untapped potential. But language, like the body, is inadequate too. Frail, impossibly unfit, always hungry. I think that maybe all the best writers know this to be true — and maybe this is the thing that those male writers don’t understand: the futility of this whole endeavour. I think, once you acknowledge that, every sentence becomes an unexpected gift. Miraculous, even. That any phrase should even touch the sides of a thing as convoluted and sacred as humanness is a wonder beyond us all. When it does, even for just a moment, it is a joyous, triumphant occasion — not a triumph of the writer or his ego (as, perhaps, some of those male writers might believe), but a triumph of the human spirit, and, of course, a triumph of language. Such an achievement is beyond the writer himself — it is not a stroke of the ego, but rather, an immensely humbling experience. In that moment, it becomes apparent that this language is not yours — not of your own creation. The writer is not the creator of a sentence, but merely the curator of it. The custodian. The sculptor.

The writer’s voice, then, is not the most essential part in the endeavour. Language is like clay — the writer, just some guy with deft hands and an eye for detail. The clay itself is the thing — a piece of the Earth — a divine, holy thing. A thing to be revered. A thing to be handled with care. A thing that is more important than you, and your ego.

So, when I say that my potential is too big for my body, I don’t do so with ego — I don’t mean to imply that I am important, or godly, or deserving of holiness. I perhaps don’t even mean just my potential at all. Maybe, what I mean is our potential — human potential. Or, even, the potential of language.

It is, I know, beyond me. More than me.

We are not gods.

We are custodians — of language, of each other, and — of our potential. ¹

1. This post weaves together lines I wrote a while ago with lines I wrote this week — it feels somewhat scattered, disjointed. I’m not sure if it really gets at the heart of the thing I’m trying to get at, but then again, that’s the whole point. The irony of it is kind of irritating. Caitlin and I often discuss this idea — not being able to write about something, because the concept is too big to be pinned down yet. I will likely revisit these words later and rework them, maybe more than once. For now, let’s call them incomplete, and leave it at that.