The Sword, The Spell, and the Broken Rosetta Stone

Notes After Two Years of Silence

“I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet,” Ada Limón writes in “The Quiet Machine¹,” before cataloging silences most of us have never bothered to name. The silence of her lawn vs the silence of the field across her street. Then comes the turn, or as Cohen would sing to us, the fourth, the fifth — the silence that baffles kings and sneaks into our bones, and howls until we can’t be quiet anymore. “That’s how this machine works,” she tells me. Hallelujah.

When I first encountered this poem back in 2019, I was struck by Limón’s insistence on precision, her refusal to let silence be singular. It reminded me of something I’d learned in and through chronic pain: that people with similar conditions develop elaborate taxonomies for suffering. The McGill Questionnaire² offers seventy-eight descriptors (78!): flickering, quivering, pulsing, throbbing. We’ve mapped out almost the entire geography of pain, especially when compared to other sensations. But, of course, the question is: why? Is it because naming our pain makes it real, or because naming it makes it bearable? Or is it something else entirely — that through the naming, we assert that we are still here, still capable of distinction, still refusing to be flattened by our afflictions?

And silence? I still often approach it as a monolith when, really, as Limón demonstrates, each silence carries its own weight and texture. I have known California’s quiet, but not her Kentucky silence, and I have lived the quiet of not answering the phone, of turning off the lights and pretending I’m not at home, even when I’m standing in line at Publix. But it’s that final image that haunts me, follows me till it possesses me: silence building in my body until it becomes unbearable, until it breaks me or I break into sound. But again, I have to ask: which machine? The body? Consciousness? Or perhaps the instrument by which we transform experience into meaning, into story, into something we can hand to another person and say: “this is a part of what I carry”. And in that transformation and translation, there lies the hope that they will do more than see it or hear it, but their presence alone may steady and stay us from being the proverbial tree that falls in the forest.

When I think about what it means to really listen, not just to hear but to attend with the absolute fullness of who we are, I keep coming back to Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie, in 1997’s film adaption of Carl Sagan’s “Contact”³, sitting in front of those giant radio telescopes with her headphones on, sifting through static for a literal sign from the heavens. There’s something particular about Dr. Arroway’s faith (even though she’s an atheist) that gets at what I’m trying to understand about attention itself. She and her team spent years listening to cosmic noise, teaching themselves to distinguish between meaningful signals and the universe’s background hum. The film doesn’t really interrogate what this does to a person — the loneliness of it, the discipline required to keep faith that something, anything might answer back when year after year, nothing does, and till this point, nothing ever has. But I think about it all the time, the way that kind of listening might hollow you out or fill you up or maybe both at once.

In Sagan’s original novel, after Ellie receives the message from Vega, she discovers Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous in his book, “The Idea of the Holy⁴,” during her research. Otto argued that humans have an innate capacity to detect and revere the awe-inspiring. He called this the “mysterium tremendum”, the mystery that makes us tremble, that repels even as it compels. For Otto, the numinous is “wholly other.” The only honest response to encountering it is what he calls “absolute astonishment.” He was writing about religious experience, about encounters with the divine. Still, I wonder if his framework might apply to something more ordinary and more challenging: the experience of truly encountering another person’s interiority, their suffering or their unique form of joy, which is always, in some fundamental way, inaccessible to us. Wholly other.

Perhaps, all intimacy is a form of listening through the static, trying to distinguish signals of who someone actually is from the noise of who we want them to be, who they sometimes pretend to be, or who we’re afraid they might be. And the numinous thing that makes us tremble — isn’t always mystical or grand. Sometimes it’s just the shock of recognition when someone sees you clearly, when a hand squeezes yours in a church basement next to shitty coffee and communicates: “I know this, I’ve been exactly where you are right now”, without saying a word. Or when someone draws a sun on the back of your rear-window for no reason except that they thought you might need more light in your life. These small transfigurations, that Otto probably wouldn’t have dignified with the term numinous, can make or break us. They can make or break anyone.

What haunts me today about Contact is the ending, specifically the way Ellie returns from her journey, whether through a wormhole or a hallucination; the film deliberately refuses to confirm, with no proof of what happened to her. Just her own testimony: “It was beautiful. They should have sent a poet. “ She experienced something that unmade and remade her, something she can only describe as contact with the wholly other, and she has no way to make anyone else believe her. All she has is her own insistence and the terror that her experience might be fundamentally untransmittable.

This way of being so unmade, or desolated by an experience that we have to be remade, might be the truest terror of living. Every day, there is more to lose. Simone Weil understood this differently. “Grace fills empty spaces,” she wrote⁵, “but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” I’ve read that excerpt over 100 times, and it still pierces me while liberating me, because I need the divine to rush in, and simultaneously, I don’t want it to, because I know it will be painful. Contemporary psychology might refer to this as “post-traumatic growth,” but Weil suggests something more radical: that emptiness itself might be the beginning of transformation, not its enemy.

Weil called our pull toward distraction “gravity”: the force that drags us toward compulsion, toward “everything which is grasped.” She was writing in 1947, but she could have been describing the particular weight of social media and the news cycle: the way our thumbs move toward our phones without conscious choice, the dopamine feedback loops that Silicon Valley engineers explicitly designed to be addictive. In Limón’s terms, this gravity prevents us from experiencing any of her distinct silences. Instead, we get the static that masks every potential void before grace can enter. And frankly, it makes sense to want to paper over it, because sadness and loss have so many challenging textures and weights. There’s “crying in the shower sadness”, and there’s “weeping on the kitchen floor of your 1-bedroom apartment heartbreak”. There are “don’t look at yourself in the mirror” types of loss, and “I can’t bring myself to turn on the news today” kinds of despair.

But what am I doing when I create these categories? What strange comfort do I find in distinguishing shower-crying from kitchen-floor collapse? I keep thinking there’s something I’m trying to protect — maybe the belief that if I can name each specific sorrow, I can contain it. As if precision could save me (it rarely has). As if by naming each shade of suffering, I could master it. I’ve been thinking about the mathematics of withholding. Each day, we subtract: what happened, minus what hurt, minus what could destroy us if we said it out loud. We hand each other these remainders: “I’m ok!” [The exclamation does so much work here] as if the truth were too radioactive to touch directly.

In her poem “The Spell⁶,” Marie Howe illustrates how she performed this calculus on a daily basis: “I dropped you off, taught my class, and had a tuna-fish sandwich”. When her daughter keeps demanding, “Tell me the whole thing, mom,” she isn’t asking for information; she’s asking for confirmation: that her mother exists beyond this daily ritual of performance. When Howe finally cracks — Elise’s death, frozen tears, ascending serpents — even the truth arrives in fragments. The whole thing can rarely be made whole in the moment we try to tell it. Language can fail exactly where we need it most. “All the frozen tears are mine, of course.” Of course. Of-fucking-course, because that’s what it’s like to be stuck in grief.

For Howe: Elise is dead, and the world feels weary and brokenhearted. And most of us [especially as we approach middle age] know what that feels like. This is precisely where this poem becomes a form of CT surgery for me. That line cracks me open like a Finochietto retractor, because the world feels wearier and more broken-hearted than it ever has. Melissa is dead, and I get to live, and sometimes I don’t know what to do with this one wild and precious life. And I know this sounds fucked up, but when I was sick, really sick with my autoimmune disorder, it was easier because I knew my story and role. Sometimes, long-term/chronic illness simplifies things. It gives you a job: to endure with bravery and grace. Sure, it’s a terrible and exhausting job, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, and yet (and yet!) it was a job I was good at. But this? This after? This liminal wellness, this brutal ongoingness? This is where the voice from the backseat becomes insistent: “No. Tell me the whole thing.” And the entire thing is, I’m not sure I know how to live a life that doesn’t revolve around survival. Maybe, like Lazarus, I don’t know what to do after returning to the land of the living. Perhaps no one does, and we’ve all agreed not to discuss it.

Simone Weil finds me here, again, in exile, or where I keep encountering her in the malheur. Affliction, as she called it. Weil insisted that affliction is utterly distinguishable from ordinary suffering. Affliction, she wrote⁷, uproots us completely. It’s physical distress and spiritual desolation, yes, but also social degradation. It pushes us past the margins, making us unrecognizable to ourselves and others. What Weil understood, and what I’m only beginning to understand, is that affliction isn’t just pain or suffering dialed up to 11. Affliction is the continuous rending out of belonging. People no longer know what to do with you. You don’t know what to do with yourself. You become illegible, which is different from being misunderstood.

And maybe that’s why I keep returning to Lazarus and Ellie, why I can’t let their stories be static. Because their stories are also stories about illegibility, about what happens when you’ve crossed a boundary that no one else has crossed. The story we tell freezes Lazarus at the tomb’s mouth — unwinding his grave clothes, blinking into the unbearable light — and then we cut away. We stop the story precisely at the moment of resurrection because everything that comes after that is mucky. I’m trying to understand what I’m protecting myself from when I insist that transformation happens all at once [even though I have over a decade of evidence that this isn’t the case], when I need change to arrive decisively, thoroughly: before and after. I still want my transformation to be postable on Instagram: from dead to alive, from sick to well, from broken to whole. These binaries comfort me because they suggest an endpoint, a place where I can finally arrive and can rest for a while. I still want to tell myself that crossing the threshold is the hard part, and once you’re across, you’re done. But I’ve been on both sides now, and here’s what they told me: the thresholds never stop. The crossing never ends. You don’t transform once and then rest in your transformation. You change, and then you have to keep changing, keep choosing, and keep showing up to a life that insists on the cycle of building, freezing, and breaking.

What devastates me, now, when I read “The Spell” isn’t Howe’s confession but what happens after. Her daughter looks toward “the unlived life” — not at her mother, not at the road, but sideways toward all the parallel worlds that exist alongside this one. She says, “Ok,” while still looking in that direction. This might be a new form of grace for me: I will sit here with your unbearable information. I will not require it to become something else.

And fuck me, I can’t stop requiring things to become something else! When Howe writes “if that wave broke it might wash my life clear,” she’s built two conditionals stacked on top of each other like a grammatical cauldron. Her lynchpinned might preserves two incompatible possibilities simultaneously: that grief, fully felt, could transform us; and that grief, fully felt, could engulf us. I know them both, the possibility that seduces: promising that if I just surrender more, if I’m willing enough, if I utter just one more 3rd step prayer, I’ll emerge purified, renewed. And the possibility that threatens: a warning that surrender could be just another form of meaningless suffering in a life that’s already had enough of it. What terrifies me about Howe’s conditional spell isn’t the uncertainty - it’s that I hear her voice tremble in my own, the way I’ve been saying “might” for years. Every morning I wake up and take another hit of the conditional, another dose of maybe, another day suspended between outcomes. We all do this with something terrible — choosing the permanent deferral. It means we never have to find out who we’d be without our carefully maintained sadness and grief.

​​But there’s something else happening in that car, something I missed for years reading this poem. Howe’s daughter isn’t just witnessing her mother’s suspension — she’s learning that “might” is the condition we all live in. Not just those of us with documented trauma or catalogued pain, but everyone. Every person she’ll ever love will be conjugated in the conditional: might stay, might leave, might break her heart, might heal it. When she looks toward the unlived life, she’s performing an act of honesty that her mother can’t quite manage. She’s acknowledging that every life is unlived until we choose to live it, that we’re all sideways to our own existence, glancing at what might be while sitting in what is.

Otto wrote that the numinous is “wholly other,” but he was thinking about God, about the divine breaking through our ordinary categories. What I’m beginning to understand is that we are all wholly other - not just to each other, but to ourselves. Each of us sitting in our cars like Howe and her daughter, suspended between the life we’re living and our unlived lives if we turned right. Each of us, like Ellie, returning from our own journeys through affliction with no proof except our insistence: it happened, it changed every part of me, I cannot make you understand.

When Otto described the mysterium tremendum — the mystery that makes us tremble — perhaps he was also describing this: the terrible recognition that every act of naming (our silences, our pains, our particular forms of sadness) is both an attempt at connection and an admission of isolation. We develop these elaborate taxonomies not because precision saves us, but because sometimes, precision is all we have. And that precision must be built until it can no longer be precise. Otto gave us a beautiful language for trembling before the divine, his mysterium tremendum. But what I’m learning is that I also need a language for trembling before the mystery of continuous ordinary living. Maybe this is the spell Howe was trying to cast: not the one that unlocks precise meaning, but the one that makes illegibility and the unknowable bearable. The one that lets us say “Ok” while looking sideways, realizing what might be possible if we allowed that wave to break and wash us clear. That our lives could begin, again, from now and from here.

Ok?

Ok.

1. Limón, Ada. “The Quiet Machine.” Bright Dead Things, Milkweed Editions, 2015.

2. Melzack, Ronald, and Kenneth Torgerson. “The McGill Pain Questionnaire: Major Properties and Scoring Methods.” Pain, vol. 1, no. 3, 1975, pp. 277-299.

3. Sagan, Carl. Contact: A Novel. Simon & Schuster, 1985.

4. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John W. Harvey, Oxford University Press, 1923.

5. Weil, Simone. “Grace and the Void.” Gravity and Grace, edited by Gustave Thibon, translated by Arthur Wills, Routledge, 1952.

6. Howe, Marie. “The Spell.” What the Living Do: Poems, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

7. Weil, Simone. “The Love of God and Affliction.” The Love of God and Affliction, translated by Patrick C. Burns and J. D. K. Hughes, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.