The Avenues of Language

 

 

He would never just say, ‘I ascended’ or ‘I descended.’ He would say, ‘I ascended up’ or ‘I descended down.’ This linguistic oddity of his struck me as revealing: there’s nothing innocent about syntax. Finding ascend unsettling, he probably wanted to reinforce the idea of the verb: ascend reveals the infinity of space - which is full of mystery and unknown dangers. As for descend (on its own, unaccompanied by a preposition), this verb is equally upsetting: it’s never clear when the descent will come to an end or to what depths we will be led. The need to say ‘descend down’ emerges from this terror: we place a limit on the action of going down, we stop it at a specific point. Can you imagine descending forever, endlessly? It would be as unnerving as ascending forever. In any case, I seem to have discovered a certain difference between up and down. Ascend up reinforces the direction of the verb, since, strictly speaking, one can only ascend in that direction; now, it is possible that there is an imaginary place we call up, a specific place we ascend to. A mere leaf blown by the wind is incapable of ascending up in the way we ascend. We nearly always ascend a lot. We ascend buildings, skyscrapers, planes, mountains; we’ve even gone up to the moon.

One day the same individual told me, ‘I was ascending up and didn’t find you.’ This sentence gave me considerable cause for reflection. As it happened, I had a small studio in the upstairs of a building. A dreary room painted gray by some previous tenant, it was full of old furniture and made me depressed, so I would stay there only for short periods of time. My initial confusion was attributable to the fact that he had employed the past continuous. Why hadn’t he simply said, ‘I ascended up and didn’t find you.’ He clearly wanted to make me suffer. In saying, ‘I was ascending up and didn’t find you,’ he was prolonging the action of ascending and of not finding me. I continued to not be in my studio, he continued ascending and finding the room empty; my absence (not being there) was an ongoing absence. Had he said, ‘I ascended up and didn’t find you,’ the action would have taken place in the past and I would have had no reason to feel guilty. Instead, the action lingered on; it was as if he were still going up and I had yet to arrive, would never arrive. I imagined him going up time and again. On some of his trips, the elevator wouldn’t go down all the way. On reaching the second floor, it would go up again. Other times, he would go up and down without stopping, but no matter what he did he wouldn’t find me. The elevator would creak, the door would rattle open, he would ring my studio doorbell, no one would answer, so he would retrace his steps, go down, but before reaching the lobby he would head back up to my studio, and I wouldn’t be there. It seemed like it would be impossible to stop thinking about this, that the situation would just go on and on indefinitely unless he recast the sentence. In my mind, as we were drinking coffee at the corner cafe where the pinball machine chimed, its lights flickering in the mirror with a beer logo embossed on it, I was going to have to continue ascending and descending - even though steam was rising from our cups, we were smoking cigarettes, and the vapor was fogging the windows (it’s winter and it’s cold outside.) Since I had yet to arrive at the studio and he was still going up, he could blame me for my absence from the studio while we were both at the cafe. To calm my nerves, I thought about how it would have been even worse had he said something like ‘I have ascended up and I haven’t found you’ because that would have meant that I was likewise absent from the cafe with its gray marble tiles, gilt-framed mirror, fake palm trees, and fine porcelain cups. With that sentence, he would have made me disappear from the place. All of me taken together would not have been enough to make up for my absence. I don’t know that he avoided that construction to spare me pain - a distressing feeling of unreality - but I silently thanked him all the same.

‘I wasn’t in my studio; I went up and then, almost immediately, came down,’ I stated with considerable precision. ‘I didn’t feel like working. I went for a stroll in the street. But I didn’t feel like walking either. I was sort of sleepy, feeling that kind of distance that protects one from anxiety.’ My sentence established some order: the actions undertaken had been completed. I had gone up once, gone down once, walked aimlessly through the streets, and then entered the cafe and looked for a free table. I had sat down and lit a cigarette. Then he arrived.

‘I got a little worried when I didn’t find you,’ he said, accepting the linguistic truce. ‘I stayed in the lobby, smoking. Then I went outside. I thought you might be taking a walk.’

I was walking. I felt at ease with language. I was walking. I was wandering aimlessly down the avenues that were gradually becoming lighted. And even if I thought that walking always leads somewhere, my steps only led me inside words, where I feel safe.