The Rattle of Words

and what's left unsaid.

Photo c. Sophia Benbahmed, 2024

Happy Friday, friends. For those of you who are new to Going Solo at the End of the World (welcome!), I wander and write full-time, year-round. Right now, both my route and my writing are focused on a specific story: as the U.S. staggers inelegantly toward its next presidential election, I'm writing a series of profiles of swing state voters for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Like a lot of people who wrestle with nonfiction, narrative, truth, and fact for a living—whether as karmic punishment, calling, or curse—I spend a lot of nights staring at my screen, trying to wrangle the facts. It's never exactly easy; sometimes it's brutal, sometimes it's joyful, sometimes it's a just a bitch. This week’s post touches on what that’s about.

All quotes are from the 2001 Mariner edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, by James Agee, photographs by Walker Evans, first published in 1941.

Thank you, as ever, for taking the time to join me for the ride. -M

“Let this all stand however it may: since I cannot make it the image it should be, let it stand as the image it is.”

—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Lately, when I sit down to write, I find myself staring at the screen like I’m peering into deep space: looking for even the suggestion of a shape, something that breaks the pattern and catches the eye: an angle, a point, something to indicate a clear and given thing that might, if I look more closely, emerge from the vastness, become solid, tangible, something I could seize with my little fists and say, This.

It's not a lack of subjects to tackle—quite the opposite. It's the surplus of subjects, the Babel of stories, the currents of meaning that twist and pull other currents off course, the way they keep tangling up. And the noise—my god, the insistent clangor of saying, the carnie bark of soundbites and pull quotes, the slippery statements, the spit-polished spin, and behind it all, the slanting shadow of what's elided, lied about, left unsaid.

The stories I hear as I trek from town to town and state to state are longer, less narratively neat. Their meaning is more ambiguous, if meaning can be found at all. The ending escapes my fingers, skittering off the second I think I've got it by the tail. The faces I see are more hardened, more frightened, the people more brittle, more fragile, more bruised.

Every subject feels massive, daunting, slick as a sheer-faced cliff. I can't find a toehold, an outcropping of rock to grip. 

Grief. Laughter. Disillusionment. Love.

---

So when I sit down to write these posts here at Going Solo, shedding the rubbery mask of reportorial third person—the costume of objectivity that's not much more than a refusal to say your own name—and resume my rightful place as a flawed, subjective, and limited self, as an I, and I find myself wanting to tell you only this:

For every 3000-word story that makes its way to print, I've cut away another 100,000 words each person said. I've elapsed the 10 or 20 hours they took out of their own lives to spend with me. I’ve left out the rocks on which we sat, the meals we shared, the walks we took. I’ve skipped over all the times I had to remind myself to look away because it's rude to watch people cry. I’ve edited out the hollow sound behind the things they said that would give away what they needed to hide. I’ve declined to tally up what it cost, what it took, for them to tell me what they know, what they fear, what they want, what they hope and believe. I've stitched together the scraps of their stories as best I can because we all have threadbare spots in our lives. I've fast-forwarded through what matters most to them because what matters most to any one of us is not what makes the news. 

And all I can do with the knowledge, the excess, the surplus of stories, the hours and days and weeks and words that were freely given to me by these strangers, is carry them with me when I go.

---

I sit down to write. I wrack my brain and listen for the rattle of the words. 

Power. Child. Mother. God.

Sometimes they sound like knucklebones. Sometimes they sound like bells.

America. Racism. Violence. War.

---

The transcription software I use provides a list of keywords from each interview. I upload the audio into maw of the AI mind; it spits out the text, headed by a list of the words that occurred with greatest frequency in those two or four or six hours.

Mon, Sep 23, 2024 2:57PM • 1:29:54

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, country, americans, president, vote, years, give, day, happening, world, harris, fucking, principles, community, administration, policies, kamala, power, talking, matter

Mon, Sep 16, 2024 2:40PM • 2:42:20

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

talking, white, black, women, kids, black women, trump, kamala, black men, literally, called, son, interesting, father, dealing, happened, children, mother, supposed

Sun, Sep 01, 2024 5:30PM • 1:50:56

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

feel, good, sit, work, life, big, years, military, hear, country, point, fucking, politics, trump, training, absolutely, eat, afghanistan, women, marine corps

Tue, Aug 13, 2024 12:10AM • 2:05:39

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

fucking, shit, work, friends, fuck, put, feel, life, kids, hear, point, call, day, money, literally, people, god, gave, conversation

Sat, Aug 07, 2024 6:41PM • 1:57:22

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

military, literally, shit, fucking, vote, happen, world, pay, talking, congress, big, type, writing, work, left, fuck, veterans, person, sudden, gi bill

"…those whose lives they so tenderly and sternly respected, and so rashly undertook to investigate and to record."

Sometimes people ask me stupid questions. Sometimes I ask stupid questions of them.

Where are you?

I don't fucking know.

What are you working on?

I'm going into people's homes and asking stupid, facile questions while they count the ways this country has broken their hearts.

What's your writing process like?

I sit and I listen to people and I watch them for a long time. Then I leave.

I go back to wherever I go—a campsite, a parking lot, the side of the road, a friend's house, the occasional hotel.

I listen to the recordings and I read the transcripts. I wade into the sea of their stories. Sometimes it takes a day, sometimes not that long, before the rogue wave of the story catches me off guard and drags me under into whatever it's going to say.

I stop answering the phone, stop posting, stop responding to emails and texts.

I swim through the hundred or two hundred thousand words someone who didn't owe me or you or readers or the American public or America itself their story, their perspective, their voice, but they gave us those things anyway, and I strip their stories for parts.

From those parts I try to build a new story, one that is both accurate in every point and as true as anything so partial, so limited, so incomplete and lacking the rest of itself can possibly be.

I tell myself this is not an absurd or futile task.

---

The man who paused mid-sentence to watch the moon.

The woman who flung her arms around me the moment I set foot in her home and insisted that I eat a pear.

The man I knew wouldn't trust me until I trusted him, so I handed over the keys to my truck and climbed on the back of a stranger's Harley because what, really, does anyone have to lose.

The boy who'd just turned 18 who stood in the doorway of a nearly empty room holding a blanket around his shoulders and spoke very softly and kept interrupting his own sentences, frustrated that what he wanted to say wasn’t coming out exactly right.

The man who chopped an onion on a paper plate and made a meal on my camp stove while he told a story and sang the blues.

The woman who sat with her back to the window. The light of late afternoon was still bright through the broken blinds; her shadow, sharply etched, looked like a wood cut against the light.

In the four hours we sat there, I never saw her face.

---

The story is written, fact-checked, edited, filed.

I hitch up, load in, drive off to the next place with these places, these people, their stories lodged somewhere in my cells. Their words, their expressions, the sound of their laughter, the way they sat and leaned and glanced up and looked away.

Their voices play on a loop in my skull. Their hands repeat a gesture, over and over, in my mind's eye.

Bent, scarred hands sweeping dried tobacco into a tiny pile on a table with great care.

Oil-stained hands reaching into a bed of river rock for a skipping stone, curving around it, spinning the stone across the surface of the river without a sound.

Powerful hands with inch-long nails that flash up to a face, sweep at the corner of an eye, and return to stillness so quickly I can’t be certain they moved at all.

One young hand pulling away from another across a table.

The empty hand on the table that's left.

“To come devotedly into the depths of a subject, your respect for it increasing in every step and your whole heart weakening apart with shame upon yourself in your dealing with it: To know at length better and better and at length into the bottom of your soul your unworthiness of it: Let me hope in any case that it is something to have begun to learn.”