No Words for It

When I discovered Tom Robbins as a teenager, the passage that I remember just being blown away by was in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues where he talks about the brain overestimating its own importance because it’s the part of the body that goes around estimating relative importance of body parts. I think the word-generating, word-understanding part of my brain has been similarly carried away lately, since I wrote an unprecedented number of words in November and this week finished reading the 750 pages of Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, which is LOVELY and funny (and I love the name Abysmillard! And the comical Binky-isms!). And then I started reading The Maytrees by Annie Dillard which I couldn’t read during NaNoWriMo because I always feel like “If I can’t write like Annie Dillard I don’t want to write at all” which is not a thought I am proud of or want to perpetuate, because the world needs lots of non-Annie Dillards.But, basically, it feels like word overdose, and it’s hard to blog when I am weary of my own voice, and it is time to remember the kinds of knowing that there aren’t words for. I went into a knitting shop this weekend to meet some Urban Mamas and my friend Sarah and even though I haven’t touched yarn or knitting needs in — four years? I came home and picked up a ball of yarn just to see if I remembered what to do, and funny, even though I couldn’t have put it into words, or drawn a picture, my hands still knew what to do (in a very limited, I can make squares and rectangles, only, sort of sense, scarves and afghans) but, for this second week when Raven has had to go out of town, I am finding comfort in the rhythm and repetition of the needles clicking and putting down row after row in what will probably be a scarf, because that’s all I know how to do. And, anyway, what it is is really less important than the pleasure of it in my hands being made.And because life is synchronistic, I am busy thinking about non-verbal knowledge and when the violin teacher started teaching our eight year old to read alto clef last night, it was about by-passing the word-generating part of the brain, and going straight to associating a spot on the staff with a spot on the viola. I could feel myself start to get a little panicky, thinking this is less orthodox, this could make understanding theory further down the line more complicated. Except. I trust the teacher. With a conscious willingness to put my ideas aside and do things his way and trust the process. And my son can already can read bass and treble clefs from piano, and has this quick mind, that makes connections that surprise me and I don’t think he will have a hard time understanding key signatures or accidentals. And I could see the wordy part of the brain really messing with the instantaneousness of reading music, and this was, when I think about it, how I taught myself to read alto clef.So there is irony in trying to write a celebration of the non-wordy parts of knowing, but there are things I don’t have words for: what to add to balance the flavor of a sauce, the overwhelming combination of tenderness and safety and self-and-otherness that I feel with Raven, the response to music when I cannot listen to another minute of NPR and another story on climate change, how far I can stretch in yoga and have it still be all right.