A Quiet Codified

 

A Quiet Codified 

                       

                         The tongue has the power of life and death,

                                                                        and those who love it will eat its fruit.  

                                                                                                            - Proverbs 18:21

 I was tasked to watch James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket for my Documentary Studies class that I’m still deciding whether or not to attend this morning. Under the small comfort of my blanket, my jaws racked against what I was watching before me and the retainer still in my mouth, I was struck by one short scene in particular, when Baldwin was asked by an interviewer if he would ever be able to write anything without a message. Just as I was struck by the question, so was Baldwin, who laughed knowing that what the interviewer was asking of him was impossible. How could one write with no message? So here I am, with the movie paused, seeing to the immediacy of this question and the response I feel I must give.

    Maybe I am being facetious when I say this—I can’t quite tell because I’m not sure how well I’ve come to terms with what I am believing—but I do think that is very possible. Maybe not for myself, such as Baldwin would agree for himself. No. I don’t think my writing could never mean anything. That would be a waste of my time—a waste of code and voice and idea. Living costs too much and so of course my words must be invaluable. But this value that I’ve assigned to living—to voice—is just as it is: a value I have assigned, recognized, and propagated. And through this assignment, recognition, and propagation, I know that meaningless words can never manifest from me.

    But for many, it is very easy to speak nothing. Silence in words. Emptiness. Quiet codified in speech and type. I hear and read it all the time, and there is a death in it. And I grieve those words because when spoken to me these words seek to re-evaluate the cost of my living and my speaking. Those dreaded words—“committed to becoming a more equitable campus community in which every person has a strong sense of belonging”—were once an emanating light of great promise, but the guppy I was back then had no clue of what the anglerfish was. Those words speak nothing. There is death there.

    And you can feel that codified quiet. You see it when you sit in the temporary Black student center—and you’re only really there because the original space was flooded the year we eased ourselves from the restrictions of the pandemic (I thought it was comedic that the minute we were finally able to congregate, that God had sent the flood and we were scattered once more)—and a group of tourists geek and aw at you as through the window as you just try to be with your music and your conversation. Those weren’t for exhibit but now here you are, the object of that zoo. And you feel this codified quiet as your professors in Political Science make liberal promises where your labor and body are included (whatever the hell that means). You can feel this codified quiet when once the banter and the calls for doing are loud and cacophonous cut after you ask for people to actually do. These are words with no message. Within my life within my voice I find that true, and I feel that chill when I feel those words stay silent.

    That chill cannot exist in me; it is quite impossible as Baldwin felt, because life is warm and my voice is the same. It is incompatible and ultimately unconscionable. And every single day I have to urge myself to believe this. My words mean. They mean.