Limits of Language

 I look out my window at the recently renovated apartment building across the street and wonder what it would look like after shelling. I picture shredded window blinds behind shattered glass. Brick veneer flayed open. The intimate furnishings of private interiors exposed.

I walk past the lovely brick building on the corner that houses Our Lady Queen of the Americas. I think of the assembly room where our neighborhood meetings are held and I think—that’s where we would gather to plan our defense and organize food distribution. The building used to have one of those old fallout shelter signs on the door, and I picture us moving in with an overnight bag and cooler of food. (Google the phrase “fallout shelter”—the first dozen hits are for video games or apps. Did not expect that. Draw your own conclusions.)

I ride the long Q Street metro escalator to catch my train and I imagine the residents from blocks around who would fill its platforms with sleeping bags and pet carriers, bracing as the booms echo down the long concrete passage.

I watch CNN every evening and listen to the correspondents talk about the cities—who is holding them, which ones may fall--and I think of the Illiad. Unlike its epic cousin, the Odyssey, which is full of weird characters and magical adventures, the Illiad is just a relentless battle narrative, one ensanguinated page after another. 

I remember a quote I often share in the lectures I give about the origin of cities: “Any destruction of a city is equivalent to a retrogression to chaos.”  That’s from The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion, Mircea Eliade’s illumination of the two ways of being human. Chaos, in this usage, isn’t mere mess, as in “my studio this semester is just chaos.” Chaos here is formlessness, the nightmare of a world without reason, without any consensual order, in this case one laid waste by one man’s mad ambition.

Since the war began a month ago, I’ve been trying to find language to help me unpack my thoughts and make something meaningful from them. New words are often born out of new situations, when the old ones are insufficient, but it seems as if we’re still excavating words from the past to digest this new horror because we can’t just keep repeating “WTF.” I learned a new word from the Washington Post that I previously had no need to know: irredentist, which is someone who wants to reclaim territory they insist was once theirs. It’s a young word, as words go, first used over a century ago in the territorial nationalism that led us into the first World War, so it’s doubly potent.

Even though our astonishing technological prowess allows us to hear from people thousands of miles away and watch live-streamed drone videos, the language we are using to describe what we see reaches back even further, to the Homeric, the Virgilian. The fall of Troy. The sack of Rome. The siege of…Mariupol.