On the poverty of names

Sometimes, the words I reach for feel too worn-out to carry what I’m actually feeling. Like they’ve already belonged to too many other mouths and lost their sharpness, their intimacy. I try to speak from a place that’s mine, but the language feels borrowed — and somehow not enough.

Watch what happens when light moves through ice. Not the flat white of snow, but the deep glacial blue where pressure has compressed air into something dense and ancient. There’s a color there that exists nowhere else — electric, mineral, alive. No word holds it. “Azure” is too warm. “Cerulean” too soft. The ice doesn’t care. It goes on being exactly what it is, indifferent to the poverty of our naming.

This is how I feel trying to speak what’s true.

The mind is a sacred scent — it bypasses every guard we’ve posted at the gates of meaning. Pine resin and summer asphalt. Rain on hot stone. The particular chemistry of these things doesn’t ask permission before rewriting your present tense, doesn’t negotiate before yanking you sideways through time. Language limps after it, useless, trying to catalogue what’s already dissolved into bloodstream, into memory’s older, wordless country.

We’re told “sad” will do the work. That “angry” can carry the freight. But these words are rental trucks, one-size-fits-all, already packed with other people’s furniture. What I need is something custom-built for this exact cargo: the hollow sound of wind through a building that used to be whole. The weight of understanding that some doors close so quietly you don’t hear them, only to notice later that you’re standing in a different room than you thought, and the way back has disappeared.

There should be a word for the particular violence of certain kinds of beauty. For the way a perfect line of poetry can crack you open like dropped porcelain. For standing alone in a museum before a painting that sees you — really sees you — and the sharp, clean terror of being witnessed by something that can’t look away, can’t lie, can’t pretend you’re anything other than exactly what you are in that slant of gallery light.

There isn’t.

So we compound our poverty. Stack insufficient words on top of inadequate phrases, building rickety towers toward meaning we’ll never reach. We say “I miss” and hope the verb will stretch to hold everything: the architecture of loss, the archaeology of absence, the phantom ache of limbs we’ve already amputated. We say “I remember” as if memory were singular, linear, something you could hold in your hand instead of something that holds you — rewriting you backwards, making you up as it goes.

But here’s what language won’t admit: precision is violence. To name a thing exactly is to kill what makes it breathe. The moment we pin the butterfly to the board, label it, catalogue its genus and species, we’re left with wings and no flight. Structure and no spirit. The thing itself, dead under glass.

This is why the untranslatable thrives. Why certain feelings live best in the gap between languages, in the space where meaning breaks down and we’re left with only gesture, only sound. The German Fernweh — an ache for places you’ve never been. The Portuguese saudade — that profound, melancholic longing for something absent, something that may never have existed. The Arabic ya’aburnee (يقبرني) – literally “may you bury me” — loving someone so completely you hope to die before they do, because the thought of surviving their absence is unbearable. But even these words, specific as they are, are still just nets thrown over something too quick, too alive to be caught.

What I want is a language that self-destructs. Words that burn up in the speaking, that refuse to be recycled, refuse to serve twice. A word for this exact moment: autumn light through moving water, the way it fractures and reforms, fractures and reforms, never the same pattern twice. Just that. Nothing else. A word that exists for thirty seconds and then disappears, leaving no trace, no residue, no secondhand market for someone else to buy my feeling cheap.

But we don’t get that language. We get English. We get Arabic. We get the grinding machinery of grammar, the assembly line of syntax, producing meaning at scale, meaning for export, meaning that’s been sanitized and standardized and stripped of everything that made it dangerous, made it true.

Still, I’ve seen what happens when people try anyway. When they take these poor tools and build something that shouldn’t be possible with them. Didion making a religion out of precision. Baldwin turning rage into architecture. Sebald walking the perimeter of what can’t be said, marking its borders with meticulous care, showing us the shape of absence by everything he doesn’t name.

They don’t close the gap. The gap stays open — that space between interior and utterance, between what is felt and what can be told. But they honor it. They refuse to pretend it isn’t there.

That refusal is its own kind of truth.

So the poverty remains. These worn coins, these hand-me-down phrases, these words that have been everywhere, carried everything, and arrived here exhausted, asking us to make them new again, to make them mean something they’ve never meant before.

I pick them up anyway. Turn them over. Feel their weight.

And I keep trying to pay for something they can’t buy — keep trying to name what has no name, to translate what refuses translation, to speak the unspeakable with nothing but these tired, beautiful, failing words.

Because the reaching itself is honest. The falling short is true.

And in that gap between what I mean and what I say, there’s proof: some part of me stays wild. Unnamed. Mine.

The poverty of names can’t touch it.

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