Have you been lost for words lately, too?

If so, don't panic. Maybe that tie in your tongue is actually a miracle.

Virginia Woolf painted by Vanessa Bell. It’s Woolf, but more than that, it’s magic, the magic of writing. The part where you turn your mouthless face to the sun.

I’ve been having a new experience lately. I’ve been finding myself lost for words.

Maybe this isn’t so unusual, but it’s new to me. Finding the right words is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done, as a writer and storyteller and editor and translator.

So many times already in this young year, I’ve found myself trying to describe a way the living world is unfolding around me, or inside me, but instead I just sit with my mouth gaping and gulping like some kind of goldfish. And that’s to say nothing of trying to speak of the state of global affairs—of the world-ending pain and suffering in the Middle East.

I’ve frequently felt some rising panic in the face of this wordlessness. Who am I, if I can’t find the words, if I can’t do this one thing I’ve built my life around? Just lately, though, I’ve become convinced that this new tie in my tongue is about something much bigger than me. That if I can’t express the world I’m living in or feeling, that’s because that world is changing, and it requires a new syntax.

What we say matters. To speak and to write carry great responsibility. And not only because the words we put to things determine human thoughts and actions and have consequences for human life—though of course, all this is true.

But there’s more. Our words matter because they don’t actually originate in us. Because the world is calling to us to speak them. Because to speak is an act of praise, of worship, which is required of us—which is part of our role and duty as human beings.

In his book The Call and the Response, the philosopher and theologian Jean-Louis Chrétien reminds us that the Greek word for beauty derives from the word for “call.” Etymologically, something beautiful, kalon, is the result of a call, kalein. Beauty itself, then, is a form of calling. For the beings of this world that don’t have voices—for spring and the wind and the sea and an unfurling fern—beauty is a form, the only form, of speech. “The beauty of things, in a certain manner, is their voice,” Chrétien writes. And this voice doesn’t want to sing out alone. It asks us to respond. It summons our own speech, our own words. It demands that we do our level best to find words that might express the beauty of the world.

But it’s a long time since most of us have conceived of words in this way. Over the last few thousand years, a strange distancing has taken place, which has made words a map, separate from the territory of lived experience in a living world. Often, the map isn’t just separate from the territory; it seeks to obliterate the territory, calling on tired, obfuscatory phrases—on propaganda—to describe wars and power grabs and acts of supremacy and oppression. How this happened is a long story I’m still trying to understand, though I’m convinced it has inflections points in the adoption of written language, in the Reformation, and in the so-called Enlightenment.

And so we arrive at the present day, in which four million books are published every year, and all day long people churn out podcasts and TV shows and rolling news and, yes, Substacks, and very little of it seems to make any difference at all.

For a long time, I thought the only ethical response to this daily torrent of glib nothing was to shut the hell up. I thought my desire to write and tell stories was nothing but narcissism. I carried around this quote from Adam Curtis like a little chain of worry beads:

We might look back at self-expression as the terrible deadening conformity of our times.

Then I read and reviewed Paul Kingsnorth’s anti-book book Savage Gods, about his crisis of faith in writing and decision to give it up—and let me tell you, friends, that drove me fully over the edge for a while. Here’s a sample quote:

All humans do is talk. Talk talk talk and out come the sounds and like poetry they change nothing but we talk talk talk anyway and we mistake the sounds for meaning or action, and the trees stand there silently and we just talk.

But is this really the only way of talking? Are words always meaningless?

Words, I’ve come to realize, are only glib if we’re living in the map and not the territory. If we’re caught up in the endless chatter, giving too-easy voice to things we think we already know.

To only speak things we think we already know is deadening at the best of times, but right now? During a revolution of consciousness? During a breakdown of the known world? It’s suicide.

So if you too keep finding yourself lost for words, maybe that’s a good thing—maybe it’s a miracle. Because when the words we already have fail us, we have no choice but to go back to the territory, back to the living world itself, and listen—really listen—for the call of what is beautiful; what is asking us to sing it into sight.

The words we find at first might be clumsy. They might sit strangely on our tongues. Don’t worry, and don’t rush to smooth the edges. This clumsiness is poetry. It’s the sound of us speaking a better world into being.