The Inverted Jenny

Sometimes I feel as though I really screwed up my life. Here I am, a ruggedly handsome older gentleman spending more and more of my time exploring the written word, just as the larger world moves further and further from caring about language as anything more than a prompt to feed their artificial intelligence engine of choice.

Wordsmithing has become something akin to collecting postage stamps. No doubt there are many dedicated philatelists still out there philatelling all those misprinted upside airplanes and minor Bavarian royalty. Even the most dedicated of stamp collectors, however, must occasionally look up from their jeweler’s loupes and think to themselves, “What am I even doing?”

Right now, writing feels a bit like that to me.

Language is a clunky tool. The more time I spend working with it, the more I feel like one of those birds dropping mollusks onto rocks. They must suspect there’s a more efficient method for getting their meal, but what is it? At least birds have a clear goal; eat or die. But what’s the goal of the writer? What are we trying to achieve when we confront the empty page? Why do we commit ourselves to this impossible task when a single image is, as the saying goes, worth a thousand of our stock in trade?

Why take the time?

This new world rewards immediacy. Fast is no longer fast enough. Reading is slow. Writing considerably slower still. Compare the pace of reading to watching a film flickering by at twenty-four frames per second. Images moving so fast the eye cannot distinguish their individuality. Yet even movies now feel laborious. Committing two hours to anything just seems like too big an ask. You really want me to sit down and watch a single story for two hours when I could watch 10,000 Tik-Toks in that time? No thanks. And here I am, like an idiot, foraging for words one at a time like a pig snuffling the forest floor for truffles.

So why do it?

What is it that compels people to communicate our experiences of life? Dogs don’t do that. Our closest primate cousins don’t do it, either. A chimp will never share their new poem with you, even if they spent an infinite amount of time on an infinite number of typewriters composing it. Other animals have language, but none use it the way we do. No jellyfish is asking another about its day.

The famous “Inverted Jenny,” a misprinted 1918 postage stamp. Photo by Spencer Platt.

As people, though, we do little else. Storytelling is who we are. The human world is only made cohesive through narrative. “This happened and that happened and now we’re eating antelope” is a story probably told a million times over various campfires across time, but was there ever a more important tale? The narrative of how you came to be sucking the marrow out of an antelope femur might be the difference between life and death for your people the next time food is scarce. Entire histories are crafted from stories like that. Heroes made and undone. From there, royalty and priests and industrialists and, eventually, some jerk sitting down to write a Substack.

For all the billions of people who have come and gone, though, how is it that there’s anything left to say? How many more words need to be unearthed? How many more paragraphs assembled? How many more pages tattooed with messages which will mostly go unread? And why, when there are so many more efficient ways to communicate an idea, do so many of us still shoulder this cumbersome load? Even that idiot Sisyphus had the good sense to know that he was being punished rolling that boulder up the hill. Writers have no such self-awareness.

The thing that’s been tripping me up, of late, is trying to figure out what exactly it is we’re trying to say. What is it about this life that demands our expression of it? What is it that keeps us poised over notepad, pen in hand? Or squinting into a screen as our fingers hover above the keyboard? What is it that wrings our brains out seeking the perfect word when, seemingly, fewer people seem to care about words as little more than shaving cream pies, good for smashing into a face but little else? Consider some words from the news over the last couple weeks: “imminent,” “unconditional surrender,” “war.” All words denuded of their meanings in exactly the same way replacing pie filling with shaving cream makes it fit for flinging but otherwise inedible.

Maybe the reason I fell in love with “The Telepathy Tapes,” the podcast about non-verbal autistics who, allegedly, have the ability to communicate telepathically, is because these people have figured out how to bypass the uncertainty of words to get out something elemental. The human species spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving language only to eventually discover that language is often less intelligible than the grunts of our ancestors. And yet, some of us remain at our labors. I don’t know why.

Maybe the writer simply believes they have something worth saying. Maybe they’re right to believe it. Story is our unique human birthright. We weren’t endowed with a whole helluva lot by our Creator. Mostly hairless bodies, nubby teeth, brittle claws. But we have words. And we have something else, something akin to an extra sense. The human compulsion to create. To express. All of us seeking to broadcast some message, which, when distilled as fully as I can distill it, sounds to my ears like a question: “Is anybody out there?”

The eternal paradox of the human condition is that billions upon billions of us have yet to find a satisfactory answer. And so people like me keep searching for novel ways to ask, fully aware that we will never find the right words because the answer doesn’t lie with words any more than the stamp affixed to the envelope tells us what’s inside.