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Formative

Experimental/Hybrid Nonfiction, Jennifer Zeuli



Wernicke’s area resides at the nexus of the temporal lobe, where visual and verbal memory are formed, and the parietal lobe, which interprets and integrates sensory information. 


7

She was gone, she came home, she was still gone. She cried when she told you the news and you, not crying, wiped her tears with your security blanket. What she heard: Feel loved. What you meant: Stop that. 


Over weeks of nights of conversation halves while you lay on the floor of your room with the door cracked open, she spun a new language and the phone cord stretched and trembled: 


Suicide


Cyanide


Devastate


We find Wernicke’s area in the posterior superior temporal lobe. Sounds and symbols enter, neural networks form and spark, and out of this alchemy meaning arises. 



You’d known about mortality for almost two years; your kindergarten tormentor had spilled the beans. Old age, then death.


Or death first? He was younger than your mom. And he wanted it.


The hard floor, the sounds of anguish, the dim strip of light, the neural pathways forge past and present and craft a template that predicts the future.


Spark.

Some people want it.

In the inferior parietal lobe on the dominant side—left, for most of us—the angular gyrus links sensory input related to language. This is where words fuse with ideas, with images, with hot and cold and acrid and featherbed soft. This is where synesthesia happens, or where I imagine it: the iron-heavy gray of fear, the cloying smell of organ music, mistranslation, the bumpy knitting of a child’s blanket.

17 

In high school, you’d learn about the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns. What’s it like to die from cyanide? In the moment after, the moment of conscious death, what animates your final thoughts? Does darkness fold over you, forming soft, stiff peaks beneath which obliteration warms you as it smothers? 


Spark:

The words you learned send tendrils up from the soil, syntax unfurls as leaves, semantics  bloom black and dark red.


It happens on bedroom floors and stair landings and three-car garages and Costco parking lots, and the flimsy notion that the wages of suffering are enlightenment disintegrates beneath your gaze. Always down the road, you’d once surmised.  Resolution. We all get there. 


But maybe there is no resolution. 

But maybe there is no road.


The amygdala and the hippocampus, part of the limbic system, process input in milliseconds and catalyze emotion. Joy, rage, despair— primal, evolutionarily ancient.  When this area of the brain is ascendant, in bursts of reflexive intensity, language goes offline. But in the absence of emotion, in that vacuum, neurons struggle to fire in the hippocampus, stunting its growth even as all your words fail.


27


And you’d sit on the verge and you’d watch the foot traffic and the groups of partygoers in their shiny cars, and the only thing constant is dust. You’d think of that long-ago phone cord, coiled and grimy beige, maybe the only tether holding her to the wall, to the kitchen, to the earth. And for what?


They’d say this is hereditary. 


One day, you’d say

Recourse, you’d say


And you’d touch that thought like a talisman, obsidian dark but warm, from time to time.

Then you’d slip your hand away, leaving its weight in the pocket of your cardigan.


And then it disappears in a gap in your attention. It's a memory missing a resonant truth. In its place a pink elastic, adorned with a glittering butterfly, stretches around your middle and forefingers then pushes them into alignment. It’s stronger than fear, uncoiled, and does not need the traverse of language to anchor.


Connections forge between the left amygdala and the right frontal cortex. Emotion cubes itself into symbols, and this abstraction is the best approximation we have of understanding beyond language, the way many religions render the true name of God unpronounceable. “Love,” “grief,” “alienation,” “contentment”—-powerful words but in the space between the associations they create and the truths they represent, there is room for mystery.


47


The words we know,” a poet once said, “determine the worlds we know.” As you learned to talk, as you learned to listen, language carved your mind’s terrain like ice-sharp rivers, not an interruption but a formation. 

But you have no words, now, for the featherweight that fills your arms and presses your feet firmly into the earth, for the roadless expanse of grass and the solidity of the present instant.


The limbic system, the oldest part of the brain, exists outside of time and beneath those icy waterways


Spark:

An earthquake, a groundswell, the tiny hand in yours, the truest thing you know.


 

Jennifer Zeuli is a solo mom and high-school English teacher who writes after bedtime and between classes. She is beginning an MFA program in creative writing at Emerson College, and has participated in the Kenyon Review Writing Workshop in poetry and nonfiction, and the Yale Summer Writing Workshop in nonfiction. Her work can be found in Oddball Magazine and forthcoming in the Porcupine Literary Journal.

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