On Heartbreak

I

Several years ago in Zagreb I visited the Museum of Broken Relationships. It’s a collection of innocuous objects submitted by members of the public because they represent a relationship that came to an end. There are teddy bears, handwritten notes, broken plates. There is a copy of Football Manager 2007. Alongside each submission is an explanation of the place the object occupied in the relationship, and why it came to symbolize its decline (or sudden termination).

I left the museum disappointed. Not in the concept, but in the vapid descriptions submitted by the heartbroken. Tragedy isn’t just for poets, and when people cannot find the words to capture their feelings they find comfort in cliché. I entered it hoping for something profound, and found what amounted to a series of Instagram posts and monologues from Young Adult novels. Rather than an intimate display, it was alienating. The clichés didn’t give any insight into how these people were feeling, the sharpness of their loss or their anger. It only built greater distance.

The thing about heartbreak is that it’s tacky. The language of loss is the language of soap operas and bad poetry. At some point in our life we all come face to face with the inexpressible, but we try to express it all the same. We are creatures of language, but not necessarily of good language. So instead we grope towards the same words, because in their familiarity we find a shared experience, and the company of others suffering the same. What is happening almost stops being expression at all, but more like an act of community.

II

In Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes writes from the perspective of a developmentally disabled man named Charlie. At the beginning of the story his language is broken, stilted, lumpen. He is unable to express himself and his feelings except in the most muted, basic tones. He feels frustration, he feels pleasure, he is ignorant of the petty cruelties of those around him. Later, after experimental treatment, his cognition improves and so does his literacy, his ability to account for what he is feeling and record those feelings in a journal. The texture of the novel changes along with Charlie. The language is dynamic and reflective of his mental state, just as when it declines later as he is forced to abandon the treatment, and he returns to his tragic, pre-intellectual state, emotionally myopic and denied the pleasures of reading, of expression, of self-actualisation.

I took it on holiday with me, expecting to find it as affecting as everyone else, but it never had the ring of truth. I found the imagined internal monologue of the disabled Charlie to be a little trite, a little condescending. His elevation to genius happened so quickly that the book never had time to stretch its legs a little, dwell on the transitional period, the slow construction of a new self. In his broken language I heard as much of the mockery of the school bully as I did the truth of how those with reduced intellectual ability really speak.

The problem, which Flowers for Algernon wrestles with, is that first person stories are compelling, but how do you write one from the perspective of a character whose own expression is so limited? Some embrace it, such as in Keyes or Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks, where Bascule’s cheerful idiocy is at least leavened by the wit of his companions. Others simply cheat, accepting that the contradiction can be skated over, and that we recognise that what we are reading is the story of a character if not exactly their expression of it, first person or not.

How, then, do we tell our own stories when we don’t have the words for them?

III

The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth is an album by Headache and Vegyn. Vegyn is a DJ and producer who has worked with Frank Ocean, and Headache is Francis Hornsby Clark, a spoken word poet. The music is a warm, downtempo electronica which puts me in mind of Tomorrow’s Harvest by Boards of Canada. The lyrics are spoken, all curiously monotone and smoothed off, either AI speech or deliberately reminiscent of it. The whole record is a character sketch, and each track the discursive ramblings of a man experiencing manic depression, drug use and psychosis. At some point in the scattered narrative, the smoking area intimacy, the frantic journalling, he attempts suicide.

What makes the album so arresting is that its language is a natural one. It isn’t overwritten or self-consciously literary. When its narrator reaches for metaphor it is a well-worn one, or jumbled and awkward. The language is conversational. “So yeah,” he says at one point. “This one goes out to drunk mad women”. The netball team who stayed out for one shot longer, and so find him naked on the meadows at night, wondering why he isn’t yet dead. One of the first things spoken is, “Even my demons have demons”, which could have been scratched into a school desk. Later in the first track, The Beginning of the End, this passage:

There’s so much shit in the world

There’s good, bad, mad, sad, ugly, happy

But I just love beauty

In Business Opportunities:

When we slept together that night for the first time, I saw stars

It was beautiful

Is this adolescent poetry? Is it, strictly speaking, good? What it feels to me, more than anything else, is real. And so when the emotional blows do land, they have an extra weight to them. In between the druggie philosophy and wobbly gropes at meaning there are lines which slide in like a knife.

Odd details are picked out with the crystallizing detail of trauma. His uncle relating to him that he killed a man “on the embarcadero” in 1993. The women who find him, naked and freezing, a blurry circle of faces above him, wonder whether they are “in a time of national crisis”. He dreams of taking someone to “Cartagena for a ceviche and a swim”. Someone once told him, “if you have more than three major concussions before the age of seven, you’re fucked.” And then, “I had eight.”

This specificity and strangeness is what lends each monologue the feel of truth. The triteness of so much of the emotional expression is what makes the tragedy, and the character experiencing it, so plausible. So too the self-mythologising, the way in which he believes he has mapped himself out, that he knows the story of his own suffering so well. The little snatches that feel like half-remembered phrases, bubbling up from the depths of his consciousness. Non-sequiturs like “I don’t speak English, I speak Toyota”, or, “though fish are not animals, they do have feeling, so think about that the next time you take a shit in the sea”.

I have known people who speak like this, and I have known people who are unwell. Sometimes the hurt they express is inadvertent. It isn’t in their descriptions but in their scrambled thoughts, their manicness, the way they navigate around issues like they’re open wounds. They don’t need to describe their heartbreak well. They just show you instead.

IV

I have no tragedies to submit. No heartbreak or bereavement. My copy of Football Manager 2007 only ever brought me joy. Enough miseries and hardships, but mostly small miseries, slowly drooling out of me rather than wrenched out through my chest cavity. I don’t know how it feels, no matter how many times I read about it. Maybe that’s what numbed me to the Museum of Broken Relationships most of all. Not the cliché, but my own naivety.

The musician Phil Elverum, who releases music as Mount Eerie, wrote A Crow Looked at Me after the death of his wife Geneviève from cancer. In the song ‘Death is Real’ he sings about the uselessness of art to express grief. “When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb”. Instead his pain is a series of images.

A week after you died a package with your name on it came

And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret

And collapsed there on the front steps I wailed

A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now

You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known

Deep down would not include you

Though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down

Being swallowed into a silence that’s bottomless and real

“It’s dumb,” he sings. “And I don’t want to learn anything from this”.

Here’s to never learning anything at all.