Acker? I hardly know 'er!

the best kind of fucking, i think we can all agree, is when you briefly lose your tongue.

for a few seconds (or maybe, if you’re lucky, a very many seconds), language is not

there.

i call it “the moment my mind turns off,” though that’s not exactly right. what i mean more is that in those moments, i am not narrating.

i am not translating sensations into meaning at all.

eventually, of course, it always ends.

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i settle back into my body (or perhaps just my mind) and small dots glow in my vision, swirling around the tiled floor when i stagger to the bathroom to piss.

in this way, every time i cum, i think about st john of the cross: “silence is god’s first language / everything else is poor translation.”

i don’t think he meant silence as in “the absence of sound.” i think he was talking about that which cannot be strapped down with the language of words. instead, his silence was immediate experience—the moments when you briefly lose your tongue.

but maybe (i think as i wipe) this is just a cognitive trap. perhaps what we perceive as the loss of language is evidence of something more strange: it is proof that how we talk about the world cannot contain it.

in 1985, elaine scarry published “the body in pain.” (this is basically a sacred text for me and you’ll see it referenced over and over again in this newsletter).

scarry wrote that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.”

when you’re in pain, you’re reduced to baby-like levels of communication: words are just sounds you cannot use. the only thing to do is cry or howl or—

and almost a decade later, in 1993, kathy acker took this idea of the nonverbal to the gym in her essay “against ordinary language: the language of the body.” attempting to linguistically strap down her experiences as a bodybuilder, she declared that lifting weights was an exercise in “that which rejects language.”

like bodybuilders today, acker was seeking failure: “i always want to work my muscle, muscular group, until it can no longer move: i want to fail.”

failure (for those who don’t lift, bro) is when your body physically cannot move anymore. failure is total exertion.1 “bodybuilding can be seen to be about nothing but failure.” acker wrote.

or as someone in the comments of this video wrote: “the feeling of not having strenth and your muscles not pushing or pulling anymore, like you lose control over your body.”

i’m tempted to believe that what bodybuilders call “failure” and what scarry called “destruction” is not necessarily so.

perhaps it is success. perhaps it is creation.

what if these moments are proof that we are more than what we can translate about ourselves?

when i remember st. johnny’s wisdom that everything but the unsayable is poor translation, my mind is flung back to the one semester i took a translation course.

i did all my homework at the restaurant of the ace hotel in shoreditch. (i was going to therapy around the corner, and because i never wanted to go home immediately after crying for an hour, i would mosey over to the hotel restaurant and order, like, beef tartare and green tea. can’t tell ya why.)

i was, apparently, on the same shift as this french waiter. he had the typical, tragicomic face of the french—half on the verge of laughter, half on the verge of tears. and once i found out he was french, i felt all my luck shifting.

at the time, i was translating the work of Anne-France Dautheville (which still hasn’t been published in english, btw). when he would stop by my table, i’d read him particularly inscrutable sentences and ask, “how would you translate that into english?”

after a few weeks, we became friends. he would stop by my table to yap—how hard it was to meet women, how politics was rotten, the general global rot of morality.

“that’s all you see on the internet anymore,” he once told me. “it’s just asses. everywhere you look: ass ass ass.” (he meant this in the physical sense: women with their cheeks dangling below or hanging above fabric.)

i laughed. the internet is just a fun-house mirror and nobody realizes what they see there is only their warped reflection. “that’s not what i see when i log online,” i told him.

“bah, you are just in dee—nile,” he flicked out a hand, ever the frenchman.

in class, we learned there are multiple ways to translate—it’s less a math and more of an art. are you translating to bring french culture to anglophones or to place the speech in the context of its new language? do you hold to the idioms of original publication or allow small shifts to modern speech?

translation is as much a philosophy as it is a practice; it is the conviction that meanings can be rebuilt with different tools.

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so when i think about the french waiter now, i think about all the different levels of translation we were doing. yes, it was from french to english and back again. but i think we both also wanted to talk about the ineffable. how did we choose to translate that?

in his 2018 book “technic and magic,” philosopher federico campagna takes a slightly more cynical (albeit ultimately liberating) understanding of language.

unlike scarry and acker, he does not believe that language is what builds our worlds—or rather, if it constructs anything, it’s only a partial model.

he says that our understanding of reality is always built upon our limited human experience, along with the norms and morals of our times. if you’re at all like me and experience full-body shudders whenever someone wants to talk about data, you’ll recognize campagna’s diagnosis of our current time as “the technic.”

the technic is a framework which asserts that reality can be measured and described. within this framework, “language reveals itself as a method of production,” he writes. in other words: language is data that makes the world understandable.

if scarry is correct that pain is what breaks language, then pain is where the technic’s claim to universality obviously (and spectacularly) fails.

the moments when the tongue fails are unmeasurable. no data can contain them.

(sidenote: this is why i’m skeptical that bryan johnson [boasting about his gf’s pussy microbiome] is actually having good sex.

Bryan Johnson@bryan_johnson

This is her vaginal microbiome report. 100/100 score. Top 1% of all vaginas. Her sample is dominated by the single most protective bacterial species a vagina can host (Lactobacillus crispatus). Only about 25-30% of reproductive age women globally are L. crispatus-dominant,

3:12 AM · Apr 30, 2026 · 12.7M Views

2.03K Replies · 767 Reposts · 15.1K Likes

honestly, i keep thinking about this. is it sick that i want to know my own microbiome? this is what the technic does to us, people!!!!!!)

but instead of treating the non-linguistic as a break from reality, campagna argues that it exists in the realm of the “magic.”

he doesn’t mean magic as in fairies and gods and rituals with wands. magic is about the ineffable. “that dimension of existence which can never be reduced to any linguistic classification,” as campagna defines it.

this is where pain comes back in. and failure. and cumming. all of these profound human experiences reveal how partial the “technic” really is.

these moments when you lose your tongue reveal that lived experience cannot be exhaustively translated—at least not without something real and fundamental being lost in translation.

it offers us an understanding of reality more real than our own.

language means we’ll always be reaching for something we will never quite get. but like acker told us about failure in bodybuilding: that’s the magic of it.

Hey! If you liked this, use your body to leave me a comment. Or: literally like it! Share it with anyone you know who has a body! I love knowing who’s on the other end of my words :)

P.S. Made you a playlist for the weekend. Listen by clicking the button below:

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