My young friend Raneen used the word “lacuna” (a Latin derivative) and used it well. Everything and everyone in the world has a lacuna within, she said.
Linguists speak of a lacuna, an accidental gap in a pattern within a language, perhaps a non-existent word that one would expect to find within that language. In English, for instance, we have no generic, singular for the common bovine. We say “cow” (female, from Old English) and “bull” (male, from Old English), but if we see them both in a herd, we call them all cows or, collectively, cattle. My idle mind searches for the singular, generic term that will fit both male and female. Alas, I find it not. Apply the test to horses: mare (female, from Anglo-Saxon), stallion (male, from Anglo-French), and horse (both male and female, from Anglo-Saxon). The word “horse” has no equivalent in the parsing of modern cows. Bulls have fragile egos and fail to realize that the label “cow” does them a great service, standing as sidekick to a cow cow. Forgive poor Ferdinand his weakness, and craft for him an adequate word, please.
An editor or analyst might speak of lacunas in an ancient manuscript, missing words or phrases, for instance, that leave the text difficult to interpret. Even in our own writing, we create lacunas. We commit our thoughts to paper or a computer screen. We proofread. We ponder over the gaps in our thinking, the lack of clarity arising from incompleteness. We rethink and revise. We add sentences, perhaps even paragraphs, but then an editor-friend finds both our glaring and our subtle omissions, our lacunas. Indeed, the serious, committed writer knows that the pursuit of “clarity” and “completeness” never ends. We chase the chimera.
Raneen suggests, furthermore, that we ourselves suffer a lacuna, an accidental gap. What language, what lexicon will comprehend for us the essence of the Self, of suffering, of joy, of love, of any experience? We reach for that comprehension with science, theology and philosophy, poetry, painting, and in our earnest conversation. We go after it. We dig and we build toward it. Our blood is up, our adrenaline flows... we reach for it. The inner absence that is our lacuna eludes us, at best, a fistful of water, or a glimmer down deep we cannot touch.
I offer this definition of “lacuna”: “That which no language contains, but which every language attempts to grasp, the artesian well of yearning that rises from the unsearchable darkness of our deep-heart experience of the Self.” I live thirstily; I drink from my own ceaseless lacuna.
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Kevin Hadduck is a retired academic, a writer/poet, and an amateur wood butcher. He has published three collections of poetry, a full-length prose book, and a short collection of essays. For nearly ten years, he has been active in supporting Palestine's cause for freedom and autonomy.
