Some conversations are like bridges. Conscious of the steep drop into the unsaid and unsayable on either side, we put one word gingerly in front of another, concentrating. It is easy to lose your balance. It is impossible not to think about falling.

Often these conversations are somehow formal: they are discussions with or in front of a group, with people you respect or admire or who are just older or more important than you are. Sometimes they are about admittedly delicate matters that people might not agree on or might take very seriously, and require all parties to come to a fragile and fiercely won agreement about what is proper to say and what is not. It seems we walk over a carpet of toes.

And sometimes these conservations or situations tempt us -- practically beg us! -- to jump.

I would characterize these jumps as different than Freudian slips. A Freudian slip is supposed to reveal a deep-seated truth. Writing "girlfiend" instead of "girlfriend" indicates a marked lack of affection, bordering on resentment and, perhaps, fear. It's not an accident or a joke or an unmotivated burst of vulgarity. It's a bit of yourself peeking out from behind your words. A jump is compulsive or pathological or just plain absurd.

One night in my German class we were discussing the way that telephones are answered in Germany. Instead of just saying: "Hello?" or "Hi, how are you?," the German on either end of the line says their name, generally their last name. eg:

Ring ring. Ring ring.
Schonberg.
Hallo, DiCaprio.

or

Ring ring. Ring ring.
Schonberg hier.
Leonardo DiCaprio.

Sort of like characters in a film noir. In any case, our teacher, an Austrian woman so sweet and gentle she makes Peppermint Pattie look like Kim Jong Il, was demonstrating this exchange and she said:

Ring ring. Ring ring. (holding hand up to ear as if it were a phone)
Hallo. Eva Braun.

After she said it, she kept talking at the same pace, as we exchanged slow glances: "Did she really just say that? But that's...I mean..." And then the moment's formality broke and she apologized profusely, pinkening, explaining that she didn't know why she had said it, that she didn't mean it. I believe her. I don't think this was a slip in the traditional sense, nor that she secretly harbors Nazi sympathies, nor that she revealed anything about herself. Instead, I think she jumped, intentionally or not, into the tempting space of the worst way to end a sentence her brain could produce. If we learn anything from such a jump, it is not what lies hidden within us, but what lurks in the waves below.

"Ich weiss jetzt, was kein Engel weiss" -Damiel, The Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders’ film The Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, literally "The Sky [or Heaven] over Berlin," in German) takes place in Berlin, but the film's characters speak and think alternately in English, French, and German. The female lead, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), works as a trapeze artist at a run-down circus in a dusty field beneath an overpass in some abandoned corner of the city. She wears a leotard and wings in her act, a mortal sketch of the transcendent figures invisibly circling the city.

In her first scene, the ringleader tells her the circus will be closing the next day. Shaken by the sudden disappointment that tonight’s show will be her last, she retreats to her trailer and, before climbing inside, looks up at the gray sky and thinks, “Die Angst. La peur, la peur, la peur. Die Angst,” alternating between her native French and the language of the city around her. Unexpectedly earthbound, Marion is scared.

English subtitles might unhelpfully translate Marion's private lament as “Fear,” or, worse, “I’m afraid;” a more literal translation would read: “Fear. Fear, fear, fear. Fear.” But her irreducible plaint cannot be dissolved in the medium of any one language. Her fear does not transcend both French and German but is instead located in the fact of their irreconcilability, the dim space they each shadow without shaping. She does not articulate her fear as a single being, a monster or a dark wood, because her fear of leaving the circus, like her safety as a trapeze artist who is part of it, suspends her.

When I first moved out to San Francisco, when I was still looking for work and a nonsubletted apartment and had just started taking German, Marion became an important figure for me. My first attempts to write about her were in an essay on prepositions and how I found them to be the most intractable parts of my new German vocabulary.

She led me to remember an afternoon in Paris when I overheard a conversation that sounded like English while riding the Metro. I tried to follow, out of habit, and found I couldn't. I strained to catch even a single word I recognized, but none stuck out. The familiar sounds refused to fall into recognizable words. That's when I panicked. What if I had lost my fluency and would only speak now as if my mouth were full of sand, hear as if underwater, read in thickened, muddy light? What if the words never seemed themselves again? What if I were lost?

The moment passed: I realized they were speaking Dutch. But I remembered the feeling and so when Marion said, "Die Angst. La peur, la peur, la peur. Die Angst," I said, "Aha. I know this. This is the fear of no longer belonging, of being trapped between worlds."

It was many weeks before I began to see her statement as hopeful, too. The medium of Marion's art is uncertainty: she flings herself, a brief arc, into.

And becomes the very preposition she must cross over.